Hard Work Mark of Today’s Test Pilots : Aviation: Forget being ‘top gun’ at Navy school with its grueling course of study.

Navy test pilot Lori Tanner says the Russian MIG-21 fighter is a real gas guzzler. She’s one of few Americans who can speak from experience.

A graduate of the Navy’s test pilot school, Lt. Tanner has put 40 different aircraft, including the MIG, through their paces as a student, test pilot and instructor.

“The two things I really love are the academics and the versatile flying,” she said. “Being able to combine them is a lot more challenging than just going out and operating an aircraft in the fleet.”

The 70 pilots and flight engineers who graduate from the school each year endure a grueling regimen of study, report-writing and flying. After finishing, they usually stay on for two or three years, testing new aircraft and systems at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station.

This hard-working, no-nonsense approach typifies the attitude of most test pilots today. Gone are the days when partying, go-for-broke pilots maneuvered winged cylinders around the sky in search of new speed and altitude records.

“We’re getting away from the guys that light their hair on fire and go running around at the speed of heat, seeing where the edges of the envelope are,” said Lt. Cmdr. Mike Landman, an instructor.

Just off the flight line, a student, Marine Maj. Travis M. Allen, heaved a sigh of anticipation for his coming two-week break from Patuxent’s study grind. “We were going really hard, and I was working seven days a week, 18 hours a day, trying to get all the classwork and reports done and still do the flying,” he said.

Allen, who flew attack helicopters during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, thanks Operation Desert Storm for one thing: “It taught me that I didn’t need to sleep to be able to perform, and that’s helped me out here quite a bit.”

All of Allen’s classmates are experienced pilots or flight engineers before they arrive here. Many officers enter the center with advanced engineering degrees. All are comfortable with computers.

“Probably 85% of the testing around here nowadays involves systems--that is, evaluation of the computer, electronics and programming systems that the aircraft is carrying as opposed to the vehicle itself,” said Robert R. Richards, the chief instructor.

Changing a single sensor in a computerized flight-control device can require extensive test flights to see how it affects a plane’s performance.

The explosion in airborne technology makes the ground-based engineers who plan a flight almost as important as the pilots.

Monitors on the ground show pilot’s and plane’s every move, even recording the position of switches in the cockpit. Sensors send back vital information such as which way the plane is pointing during critical maneuvers.

“The data is recorded on an optical disc similar to the compact disc that you play on your stereo at home,” said Capt. Joseph W. Dyer, director of flight test and engineering at Patuxent River. “Engineers used to wait two weeks for important information from a test flight. Now they immediately have it at their fingertips.”

But the high-tech tools available today don’t awe pioneering test pilots like the late Milt Thompson. After his flying days, he became chief engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Thompson, who evaluated the rocket-powered X-15 experimental plane, had lots of freedom. “We were remote from headquarters, so we were able to get away with things that they didn’t know about. I had more fun than the pilots do now,” he said shortly before his death earlier this year.

The machines in those days exacted a price. Pilot fatalities were common. “With the X-15, we were exploring,” Thompson said. “We really didn’t know quite what to expect, so we got into some pretty hairy situations, which you don’t see quite as much nowadays.”

One of Thompson’s most frightening experiences occurred at 100,000 feet when his X-15 was doing about 3,700 m.p.h. “All of a sudden the airplane went out of control,” he recalled. “It was all over the sky.” Much to his relief, things eventually settled down, because “you very seldom thought of bailing out.”

Test pilots of all ages agree that danger remains the one constant in their profession.

Edward Schneider, a Patuxent graduate who eventually left the Navy to test aircraft at Dryden, mused: “(The) six test pilots in this office realize every day that we are probably the only people here who can be killed doing their job. That’s always going to be with us, no matter how sophisticated airplanes become.”

Following the lead of 49 other Patuxent grads, several current students want to become astronauts. A famous predecessor is John H. Glenn Jr., the first American to orbit Earth--and now a U.S. senator from Ohio.