Overachiever finds yet one more way to overachieve

Lieutenant Commander Jonny Kim, MD, USNR, former Navy SEAL

I talked about Silver Star recipient Jonny Kim a while back in a Valor Friday piece. Since then the man who enlisted into the Navy, became a SEAL, was decorated for valor in action, was commissioned an officer, became a medical doctor (from Harvard no less), and then became an astronaut has squeezed another extremely hard achievement-of-a-lifetime into his resume.

I ended my VF piece on Kim by saying, “He’s only 37, so he’s got a couple more decades to work in some other amazing career choice.” Well, he’s now 39 and has just received his wings of gold as a US Naval Aviator. Yup, he’s taken up flying helicopters. This guy is living like three of my childhood dreams. I feel so inadequate.

Task and Purpose has the story;

Navy SEAL doctor astronaut Jonny Kim somehow finds time to become naval aviator

U.S. Navy SEAL. Harvard Medical School-trained physician. Astronaut. These are all things on Lt. Cmdr. Jonny Kim’s already extensive list of accomplishments. Now Kim can add naval aviator to that list.

Kim completed his advanced helicopter training on March 24, pinning on his wings at Naval Air Station Whiting in Corpus Christi, Texas, according to a Navy press release published this week

“NASA really values helicopter pilots for their perspectives and crew resource management mentality,” Kim said in the release, adding that astronauts in the Apollo space program also completed helicopter aviation training due to the similarities with lunar landing procedures.

“Space flight is closely related to aviation, and proper crew resource management allocates human resources to accomplish the mission safely and effectively. By virtue of the helicopter cockpit environment, helicopter pilots bring an abundance of CRM to the spaceflight table,” he said.

To complete the aviation training, Kim completed both solo and night flights.

“The NVG [night vision goggle] training in the advanced syllabus for helicopters was amazing, especially because I have a lot of ground experience as a SEAL using night vision … but I didn’t have the experience of integrating a cockpit-NVG scan with degraded visual environments … That was really challenging and formative in my growth as an aviator,” said Kim.

Kim’s graduation from flight school – he was, naturally, on the so-called “Commodore’s List” of distinguished graduates – likely makes him one of few people in the ranks of the U.S. military who are both qualified naval flight surgeons and pilots.

More at the source.

Category: Bravo Zulu, NASA, Navy