ENID — Throughout the history of combat aviation, fighter pilots have been seen as heroic, almost romantic figures, lone wolves battling it out in high-powered aircraft high above battlefields across the world.

One of history’s most famous World War I air aces, Germany’s “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen, offered this description of the role of a fighter pilot:

“Fight on and fly on to the last drop of blood and the last drop of fuel, to the last beat of the heart.”

What makes a good fighter pilot? A group of British researchers conducted a study of Royal Air Force pilots and found there are differences in the brains of fighter pilots and the rest of humanity.

That question of what it takes to be a successful fighter pilot recently was put to a group of fighter pilots currently stationed at Vance Air Force Base.

Lt. Col. James D. “Rock” Bottomlee is commander of 3rd Fighter Training Squadron at Vance, while Capt. Joe “Flint” Markowski is one of the instructor pilots in the Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals course run under the auspices of the squadron. Lt. Col. Marc “Spanky” Dauteuil is commander of 8th Flying Training Squadron, which conducts primary flight training in the T-6A Texan II.

All are instructors and pilots with combat experience in the F-16 Fighting Falcon, known to its pilots as the Viper. Dauteuil flew in Afghanistan, while Bottomlee and Markowski are veterans of the Iraq war.

“Any flying, and especially flying a fighter, is a combination of an art and a science,” Bottomlee said.

Pilots, he continued, must be able to see the world “geometrically, spatially, as opposed to just seeing the analytical aspect of a problem.”

But given the high-tech nature of fighters, not to mention the weapons they carry, science has to be part of the equation, as well.

“There also has to be that science part of it so you’re not just doing loops to music,” he said.

A type-A personality, defined as aggressive, competitive and work-oriented, isn’t a requirement for being a fighter pilot, Dauteuil said, but it “really, really helps.”

A fighter pilot pays attention to detail, a trait driven home to Dauteuil by an instructor pilot during his undergraduate training days at Vance.

Dauteuil had flown his portion of a training sortie and sat back as the instructor flew the rest, to keep his own skills sharp.

“He put his (landing) gear down, and as he was doing his final turn, he must have checked to ensure that his gear was down and locked about 17 times,” Dauteuil said. “That level, attention to detail, gets ingrained in your brain.”

Fighter pilots must be able to quickly wade through a mountain of information, Dauteuil said. On runs over Afghanistan, for instance, pilots must work through a long mental checklist before dropping a bomb.

“And oh, by the way, it’s a situation where you might have to do that long list in one minute because, if it’s a troops-in-contact (with the enemy) situation on the ground, and they need that ordinance, you’ve got to be able to process through that very, very quickly,” he said.

Fighter pilots are, by and large, reasonably successful athletes and better than average students. Physically, they are not particularly tall, but are fit and able to handle the rigors of flying a fighter jet.

“Pulling high Gs is extremely physically demanding,” said Capt. Michael “Shady” Akins, an aerospace physiologist with 71st Medical Operations Squadron. “Cockpit temperatures, hydration issues, there are just tons of human factors they are dealing with.”

“Your world comes to a focus at 9 Gs,” said Bottomlee, referring to forces equaling nine times the pull of gravity fighter pilots may experience while executing combat maneuvers. “There is nothing else that’s happening when you are pulling 9 Gs.”

The competitiveness of fighter pilots, Bottomlee said, borders on obsession. He tells the story of a children’s Easter egg hunt at a colleague’s house. The fighter pilot fathers were standing around when the homeowner trotted out a croquet set.

“It wasn’t five minutes before somebody’s ball got knocked across the neighborhood and was rolling down the street,” Bottomlee said, adding a mallet wound up being broken before the out-of-control game ended.

A decade ago, Bottomlee and Dauteuil were on a bombing range together during a wing competition. Dauteuil had his best day on the range ever. Bottomlee bested him.

“It bothers me to this day,” Dauteuil said.

Fighter pilots play hard and work hard, putting in up to 14-hour days. And after they fly, their hard work continues. During debriefing sessions after flights, fighter pilots pull no punches.

“It is very candid, very direct,” Akins said. “A lot of people would curl up in a fetal position. But they’re not trying to attack each other, it’s business. They are trying to make you a better fighter pilot, but it would hurt some people’s feelings.”

That no-holds-barred feedback, Bottomlee said, could be a matter of life and death.

“Just like a basketball or football team, if we were in practice and one of our guys, every time you threw him the ball, he dropped it, you would not take that guy to the game and put him in the game and throw the ball to him. You couldn’t afford that,” Bottomlee said. “In our community, we can’t afford to have somebody in the game who is not going to do well. Our ‘sport’ ends up with people living or dying.”

“We like to say that we are the premier air force on the planet,” Dauteuil said, “and we intend to keep it that way.”

As an instructor, Markowski said he can spot potential fighter pilots from among his students.

“You can look at students and say that kid right there has this quality that we really appreciate in our community, and you may not be able to verbalize it, but you can see it in them,” Markowski said.

After primary training in the T-6, students are tracked into either T-38s (for fighters and bombers) or T-1s (for transports and tankers).

“I can stand in the back of the room, and I can pretty close to 90 percent tell who is going to get a T-38, just by the way they are walking and the way they act during the ceremony,” Markowski said.

All successful pilots must be able to function well under pressure, Dauteuil said, but especially fighter pilots.

“Some students, especially when they make a bad landing on a touch and go and get airborne again, I’ve seen them literally forget to put the gear up, because they are reacting to the landing,” Dauteuil said. “If I roll in and I try to drop a bomb and I miss my target, I have to put my stuff together and turn it around and try to hit that target because the guys on the ground are counting on me. I’m not going to do that very successfully if I’m kind of panicky.”

“That’s hard to teach,” Bottomlee said.

Dauteuil, while flying over Afghanistan, said he heard a ground controller say “‘They are removing all the women and the children from the town, something is about ready to happen.’ There are people that hear something like that and want to be there, and there are other people that would say, ‘I’m going to let someone else handle that, that’s just a little too much stress.’”

Most fighter pilots grew up wanting to fly. Bottomlee was no exception. His father, a minister, was conducting children’s time at his church when he asked all the gathered kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. Young Bottomlee answered, “I want to be a gunslinger,” and he proceeded to fire a pair of make-believe finger pistols.

“I got a whupping when I got home,” Bottomlee said. “I figured out that gunslinging is illegal, so I did the next best thing and became a legal gunslinger with a jet.”

Akins is not a pilot, but as an aerospace physiologist he spends a lot of time with students in their first weeks of training. He said students who proceed on to become fighter pilots share common traits: “Competitiveness, in concert with being pretty good team players at the same time.”

Fighter pilots are alone in the cockpit of their jets but must work closely with their wingmen and air controllers in combat situations.

“They are constantly having to deal with challenges where a single mistake can have the ultimate price — their life,” Akins said.

Akins, a 24-year Air Force veteran, said he can almost pick fighter pilots out of a group of new students. They have above-average intelligence and a measure of self-sufficiency. They are direct, well-controlled, action- and goal-oriented people.

He doesn’t hold to the theory fighter pilots are born, not made. He attributes success as a fighter pilot to “the way these guys are raised, playing sports and having high expectations on grades,” Akins said. “Actually, for the most part I think it’s personal expectations. They hold themselves to very high expectations.”

Akins and his aerospace physiology team teach crew resource management, or working together with other pilots, despite the fact fighters are, for the most part, single-seat aircraft.

The single-seat nature of the F-16 was driven home to Dauteuil while he was leading a flight of six F-16s and two tankers home from Afghanistan, high above the north Atlantic, at the end of his most recent deployment.

“You’re a single person, sitting on a single motor, with a single tail,” he said. “If something goes wrong, nobody fixes it except the person in the airplane, if you can fix it. I think a single-seat mentality is unique to the (fighter) community.”

But the single-seat mentality can’t become overarching for a fighter pilot, Dauteuil said.

“That can become your identity, being a fighter pilot, and you kind of forget you are an officer,” he said.

Lone wolf, swashbuckling, hard-living fighter pilots are the stuff of movies, Bottomlee said. Successful real-life fighter pilots live balanced lives.

“The people who do well in the fighter community and do well throughout their career are folks who have a balance between work and family,” Bottomlee said.