Walter Solak was engineering space systems right out of college but he still dreamed of flying for the Air Force.
“When I was younger, I was looking up in the air and there was this big formation of bombers that flew right over my house,” says Solak, 82, of Camden. “I said, ‘Man, I want to be an Air Force pilot.”
He was 27 when he joined the military. In April 1969, after completing pilot training, he was sent to Vietnam as an instructor pilot in the Special Operations Unit at Nha Trang Air Base.
He was taking off from one remote area along the Cambodian border to another when someone fired a bullet that pierced his plane.
“There was a village nearby and somebody down there had an AK-47 rifle and started shooting at the aircraft,” Solak says. “I had some holes in my airplane.”
One round struck a passenger in the aircraft, its energy mercifully blunted after its travel through a military toolkit. A second round hit the plane’s external fuel tank. Solak remained calm and guided his plane to its scheduled location.
“I was able to get a ladder from the locals and I got a stick and a rag and plugged up the hole, and I proceeded on with my mission,” he says.
Solak grew up in Pitcairn, Pa., near Pittsburgh, the second oldest of five. His father was a construction contractor; his mother was a housewife. Both parents cheered in the stands at each of his football games.
The family had fruit trees and a summer garden, raised ducks and chickens and rehabilitated raccoons, white tail deer, crows and more. Solak often checked traplines before going to school, and he enjoyed trout fishing with a friend.
He met his wife, Lynne, during his senior year at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., where he was studying engineering on a football scholarship.
After graduation he got an engineering job at Martin Space Division in Denver, where he worked on the Titan II Missile System and the Titan IIIC Space Booster. From there he took an engineering position at NASA in New Orleans, where he added the Saturn B1 Space Launch Vehicle and the Apollo Moon Program to his project list.
He realized, though, that if he wanted to pursue his dream of becoming an Air Force pilot he needed to move quickly.
He contacted a recruiter and took a sick day from work to start the testing process. Afterward, the recruiter called to let him know further testing was warranted at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.
“He said, ‘All I can tell you is that you scored higher on the pilot test than anybody else in the New Orleans recruiting district,'” Solak says.
The increasing time demands necessitated that he tell his supervisor about his goal. On the third day of testing, the recruiter picked him up just in time to make the drive to Biloxi.
“When we got there we were out of time and the Air Force recruiter purposely went to the gas station to make us late,” Solak says.
Three men in suits greeted him in the office with a terse message about being late.
“That set me off,” Solak concedes.
The besuited men ignored the tirade he released in response, and at the end of another long day of evaluations Solak ended up in an office filled with space memorabilia.
“The man in there asked me if I would like to fly on a rocket and go into space,” Solak says. “I was being considered for the astronaut program.”
Being made late was part of the evaluation, he discovered, so they could see how he dealt with stress and frustration.
Following his service in Vietnam, Solak flew C-141s out of McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash.
He later spent two years in Taipei, Taiwan.
“I worked with the Chinese Defense Center in a tunnel under a mountain,” he says. “The United States was involved in supporting the Chinese and I was the liaison officer and sat next to the generals that were operating the defense of Taiwan with their radar system,” he says.
He worked 11-hour days and 13-hour nights, with a day and a half off, which gave him and his wife a chance to explore the area.
“We got to know the Chinese very well. They would entertain us and we would entertain them,” he says. “We would go on hiking excursions and they would take us to some remote Chinese temples.”
Much of Solak’s 21-year Air Force career is classified as top secret. He can mention, however, that he once flew behind the Iron Curtain into Warsaw, Poland. Other flights took him into England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Bahrain, Philippines, Thailand, Guam, Japan and Korea, as well as the Aleutian Islands, Diego Garcia Island, Wake Island and Midway Island.
In 1987 he and Lynne moved to Camden, where he worked almost another 20 years as program manager for Tracor Inc., Atlantic Research Corporation and Aerojet Corporation, supporting rocket motor and warhead production programs.
“It’s been a wonderful life and a career,” Solak says.
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