Ever since Alex Orlando was a kid he seemed like he was destined to join the Navy. His grandfather was an Aviation Machinist’s Mate and he grew up listening to all of his old sea stories. Orlando remembers when he would go visit his grandparents in Pensacola, Florida and how he would always be able to look up and the see the different kinds of aircraft flying around. But despite those experiences, he took a different path.
Transcript
They tell you that you’re cleared for takeoff, and you wheel this thing out onto the runway, and it’s like a drag race, except instead of a dragster, it’s a behemoth of a plane that weighs north of a 150,000 pounds. Push the throttles up, and you just start barreling down this thing. But instead of a drag-race which ends at the quarter mile, you pull back and pull this whole thing off the runway. All you see in the windscreen is sky. And you just become a rocket ship. My grandparents used to always say when I was younger, “I want you to always act like I’m there. You know, if I was standing in the room, would you do that?” But now it’s, I guess it sunk in, but I always, you know, kind of picture that. I wanna make myself proud, but I wanna make my dad proud too. – Watching Alex become a pilot, is sort of getting to see my dream come true in somebody else. What better person to see it come true in than your own son? – He kinda has like a subdued proudness. He’s not the kind of guy that’s gonna come out and burst in to tears and hug your or anything. You know, kinda slug you in the arm, “I’m proud of you kid.” Stuff like that, you know. “You did all right.” That’s how, that’s how he, but when he says something like that, it just, it means the world to me. – When we went to Corpus Christie for his Winging, shortly before we made the trip Alex asked me to pin his wings on him. And I was… it really choked me up when he asked me to do that. It really did. I was so incredibly honored that he would ask me to do such an important thing. I remember my hands were shaking a little bit, I was almost overwhelmed with the emotion of it. We were so proud of him. – When I was growing up I remember playing in the water, sitting on the dock with grandpa and dad, and they’d always point out planes to me. Oh there’s the Blue Angles and F-18s. I remember I was, it was right near one of my last flights. It was sunset. We took a southern route, and I knew at some point we were going to fly over Blackwater Bay, which is where my grandparents lived. And, the route we took, I kind of veered a little further south because I knew where I was. I looked down and I saw their house, and it just kind of came full circle for me, being that kid looking up, now being that flight student looking down. I got choked up in the plane. From all that I’ve been through, to finally end up, you know I’ve been to another country, I’ve been doing two other careers, I end up, you know, 2000 feet above where I started.