His dream is to one day feel the sea spray stinging his face again. Cmdr. Larry “Splash” Coy longs to roar his F-14 Tomcat off the deck of an aircraft carrier in a loud cloud of steam.

Maybe that’ll happen on his next cruise. But for now, he must deal with gusts of hot prairie winds at Vance Air Force Base, Okla. A long way from his beloved sea, the sailor weaned on Navy tradition has a new job.

He’s the 8th Flying Training Squadron “skipper.” The unit’s job: joint specialized undergraduate pilot training. He traded his supersonic top-of-the-line fighter for a slow, 40-year-old T-37 Tweet trainer. That’s a huge tradeoff to ask a Navy combat aviator and Top Gun graduate to make.

But after flying a desk at his last job, he said, “It’s great to be flying again, even in Tweets.”

His job has new challenges. Once he taught naval aviators to land on carriers, drop bombs and shoot missiles. “But I’ve never taught people who were riding bicycles, or motorcycles and driving cool cars how to drive an airplane,” said the 18-year veteran.

However, the task is just as rewarding. “When you take a kid who doesn’t know how to fly anything, and have him soloing a jet in 20 hours, that’s fun.”

But he had to throttle back on the “put-me-in-the-fight — fly me, coach” fire he brought to the base from his carrier days. At Vance, it’s safety first. The mind-set is different from that of the fighting force. It’s training. Slow, methodical and safe.

“If there’s any [safety] question, then there is no question,” he said. “We don’t take chances.”

Commander Coy knows a thing or two about safety. As a young ensign in 1983, he was learning to take off and land an A-4 Skyhawk from the USS Lexington. An inexperienced sailor hooked the plane to the catapult wrong. When it fired, the force tore his jet’s nose gear and part of the wing off. It slipped off the bow into the Caribbean Sea.

He ejected, being shot out of the plane at 200 mph and hitting the water before his parachute could open.

“During the ejection, all I could think of was how upset my wife was going to be that I died. In the middle of my second somersault, I hit the water on my head and shoulder. You just don’t survive that.”

When he came to the surface, he couldn’t believe his luck. “Unfortunately, the carrier then ran over me,” he said. The carrier wasn’t steaming very fast, “but it still kind of hurt when it hit me.” He survived with only some deep neck muscle bruises.

A rescue helicopter picked him up. Once back on board, the captain apologized. “He gave me a Lexington cap and told me, ‘Sorry son, but you were in the way.’”

Hence the name, “Splash.”

The commander was a bit skeptical about the joint training at first, since the Navy flies off carriers. After being at Vance a while, “I see that it works.”

Commander Coy took the squadron helm decked out in full Navy blues —sword and all. And when he walks into a classroom, the students shout, “attention on deck.”

The skipper is a passionate runner. And he soon had sailors and Marines doing “PT.” Now, once a month, his whole squadron — Air Force troops, too — join for a 20-minute workout and a 25-minute run.

“It’s a great way to build camaraderie.”

– Master Sgt. Louis A. Arana-Barradas