What the Life of a Navy Fighter Pilot Really Looks Like

Vincent Aiello attended his first airshow when he was 8 years old, sparking a lifelong love of aviation. He and his brothers loved flying so much that they hung posters and replicas of military aircraft in their bedroom and even built remote-controlled airplanes.

It never occurred to Aiello that he could join the military and become a pilot until an eye-opening conversation with his stepfather while he was in high school, which he recounts in his recently released book, "Through the Yellow Visor."

"Prior to that moment, I just never really thought that was something I could do," Aiello told Military.com. "I thought it was just something other people do."

Writing a book about his circuitous journey to becoming a fighter pilot and teaching in the Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program -- more popularly known as Top Gun -- was cathartic. The five-year process to publication allowed the host of the "The Fighter Pilot Podcast" to relive not only his successes but, more importantly, also the myriad challenges he encountered along the way during his 24-year military career.

Aiello said he hopes readers glean two main takeaways from "Through the Yellow Visor":

1. You can achieve your dreams.
2. Hollywood usually doesn't portray fighter pilots accurately.

"We're real people with real struggles, and we're not always very arrogant," said Aiello, whose callsign, Jell-O, rhymes with the pronunciation of his last name. "We struggle, and I certainly did."

That struggle started early on when Aiello was forced to pivot after being denied admission to the U.S. Naval Academy; it was not until his junior year of college that he was accepted into the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps (NROTC) program at UCLA.

Aiello says he was not an especially gifted student -- or pilot, for that matter -- always feeling he had to work harder than others to achieve the same result. The California native could have easily walked away when doubts arose about whether he could handle the rigorous education and training schedules necessary in order to ultimately fly fighter aircraft.

He never seriously considered quitting, though.

"Once my stepdad, Jim, got me started in that direction, it was like a dog with a bone that he won't let go," Aiello said. "It did not come naturally, so what else am I going to learn to do besides just give up? If it is something I want to do and I don't have the natural skill, then I just have to keep working at it."

Aiello's persistence is a consistent theme in "Through the Yellow Visor," whose title comes from his unique choice of color for his helmet's visor. (Most pilots choose gray or clear ones.) From the day he was commissioned in August 1992, Aiello wrote, he refused to lose sight of his goal. That mindset helped him manage the steep learning curve both at flight school and during Top Gun training and cope with multiple deployments to the Middle East.

But nothing prepared Aiello for the news that he had a heart murmur. By then, at 39 years old, he was approaching 3,000 flight hours in the F-A/18 Hornet. Doctors sent him from Japan, where he was stationed, to Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii for further tests, which revealed a potentially life-threatening condition in which blood was pooling in his left atrium.

Aiello underwent open-heart surgery in September 2009.

"I was devastated, and I was in denial," said Aiello, who wept uncontrollably after learning of the diagnosis. "I was confident. I could fly an airplane. I could go almost two times the speed of sound. I could drop bombs, shoot missiles, land on aircraft carriers. I mean, I'm all that."

For 3½ years, Aiello was grounded as he sought a waiver from the Navy to fly again. He missed being behind the controls terribly. Aiello got so bored at one point that -- seeking to go where the action was, even if he still couldn't serve as a pilot -- he agreed to a deployment to Afghanistan without telling his family. Aiello finally flew again for the first time in February 2013 and continued in that role for nearly four years before retiring from service.

While "Through the Yellow Visor" chronicles the challenges Aiello faced in becoming a fighter pilot, he also writes lovingly about his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Beth, and their three sons Slater, Anthony and Dawson.

The Aiellos were married on an aircraft carrier in Florida in 1998, and his military journey comes across as truly a tag-team effort. Without Beth's sacrifices and how she repeatedly helped cushion the effects of his extended absences on their children, Aiello's achievements would not have meant nearly as much.

In the end, he says, it was all worth it. The Aiellos have been married for 2½ decades, and he is now a commercial airline pilot. At his core, though, he'll always see himself wearing yellow-tinted headgear.

"Call me crazy, but I have a calling that cannot truly be explained in words," he wrote. "I am a sailor -- a naval aviator -- who has voluntarily obliged himself to defend and protect those who cannot or will not do so for themselves."

"Through the Yellow Visor" is available on "The Fighter Pilot Podcast" website and on Amazon.

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