Remembering Bill Watkinson, a true ‘Top Gun’ maverick

On May 27, timed for the patriotism of Memorial Day, the long-awaited sequel to “Top Gun,” the Tom Cruise-as-ultra-cool-fighter-pilot-rebel-dude vehicle, opened nationwide and dominated the holiday weekend, grossing $160 million at the box office.   

Two days earlier, on May 25, our nation lost the real thing. Bill Watkinson passed away quietly at home in Flemington, N.J., at age 100, surrounded by his family. His life was anything but quiet. Watkinson, who graduated from high school in Maplewood, N.J., in 1941 and enrolled at Bucknell University to study electrical engineering, was on his first date with his future wife, Gladys, when they learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor over the radio. Like so many others of his generation, he enlisted in the fight against fascism and authoritarianism, joining the Navy and training as a fighter pilot.  

Watkinson served initially as a test pilot under the tutelage of future President Gerald Ford and was, according to author John Wukovits, the “prototype image of a maverick flier.” Watkinson, he wrote, “did a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to. I flew under every New York bridge on the East River.”   

Watkinson went on to fly more than 67 combat missions in the Pacific theater and took on the most dangerous of assignments. Wukovits’s book, “Dogfight Over Tokyo,” describes Watkinson’s night missions, which involved landing in darkness on the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier: “As one of the few night fighter pilots aboard the carrier, frequently assigned to nighttime combat air patrol missions, his catapult launchings and subsequent landings in the dark raised the hairs on more than a few observers.”   

Taking off was bad enough: “Each night that Watkinson took off … the flight officer released the catapult trolley while the pilot brought the engine to full throttle and placed his head firmly against the headrest. The trolley yanked Watkinson’s plane down the deck, and within one hundred feet his plane had accelerated enough to lift off the deck in an exercise some compared to being propelled by a slingshot.” When the plane carried a 1,000-pound bomb, Watkinson had to cope with an initial dip below the carrier deck upon takeoff — at night. Even the other pilots were awestruck. 

Then came the completion of the combat air patrols, taking flak, engaging the enemy, dropping bombs, followed by the most harrowing part of each mission: night landing with no lights to guide him. “Watkinson had to set down on a darkened carrier moving away from him at twenty-five knots” and rolling with the sea. He would look in the darkness for the ship’s wake and for a landing signal officer dressed in a phosphorescent suit with phosphorescent paddles to guide him home. Those night landings, Watkinson recalled, “make day landings seem like a piece of cake.”  Unlike many of his peers, Watkinson never took lucky charms or keepsakes along with him; he “never had religious medals or anything in the plane for good luck. If I had to splash, I didn’t want to be too attached to something.” 

Do that 67 times without wetting your pants!   

Watkinson flew every single-engine fighter plane in the Navy’s arsenal — the SNC-1 Falcon, the F6F Hellcat, R50 Lodestar, FM-1 Wildcat, FM-2 Wildcat, SBD Dauntless, F4U Corsair, TBM/TBF Avenger, and SB2C Helldiver. His final mission was to fly patrol over the USS Missouri as the Japanese surrendered. He was recalled to service during the Korean War to train fighter pilots for that conflict.      

After finishing his education at Bucknell, Watkinson returned to New Jersey and became a pilot for Eastern Airlines, from which he retired in 1980. During his time at Eastern, he flew every plane in its fleet, from the DC-3 through the Lockheed 1011. He and Gladys, married 65 years, bought a farm in 1960 outside Flemington, N.J., where they raised three boys along with chickens, sheep, beef cattle, horses, homing pigeons, honeybees and crops.     

My wife and I met him 22 years ago when we moved into the property across the street from the Watkinson farm. Our driveway rises 200 feet from the street and can be impassable during a blizzard. Or so we thought. 

One night during a heavy snowstorm, we were hunkering down to wait out the storm when we spotted a tractor making its way up our steep driveway, plowing us out in the dark. When he reached the top, Bill Watkinson, who must have been nearly 80 at the time, was beaming from ear to ear. “How the hell did you do that?” we asked. “That’s nothing,” he said, “compared to landing fighter jets on aircraft carriers in the dark.” And flying combat missions in his Hellcat, he said, was “the most fun I’ve ever had with my clothes on.” 

Rest in peace, Bill Watkinson, a true Maverick. 

John Farmer Jr. is director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney, counsel to the governor of New Jersey, New Jersey attorney general, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, dean of Rutgers Law School, and executive vice president and general counsel of Rutgers University.