They Set a Course to Thrill the Fans

“Rockets red glare!”

Lt. Ryan Parsons, standing behind home plate at Dodger Stadium, is shouting into a radio.

Maj. Chris Hamilton, in one of two F-16 fighter planes circling high above the Rose Bowl, is listening.

“Oh say does!”

Parsons, like the thousands who surround him on this warm summer night, is listening to the singing of the national anthem.

Yet Parsons is the only one relaying bits of it as a countdown.

“Land of the free!”

The Dodgers are playing the San Francisco Giants this night in a game that will feature many precision plays.

None more impressive, though, than the one that takes place before the first pitch, bursting through the gentle blue sky, where the Air Force’s Hamilton and fellow pilot Walter Jablow are waiting for Parson’s final cue.

A most appropriate cue.

“Brave!”

The song finished, the final word shouted, Parsons whispers, “Here we go,” and here they come.

Two giant orange and white arrows, five feet apart, 1,000 above, roaring over the right-field pavilion, blowing gum wrappers across the dugout steps, freezing fans in their hot-dog-laden tracks.

Chilling folks in a way no cherry bomb ever could.

“When you sing the national anthem, and then see us flying by, it reminds you that the military is doing its job,” Hamilton says later. “It reminds you what protecting our country is all about.”

Like everything celebrated this July 4, it is a reminder of something that doesn’t come easily.

Flyovers are as American as the double play -- on a grounder hit 300 mph.

Flyovers are like a Dodger outfielder throwing out a runner at home -- while standing in Alhambra.

The national pastime meets the nerve-racking pastime.

“You want to get it just right,” says Col. Randy Ball, a flyover veteran from the California Air National Guard. “You want to get there right at the end of the national anthem, not too early or late. You want to give people a thrill.”

While rarely enjoying thrills of your own.

The pilots who work the handful of flyovers over Southern California sports events each year aren’t paid extra for it.

Their free tickets usually go to their family and friends because they can rarely land the plane and return to the stadium in time.

Not only can’t they share in the excitement below, but on nights like Thursday at Dodger Stadium, they can’t even see it.

“To be honest, I only saw a glimpse of the parking lot, and then we were gone,” Jablow says. “I was so busy concentrating on staying in formation, I missed it all.”

His one advantage was that while it took friends three hours to fight postgame traffic from Dodger Stadium to Edwards Air Force Base, 100 miles northeast of here, Jablow did it in 15 minutes.

“I went home and tried to see if it was on the TV sports shows, but it wasn’t,” he said.

Yet that same night was filled with video clips of many baseball games, crowded stadiums celebrating common joys in a cocoon of safety, the war on terror seeming very far away.

That flyover wasn’t on TV? Oh yes it was.

*

Last summer, Col. Randy Ball was flying over Iraq. Tonight, he will be flying over Angel Stadium.

Last summer, he was flying amid tracer fire. This summer, a Freeway Series.

“If I’m able to see the people, see the flags, even for three or four seconds, it will send a chill down my spine,” he says.

The coordinates are plugged into the computer on his refueling plane.

The exact time will be 6:56:30.

Let’s hope the national anthem singer doesn’t pick tonight to get fancy.

(Even if the Lakers played on an outdoor court, they could never arrange for a flyover, no?)

Ball remembers the time, before the 1989 All-Star game at then-Anaheim Stadium, that trumpeter Doc Severinsen finished too quickly.

“He was doing double-time, everything got thrown out the window, I had to really hustle to make it,” Ball says.

Then there was the time, before one Rose Bowl, when a blimp got in the way, making the pilots late.

Or how about the time pilots flew over a World Series game directly during the middle of the national anthem, leaving the singer momentarily speechless.

“No matter how many times you arrange these, every time, you sweat,” says Elaine Lombardi, the Dodgers’ supervisor of special events and promotions.

Especially when the planes don’t show, as they didn’t on opening day at Dodger Stadium, arriving about 30 seconds late.

“If they’re overhead at the end of the word ‘brave,’ you’ve nailed it,” says Peter Bull, the Angels’ entertainment manager. “But if not, 15 seconds feels like 15 minutes.”

Even if Ball doesn’t nail it tonight, he’s going to nail it.

He’s going to return his plane to the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, jump in his car, and race back to Angel Stadium.

During the seventh-inning stretch, he will be introduced, standing in a place he helps keep safe, amid strangers he protects like friends, maybe carrying the Angel cap he unofficially sticks on his head in the cockpit.

Now that will be a roar.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.