"Checklist Complete: Stories From My Life In Aviation" ($16.95 in paperback from booklocker.com/books/11717.html; a PDF version is also available) is replete with photographs provided by the author.
One image is a publicity shot taken in 1980 of four S-3 jets "in a diamond formation (I'm number 3, the left wingman) flying by Mount Rushmore...." This was when Carter was a pilot trainer in "the navy's S-3A Viking Fleet Readiness Squadron, located at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego...."
Over a long career he would chart more than 16,000 flying hours. In that regard he wryly notes: "As is often said about aviation, experience is a hard teacher. First comes the test, then the lesson."
As a Midshipman Fourth Class (a "plebe") in 1970, he is aware of the hierarchy when groups gather for meals at the U.S. Naval Academy. Plebes are "society's lowest form of existence" and answerable to pretty much anyone else.
When it came to passing food, up the chain it went with plebes getting the remains. Until one night Carter "took a scoop of applesauce, for some tragic and unexplainable reason, and then started to hand the bowl to my classmate beside me." A little infraction of cultural norms? Hardly: "The heavens parted, the world erupted, fire and brimstone engulfed me...."
Carter lived to tell the story, and many more besides, such as how a starter problem in the S-3 Viking was solved with a bent paperclip; being chewed out with unrelenting profanity (not spelled out in the book) by his two military bosses when a message Carter sent went astray; a lunch that cost $3000; and his brief encounter with Vin Scully when he piloted for Delta.
Full of self-deprecating humor and technical talk (with acronyms explained), the book fittingly concludes with some of Carter's "lifetime maxims," including: "Never be out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas as the same time." Check!
