Admiral Tries to Fly All He Can Before Landing Desk Job

While most officers his age and rank plant themselves behind desks, the Naval commander at Point Mugu prefers to streak through the sky at supersonic speeds in one of the Navy’s hottest fighter jets.

As the ranking officer in Ventura County, Rear Adm. George H. Strohsahl Jr. has rewritten the rules so he can fly regularly with other Navy pilots above the Pacific Missile Test Center.

He juggles his schedule, sending his secretaries into momentary panic, to join the fraternity of hotshot pilots at Point Mugu who routinely fly in tests of the nation’s latest high-tech missiles.

“I’m like a kid in a candy store,” the admiral says. “If left to my own devices, I’d be flying 12 or 14 hours a day.”

At 52, this two-star admiral ventures into the airspace in a way few his age or rank have gone before.

“He’s the first admiral to be here in a long time who flies, himself,” said Capt. Samuel Vernallis, vice commander of Point Mugu. “Most senior officers get to a point they don’t fly much.”

Upon his arrival, Strohsahl changed the rules to require the commanding officer and other senior officers to fly with younger pilots. He emphasizes the safety benefits of having younger pilots strapped in next to their more experienced elders.

Rewriting job descriptions has another benefit. It permits Strohsahl to maintain his membership in the brotherhood of test pilots, the ones with the right stuff to challenge the heavens.

Strohsahl doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s having a ball. His boyish enthusiasm for flying is contagious. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he says, “the culmination of my career.”

Nor does he shy from saying he would love to stay longer at Point Mugu than the Navy has in mind. Next fall he will accept his next promotion--a desk job at the Pentagon.

In the meantime, he spends as much time aloft as possible. Living at the commanding officer’s headquarters on base, he makes himself available for flying nights, weekends and holidays.

Christmas holidays are the best in his book. That is when most Navy pilots want to spend time with their families. “The way I look at it, it just leaves more airplane cockpits for me to jump into,” he said.

“He will fly anything whether it has an engine or not,” said Marvalyn Strohsahl, his wife of 36 years.

On weekends, that extends to flying gliders as an instructor for a private flight school in Tehachapi. Strohsahl’s passion for flying runs so deep he doesn’t care if he is in the glider with the student or flying the tow plane.

The son of an airplane mechanic, Strohsahl grew up around airplane hangers. He began flying lessons at 15, soloed at 16 and had his license at 17, making him the youngest licensed pilot in Connecticut at the time.

As a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., he would sneak off to local airfields to fly light airplanes. He proposed to his wife in the cockpit of a small plane flying over the Naval Academy.

If all this sounds as if some screen writer had conjured him up, Hollywood once thought so too. Producers of a Kirk Douglas film, “Final Countdown,” cast Strohsahl to play himself as the air boss on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

His cool John Wayne demeanor helped land him the speaking part in the 1979 film about a modern aircraft carrier moving through a time warp to see the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

A decade later, Strohsahl enjoys telling the story of how he hammed it up before the cameras during a scene in which the aircraft carrier is transported back in time.

“I gave him my best rendition of a catatonic fit,” he said, showing how he rolled his eyes and wagged his tongue. It apparently was too much for the director. Much of his effort to dazzle the studios wound up on the cutting room floor, he says.

For a man respected, even feared on base because of his rank, Strohsahl adds a light touch to his role as all-powerful commander. On a recent day, he stopped to chat with a worker loading ripped-up ice plants into a Dumpster and later joked with a waitress at the officer’s club.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember to call him sir,” said Lt. William Meier, a bombardier/navigator who frequently shares a cockpit with the admiral. “Especially when he is flying, he wants to be treated as one of the guys rather than an admiral.”

Longtime friends appreciate his refreshing lack of pretense.

“He is not a Navy traditionalist, someone who says, ‘Do it because I say to do it,’ ” said David Osburn, a retired Navy captain. Osburn was one of Strohsahl’s classmates at the Naval Academy and Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. “He’s a good manager.”

Stanley L. Rudeen bunked with Strohsahl on two tours aboard aircraft carriers in their early Navy years. “I could see that he was going to be the admiral and I was going to be the airline pilot,” said Rudeen, who flies with United Airlines. “That was evident to me when we were roommates 25 years ago.”

For all his flying jock talk, Strohsahl takes his administrative duties seriously. He can be the hard-nosed commanding officer, underlings say, and he spends most of his time managing the base of 6,000 employees.

Carole Kroeger, the admiral’s secretary, said Strohsahl often works late to handle paper work and make up for other time lost to flying. “He makes sure he meets all of his obligations,” said Kroeger.

The only downside to his flying is that some junior officers grumble that they get short-changed on flight hours. “There is some resentment sometimes,” acknowledges Lt. Meier. “But I think he is more restrained than some senior officers I’ve known.”

Meier said he understands why Strohsahl wants to fly every hour he can: “When he leaves this job, he is going to be flying a desk for the rest of his career.”

About a year ago, Strohsahl hitched a ride with the Blue Angels, the precision flight team that performs nose dives, barrel rolls and other exotic maneuvers at air shows.

Unlike most pilots, the Blue Angels don’t wear “G-suits,” inflatable suits that compensate for gravitational forces by squeezing the blood pooling in a pilot’s legs and abdomen back toward his head. G-suits are used to prevent the pilot or passenger from passing out.

On his ride, Strohsahl didn’t wear a G-suit either.

Still, as a middle-aged jet jockey, he is a safety-conscious aviator who flies by the book. “People don’t get to be the admiral’s age by hot doggin’ airplanes,” said Capt. Vernallis, his vice commander.

Strohsahl maintains a cool, steady hand on the stick, said Commander Doug Hargrave, another bombardier/navigator who goes up with him frequently.

Last month, the two, sitting side-by-side in an A-6 Intruder attack jet, were refueling in mid-air when an external fuel tank exploded.

Working as a team, the two managed to disengage with the tanker plane flying 20 feet overhead, make sure everything was clear below and set off the explosive charge to jettison the tank--all in about 15 seconds.

Strohsahl never mentioned the incident to his wife.

Strohsahl’s favorite plane is the F/A-18 Hornet. As a captain in the mid-1980s, Strohsahl was the F-18 program manager at the Pentagon. Again, he rewrote his job description to make sure he participated in flight tests.

In its early versions, the F-18 developed a series of problems, including a crack in its tail and fuselage. Under the glare of television lights, his startling departure from Navy-speak once landed him on the network news. He assured reporters, “The tails are not going to fall off.”

Strohsahl still defends the jet as the best the Navy has to offer. A two-seater F/A-18 sits on the Point Mugu macadam with his name stenciled on the side.

“It is a pilot-friendly aircraft,” Strohsahl said, looking at its picture dreamily. “You can take a pilot no matter what they’ve flown and they come out all goo-goo-eyed. It has a space-aged cockpit with 22 programmable digital computers.”

In October, Strohsahl is supposed to leave this job and his F/A-18 behind. His two-year tour winds to a close. Already, he has managed to squeeze a couple more months for himself at Point Mugu before returning to Washington as the number 2 officer in charge of the Navy’s flight programs.

While the Pentagon job is his next logical career step, the job as it is currently written has little provisions for flying. But Strohsahl has rewritten job descriptions twice before. Many are betting he call pull it off again.

One of his oldest friends wonders if he has his eye on the “Gray Eagle,” a handsome trophy passed as the mantle of longevity to the senior Naval officer still flying. “George may have a shot at it.” said David Osburn, his old buddy from the Naval Academy and graduate school.

As for Strohsahl, he doesn’t care to discuss his next job. He’s having too much fun now.

“It remains to be seen what I’ll be flying,” he said. “If nothing else, I’ll be out there on the glider fields on weekends.”