TEXT ON SCREEN: SOMETIMES DREAMS TAKE OFF

PIERRE SPREY: Ever since I was a kid I built model airplanes. I love airplanes, like lots of Americans, I mean that’s a very common passion, needless to say. And I always wanted to design airplanes. I figured out before the end of college, it would be 20 years before they would ever let me design an airplane. I said, I don’t want to wait 20 years to design an airplane. I’ll do something else. So, I switched into mathematical statistics and operations or search.

TEXT ON SCREEN: AT THE HEIGHT OF THE COLD WAR, PIERRE SPREY WORKED CRUNCHING NUMBERS FOR THE PENTAGON.

PIERRE SPREY: At the time, a little group called the Whiz Kids, that were supposed to look over the entire defense budget, find areas where we were spending too much or too little. I got asked to analyze the entire part of the U.S. defense budget that had to do with buying airplanes for a cold war in Europe. Very exciting area to work in for someone for a guy who’d wanted to design airplanes.

I came up with a conclusion the Air Force was horrendously wasting money on deep strike bombing, totally useless thing that would never stop the Russians for anything more than days, and that we were underfunding real air-to-air, real air combat, and a huge storm arose out of that.

TEXT ON SCREEN: SPREY DECIDED TO DESIGN THE SORT OF COMBAT JET THAT WOULD PROVE THE AIR FORCE WRONG.

WITH A CORE GROUP OF TEST PILOTS AND ENGINEERS, THE FIGHTER MAFIA WAS BORN.

PIERRE SPREY: They started a program to build a real, small, super hot, super cheap fighter that could whip any other fighter in the world. Has to be able to maneuver, accelerate, fire missiles, and out-dogfight another airplane. That became the F-16.

Even though an Air Force general had once told me, you’ll never see that little son of a bitch fly, we built over 4,500 of them and they’re still in production.

(END)