Mike Hostage:  Fighter Pilot, Hero, and DC Maxecuter                 
        by Pat Daily and Allan Schanzle -----

"Recently, Jerry Paisley, now living in Smithfield, VA, sent many of us an email about Mike Hostage

You see, Mike is a DC Maxecuter.  He used to fly with us at Shangri-La (Comsat) and at Pax River starting back in the late 70s shortly after he had finished his undergrad work at Duke.  We checked old issues of Max-Fax and found that he joined the Maxecuters in early 1978 and was welcomed to the Maxecuters in the January-February Max-Fax when Pat was the editor of the newsletter.  As a youth Mike’s home was  in Bethesda, Maryland and he attended Georgetown Prep for High School.  He  developed an interest in airplanes and this led him to join the USAF in February 1978. His career has been on fire ever since.  He flew F-16 and F-15s and several other Air Force types and is a Command Pilot with over 4000 hours of flight time.

We also found a couple of photos of Mike and his daughter, Sarah, in Max-Fax back in the 80s and 90s while they atended a few of the Maxecuter flying sessions. He and Sarah made every flying session that year.  What you may not know is that Mike had just come back from the first Iraq conflict where he commanded the 71st Fighter Squadron (based at Langley and deployed to Saudi Arabia).  Pat remembers talking to Mike -- he had just made Colonel (O-6) and was stationed at the Pentagon working on the joint Staff as a political-military planner.  We talked about his love of flying gliders and how he and his kids were building a full size glider. Mike said that it was a long drawn out project because every time he got transferred, he had to pack it up and trailer the partially completed glider or store it if he went overseas.  Mike is now working on his third sailplane and photos of all three can be seen on this page. A true lover of silent flight.