So There I Was

So There I Was

Join hosts, Fig and Repete, as they bring in some great aviation raconteurs to relate the glamorous, hilarious, poignant, tragic, and incredible tales of aviation. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll laugh ’til you cry, but you’ll never be bored!

Episodes

July 23, 2026 38 mins

RePete opens the show and a call with Sticks about buying an airplane. Apparently, Sticks needed an airplane-shaped hole in his finances! Before that, two quick health check-ins: Fig is nursing an eye injury (prescription: beach time, not flight time). Meanwhile, Bago is recovering from a pathologic knee fracture, mistaken for arthritis for weeks. Good news — the lesion’s benig...

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Fig was involved in a serious crash on Thursday - 16 July. A Short update on his condition.
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Putty talks Camp Bastion Attack in Sept of 2012, Lawman describes the most legitimate ejection ever made and Candyman talks traffic tickets in a war zone!
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Marine Corps aviator Maui (call sign Cobra-31) joins RePete and Fig for stories spanning three decades of naval aviation: serving under Colonel Don Conroy — the real-life inspiration for The Great Santini — flying Huey gunships out of Marble Mountain, a hair-raising New Year's Eve medevac, training Iranian pilots before the Tehran evacuation, and flying CH-46s in Desert Storm.
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In Episode 218 of So There I Was, Fig & RePete bring listeners two stories recorded live at the Harrier Sundown gathering in North Carolina. First up is “Monster,” one of the earliest Marine aviators selected for the AV-8B Harrier program back in 1984. He recounts the chaos of being handed the first-ever heavyweight VSTOL launch off an LPH — no computers, no test pilo...

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Marine Cobra pilot X-Man flew combat in both Grenada and Beirut — in the same month. He walks RePete and Fig through his path from a test pilot neighbor in Northern Virginia to the cockpit of an AH-1, the Grand Anse campus rescue operation, and a Beirut rules-of-engagement situation where the pilot in command was asked to apologize for returning fire. He declined. At 69, X-Man is still logging AH-1 time with the Army Aviation...
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This week’s episode was recorded live at King Mackerel’s Beach Tavern Bar & Grill in Moorehead City, NC, right after the historic Harrier Sundown Ceremony at Cherry Point. In Segment 1, call sign Ag—a Texas Aggie and former Harrier XO—takes you on an unforgettable journey crossing the Atlantic to Desert Storm. From a midnight “Casablanca” goodbye at ...

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Buggsy joins us to talk Flight school, Joining the Navy, Flying Harriers, Sundown Ceremony and more!
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June 5, 2026 32 mins
A near mid-ground collision by Strecken and
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May 28, 2026 84 mins
Col Bill Wehrung - Horny sits with us to talk Naval Academy, Marine Aviation - including 235 combat missions in Vietnam, getting hit twice and an amazing career spanning 3 decades... starting before Safety Standards were a 'thing!'
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Fig & RePete go over several aviation topics - including the F/A-18 Growler Mid Air collision in Mountain Home Idaho, last week.
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May 14, 2026 127 mins
Brain joins us to talk Flight School, Harriers, Drones and F-35s! Funny, touching... Don't miss this Great American!
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Bonk, Top Gun, Marine MAWTS-1 and Test Pilot Stories kick off with him bobbing in the Pacific after less than 500 flight hours in total flight time! Actually, that’s just the warmup.

This week on So There I Was, Fig and RePete sit down with Bonk, a former Test Pilot School graduate, Top Gun instructor, and MAWTS pilot whose career somehow became more ins...

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April 30, 2026 94 mins

This week kicks off with Kemo back in the saddle, and it goes sideways immediately!

Actually, this one starts fast. No warmup. No easing in. Just straight into stories that make you stop and go, wait… what?

Kemo’s back. And if you’ve heard him before, you already know this is going to be ridiculous. If you haven...

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April 23, 2026 93 mins

Doober comes back to tell of his acquisition of former US Marine Corps H-34 helicopter, YL-37. The helicopter restoration story starts with a mission that sounds simple. It is not. Actually, it quickly turns into a “wait, what?” situation.

This episode picks up with Doober and the ongoing saga of bringing YL-37 back from the brink. The aircraft is ...

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This is part two with Al Cisneros, and this time, it opens in a hurry. No notice. Grab the jet. Haul critical intel. Get it to Saigon—fast.

Actually, what starts as a straightforward courier mission quickly takes on weight. The tasking is urgent, the stakes are real, and the realization hits that this flight matters far beyond just flying from point A to...

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This episode drops you straight into one of those situations pilots train for—but hope never happens. A routine mission turns serious fast when the fuel state stops being a number and starts becoming a problem. Not a “tight on gas” problem. A zero fuel over hostile territory problem. And now the math matters. Range, burn rate, options… none of them look good.

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April 2, 2026 58 mins

Fig & RePete kick back for a raw hangar-talk session unpacking aviation’s razor edge: LaGuardia runway crash layers failing Swiss-cheese style, sim freezes hiding ghost jets, and C-130 crews lining up on the wrong damn strip packed with paratrooper Chinooks. Lessons learned? Night viz traps, CRM meltdowns, bozo announcements, and “shut up, navigator” tricks that nearl...

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March 26, 2026 81 mins

The C-130 flight engineer is a disappearing breed. However, the stories remain.

In this episode of So There I Was, DC pulls back the curtain on high-stakes aircrew life. We explore the Air National Guard culture and the “routine” moments that turn sideways. Why is the Flight Engineer being phased out? We discuss what i...

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Naval aviation stories rarely go as planned. This episode of So There I Was features Matt “Taco” Bell sharing his wildest moments… This episode of So There I Was delivers multiple “wait, what?” moments from Matt “Taco” Bell, from getting in trouble over a low transition (yeah… that didn’t go well), to realizing just how terrifying it ...

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