RESCUE IN THE BALKANS : Pilot Known for Living on the Edge : Survival: Rescued officer is a risk-taker. But family, friends praise his ability to solve problems.

In his first phone call home after his rescue Thursday, Air Force Capt. Scott F. O’Grady observed that he had used up one of his nine lives when his F-16 was blown out of the sky by a missile over Bosnia-Herzegovina--and now, he said, he only has six lives left.

The joke touched on the core theme of the 29-year-old pilot’s life: O’Grady relishes living on the edge and getting away with it--sometimes almost miraculously.

Just months before his mission over Bosnia, O’Grady was driving through the mountains near his base in Italy when his car skidded off the road and crashed. It was destroyed. But O’Grady walked away with only a scratch.

He loves doing things that are a “little on the wild side”--like driving aggressively, skiing fast and flying jets on harrowing missions over dangerous territory--said his sister, Stacy O’Grady. “We tease him that he has nine lives.”

It was O’Grady’s urge to push the envelope, combined with his relentless determination to accomplish his goals, that gave his mother hope he would survive his ordeal, even after nearly six days in the wilderness behind Bosnian Serb lines. “I just know that Scott can be very focused on knowing what needs to be done in a given situation,” Mary Lou Scardapane told reporters outside her home in Seattle, Wash. “My confidence was [that] even though I didn’t know what he was up to, he knew what he needed to do.”

The nagging question for his family during the long days after hearing that his F-16 jet fighter had been hit was whether he had survived.

“We never really knew whether he was alive or had ejected,” said William O’Grady, the pilot’s father, a radiologist who lives in this Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. “We thought if he had ejected, he had a pretty good chance.”

O’Grady’s flight instructor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., agreed. “Knowing Scott’s . . . problem-solving abilities, I am not surprised that he recovered safely,” said Dick Samuels, an Embry-Riddle professor. “Scott possessed excellent judgment and reasoning abilities well ahead of those of his fellow students.”

But O’Grady’s talents did not result in a sense of superiority. “His personality was low-key without a hint of arrogance or cockiness, and I believe Scott would be embarrassed with all this publicity,” Samuels said.

His father described a conversation with his son soon after his rescue. “He said they were making a big fuss over him. He was surprised. He’s an unassuming guy,” William O’Grady told reporters gathered in front of his brick house.

The airman’s brother and sister had gathered there to await news of his fate with their father. The family’s first word that O’Grady had been rescued came at 12:48 a.m. EST, when William O’Grady was roused from sleep by his son’s commander.

“He was alive. He was OK. And that was really great news, so I woke up Stacy and Paul and we started jumping,” the elder O’Grady said.

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The pilot’s sister had flown from Chicago and his brother from North Carolina after learning that O’Grady had been shot down over Bosnia last Friday.

Stacy O’Grady was the one who picked up the phone when her brother called from the ship at 3 or 4 in the morning. The phone was switched to its speaker, and the whole family started talking and laughing at once, expressing relief and joy after days of anguish.

Scott O’Grady told his family that he was healthy except for a burn on the back of his neck and fatigue because he had slept little since he was downed. He said little about how he survived for almost six days, except that he hid during the day, moved by night and relied on his survival training.

“He said what helped him pull through was the same thing that helped us--thinking about us and his love for his family,” said Stacy O’Grady, 26, a teacher.

During their anxious wait, the pilot’s relatives reminded each other that O’Grady was living the only kind of life he wanted to live. “He wanted to be there,” his father said. “He wanted to fly F-16s and he wanted to see action. He was right where he wanted to be.”

His father recalled his son’s disappointment when he missed an earlier opportunity for adventure: “He was in F-16 training during the Gulf War. He was all upset that he wasn’t in that war.”

O’Grady’s passion for flying began when he was a small boy and his father, who had a civilian license, took him flying in small Cessna airplanes in Long Beach, where the family then lived. He earned a pilot’s license as a teen-ager when the family lived in Spokane, Wash.

He was turned down by the Air Force Academy, so he attended Washington University, but he took a semester off to ski and re-evaluate his future in the winter of his sophomore year.

With his father’s encouragement, he enrolled at Embry-Riddle, a private school, from which he graduated cum laude in 1989 with a degree in aerospace aviation management.

Samuels, his flight instructor, remembered that he had “a profound desire to fly” in the Air Force.

After graduation in 1989, O’Grady signed up for 10 years in the Air Force and was accepted in an elite joint jet fighter training program with North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. O’Grady was based at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany before being transferred to Aviano Air Base in Italy less than a year ago. He has flown over the Republic of Korea and out of Turkey.

His family said O’Grady loves living abroad and recently tried unsuccessfully to extend his tour at Aviano until the end of his duty in 1999.

“Scott’s a dreamer. He always dreams big,” his sister said. “Scott, in that sense, gave the family a sense of hope that things can be better than the status quo and [encouraged us] to think big and not to lead a normal life--that’s what Scott loves to do.”

Doug Conner of The Times’ Seattle Bureau contributed to this report.