I’m the UK’s real life Top Gun – Nasa tried to hire me to be an astronaut but I shouldn’t be alive after horror crash
WHEN Nathan Gray thought he was about to die, he had only one question: “Do I want to see what is about to kill me or not, so eyes open or eyes closed?”
The 26-year-old trainee fighter pilot had been forced to eject from his crashing jet that was slamming straight towards the ground with “unworldly force”.
Nathan told The Sun: “I decided in those split seconds, ‘Yes, I want to see what’s going to kill me’. And I remember consciously holding my eyes wide open, waiting to see.”
He saw ploughed earth, believing it would be the last thing he would set eyes on.
But the earth was wet and soft and Nathan survived the crash, in December 2002, which an official report later said was “unsurvivable”.
It happened just after take-off from RAF Wittering near Peterborough, Cambs, when the engine was ripped apart by a component broken by a tiny speck of debris.
The £20million Sea Harrier was so low and had rolled to such an angle that ejecting safely was impossible.
Nathan’s instructor, the Navy’s top pilot, Lt Commander Jak London, who was flying with him, died.
So the young survivor made a pledge.
Nathan explained: “Jak lost his life training me. So the very least I could do is become the best pilot that I could possibly be.”
And that turned out to be one of the most decorated pilots in the Armed Forces — so brilliant that Nasa tried to poach him to become an astronaut.
He became the Fleet Air Arm’s Top Gun, completing three tours of duty in Afghanistan and flying more than 140 combat missions.
A GAME CHANGER
Nathan then went on to be the Navy’s first F35 test pilot, and in 2018 was entrusted with making the first ever landing of a new Lightning F-35B stealth fighter on the deck of aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth.
He said: “The most recent Top Gun film has him testing an aeroplane and then ejecting out of it. So that is what the testing world does. We test things and potentially find issues.”
Not bad for a kid from Stoke-on-Trent, who aged 13 told a teacher he wanted to be a pilot and was informed: “People from round here don’t go on to do things like that.”
Nathan, 47, has now told his life story in new book Hazard Spectrum, and told The Sun: “It would be wonderful if it inspired one person who had been told they can’t do something, to say, ‘At least I’ll give it a try’.”
He decided on his future career as a shellsuit-wearing 12 year old, when his parents, both newsagents, took him on holiday to Majorca.
It was his first time on a plane.
Nathan recalled: “Having only ever sat on planet Earth with your feet firmly on the ground, and where it was generally cloudy and rainy, to take off and really quickly break through all that dull grey cloud and bang, it’s blue.
“And you’re like, ‘This is unbelievable. And it’s like this all the time’.
“Then realising, ‘Hang on, the pilot gets to do this every day’. It was a game changer.”
For the first time, he buckled down at school, realising he would have to get his A-levels to make his dream come true.
He then applied to become an RAF trainee but missed out, and realised how green he was in comparison to the mostly public schoolboys who were his competition.
Nathan said: “It wasn’t necessarily a class thing, it was more their worldliness, they had more experience and self-awareness, and an ability to communicate.
“So I felt I was behind, and I knew to catch up I had to go and learn.”
With this in mind he enrolled to study aerospace engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.
That meant he gained a qualification rare for pilots, which would one day make him a perfect fit for the Navy’s jet-testing programme.
It also meant that at the freshers’ fair he met a Navy recruitment officer, who told him that the best pilots flew not for the RAF but the Navy.
After all, he was told, Navy pilots didn’t get nice long runways to land on but had to be able to land “on a small postage stamp tossed around in a storm on the ocean at night”.
After graduating, Nathan chose the Navy, training at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon.
He also spent a year with the 40 Commando Royal Marines, earning his green beret.
He was then hand-picked to learn to fly the demanding Sea Harrier fighter jets. It was during this training that he had the crash that killed his instructor and changed his life.
Nathan explained: “After that, I always thought, ‘I wasn’t meant to survive that’.
“It always felt like at some point the Grim Reaper — or we called it the dragon — was going to come and get me.”
Yet it also meant that when he began combat missions in Afghanistan in 2006, if things went wrong he could tell himself: “I’ve seen worse, so I know I can get out of it.”
Nathan added: “And that really does change things.”
The pilot, who was mentioned in dispatches for his “superior skill and ice-calm leadership”, is still haunted by the decision to pull Allied troops out of Afghanistan in 2021, letting it fall to the Taliban.
He said: “To have lost all those lives and to have committed to do something, then to walk away really isn’t what we do.
UPDATED HIS WILL
“But we did it. It’s hard for me to talk about, to be honest.”
After his tours of duty he was seconded to the US Marine Corps, where he was awarded the US Meritorious Service Medal.
His plan then was to leave danger behind and become a flight instructor back home.
But when he heard that the Navy wanted to create its first test pilot position, to help get new F-35 stealth jets ready for service, he couldn’t resist.
Test pilots help develop new aircraft, as well as being the first to fly them to find out any problems — facing danger so that future pilots don’t have to.
They also have to know thermo- dynamics — the study of the relations between heat, work, temperature, and energy — aerodynamics, electronics and to fly every single sort of aircraft there is, including vintage planes.
In 2016 Nathan became the first Brit to graduate top of the class at the US Naval Test Pilot School.
It was then that Nasa tried to headhunt him to be an astronaut, but he turned down the approach as it would have meant becoming an American citizen.
He began training in F-35s, which are so advanced that instead of having screens in the cockpit, information is projected on to the iris via a £240,000 helmet.
He said: “They’re not even on a different playing field from other aircraft — they’re from a different planet.”
The work of pushing these beasts to the maximum to discover potential faults was so dangerous that before heading out,
Nathan would leave his car keys on his desk.
He wanted to be sure that if he was killed, somebody could drive the vehicle back home to wife Lucy, 44.
One of his most nerve-racking flights was when he made the first vertical landing in an F-35 on to the deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in September 2018.
Royal Navy Commander Nathan knew the risks of the move were so high that, right before he headed for the cockpit, he updated his will.
He explained: “Nobody really knew what was going to happen. We’d done all the simulator stuff, but when the rubber meets the flight deck, that’s real. And that can be a whole world of difference.”
To cameras recording the event, it looked like a textbook landing, and Nathan even gave a jaunty thumbs up when he was down.
In reality, the main communications link between the jet and the carrier had stopped working in the final moments.
He also had to take off then land again with systems still on the blink, so that he could not even tell if his landing gear was working.
After landing, with his right leg shaking uncontrollably, he silently told his old instructor Jak London: “You were watching over me on that one.”
Nathan left the Navy in early 2019, having promised himself he would retire before he reached 43, the age Jak had been when he died.
These days he lives on a smallholding in Mid Wales with Lucy and a menagerie including sheep, chickens, a rabbit, a dog and a peacock.
He said: “We helped deliver our first lamb last week.
“So I’m keeping busy with that. But I’m also helping to design and test unmanned air systems.
“That means that in the future we don’t have to have pilots up there. We can save those little pink bodies from putting themselves in danger.”
- Hazard Spectrum: Life In The Danger Zone, by the Fleet Air Arm’s Top Gun Nathan Gray is out in hardback on Thursday, May 25, £22.
