Never Panic Early: Happy Birthday, Fred
First off, Happy Friday the 13th!
Today, just five (5) of the 24 astronauts who flew to the Moon during NASA’s Apollo program are still with us.
One such enduring spacefarer is Fred Wallace Haise Jr., born on 14 November 1933 in Biloxi, who will turn 93 years young on Saturday.
Too young for World War II (his pops, Fred Haise, Sr., was a waterlogged mine man who survived USS YMS-84 when she was sunk at Balikpapan in 1945), Fred Jr. had just picked up his Associate’s degree at Perkinston Junior College (on a journalism scholarship!) when he was accepted into the Naval Aviation Cadet Program during Korea.
Cutting his teeth on the humble SNJ, Beech SNB Navigator, WWII-leftover F6F Hellcat, and TV-2 (T-33) jet trainer, Fred earned his wings of gold and served as a Marine fighter pilot, first with the “Hawks” of VMF-533 (F2H-4 Banshees), then with the famed “Death Dealers” of VMF-114 (F9F-8 Cougars), under MAG-24 out of MCAS Cherry Point from March 1954 to September 1956.
He then finished his “hitch” as an all-weather flight instructor on the then-new T-28B Trojan out of NAS Kingsville and checked out on the S2F Tracker, amassing 1,734.2 hours of flying time in his Marine career, leaving the service in 1957 as a captain, spending his last days flying SNBs on the “brig run” from New Orleans to Houston.
Moving to Oklahoma, he earned an engineering degree as a Sooner while spending his weekends flying first F-80C Shooting Stars, then F-86D Sabers, with the ONG’s 185th Fighter Bomber Squadron (137th FBW) out of Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City. His outfit notably had its 1959 summer camp at Gulfport, allowing Fred to visit his folks back on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
In September 1959, with his degree finished, “I accepted the offer of employment from ‘Eb’ Gough, the NASA Chief Pilot, as a GS-7 Aeronautical Research Pilot and Engineer, earning $5,430 a year,” and relocated to Cleveland to work out of NASA’s Lewis Research Center as a civilian pilot while remaining in the Air Guard until 1963, flying F-84F Thunderstreaks on the weekends with the 164th TFS out of Mansfield.
In March 1963, he transferred as a research pilot to the NASA Flight Center at Edwards, California, and published several scholarly aeronautical papers.
Haise was then one of the 19 astronauts NASA selected as Group 5 in April 1966 and served as the backup Lunar (LEM) Module pilot for both Apollo 8 and Apollo 11.
He then finally got his “ride” as the LEM pilot for the tense Apollo 13 mission, best known today through the Tom Hanks movie where Haise was portrayed by the late great Bill “Game Over, Man” Paxton.
Slated to be the sixth man to walk on the moon, instead, Haise and his A13 teammates set a spacefaring record flight (248,655 miles from Earth on 14 April 1970) held up as the farthest distance from our planet ever traveled by human beings, a mark that stood for 56 years until the 256,700-mile Artemis II lunar flyby earlier this year.
The crew of the Apollo 13 mission step aboard the USS Iwo Jima (LPH-2), prime recovery ship for the mission, following splashdown and recovery operations in the South Pacific. Exiting the helicopter, which made the pick-up some four miles from the Iwo Jima are (from left) astronauts Fred W. Haise, Jr., lunar module pilot; James A. Lovell Jr., commander; and John L. Swigert Jr., command module pilot. The Apollo 13 spacecraft splashed down at 12:07:44 pm CST on April 17, 1970. Smithsonian ASM WEB11342-2010
Haise then became something of the Charlie Brown with the football figure in 1970s NASA, serving first as backup commander for Apollo 16, then in line to command Apollo 19 before budget cuts canceled the mission. Commander for three of the Space Shuttle Enterprise’s earth-bound glide landings, he was slated in 1979 to command Columbia on STS-2A, the second Shuttle mission, which would have boosted Skylab to a higher orbit for future use. Instead, delays scrubbed the mission, and Skylab decayed and broke up over Australia.
Leaving NASA soon after at age 46, Haise’s only trip off-planet in his 20 years with the agency was the unlucky Apollo 13 (142 hours and 54 minutes), leaving him the sole Enterprise astronaut who never rode a shuttle to space. Columbia was only sent up for the first of her 28 missions two years later in 1981.
Fred went on to work for Grumman for 17 years during the F-14 Tomcat and X-29 era, wrapping his flight career with over 9,300 hours, including 6,200 hours in jets.
I recently met Fred at an event dedicating a walkway at the Biloxi Lighthouse in his honor, built around a statue that sort of looks like him in 2022.
Even in his 90s, he is still quite a talker and held a room full of people captivated and, frequently, rolling with laughter.
In 2022, Haise published his autobiography, Never Panic Early, about his life and experiences in the Apollo program. It is an excellent read.
