As a rule, I fly low and slow. Poking along at 130 knots, I'll ease down below 1,000 feet AGL to take a closer look at the countryside, to aimlessly meander along the bends of rivers and streams, gazing out over the rolling hillsides and ridges. Low and slow, with no one else around.

The peacefulness of such scenic flights belies the vigilance that pilots like me should have. The regular obstacles to safe flights at low altitudes are clear -- towers, birds and bad engines among the items to avoid. But another marker on a low flyer's checklist had better include knowing where other low traffic may be encountered.

Take a look at any sectional chart depicting the southeastern United States, and you'll find large swaths of airspace carved out for use by the military. This Special Use Airspace -- Military Operating Areas, Restricted Areas, and Prohibited Areas -- provide identifiable zones where fast moving fighters and low flying transports are likely to be found.

What most general aviation pilots may find surprising, however, is that much of the flying done by the military is not necessarily contained in these areas. Low-level training routes, both for VFR and IFR conditions, crisscross the landscape. The Visual Routes, or VRs, take military pilots and their fighters along the nap of the earth, usually below 1,500 feet AGL, at speeds that nearly reach the sound barrier.

While zipping along the proscribed lanes of these routes, military pilots are usually on their own, and just like the guy plugging away at 500 feet in a Cessna 172, they are not talking to air traffic controllers. The fast burner may see the bug-smasher on an air-to-air radar display, but the special demands of operating a fighter so close to the earth at such high speeds means that there is no guarantee that a general aviation target will be seen in time to be avoided.

The combination of fast flying military jets and slow flying general aviation airplanes provides a backdrop for a potentially dangerous mixture. Understanding how the military uses low-level training routes can give general aviation pilots the information they need to be safe when flying near military training routes. To find out how the world unwinds from the fighter jockey's seat, I recently went along for the ultimate joyride in the back seat of a McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle, flying a low-level mission through the mountain valleys of West Virginia and Virginia with the 335th Fighter Squadron, the famed Chiefs of the U.S. Air Force's 4th Wing based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, N.C.

I flew with Major Rob Hampton -- "Hampy" around the squadron -- who is the assistant operations officer of the 335th Fighter Squadron and the number three man in the Chiefs. His square frame could be that of a tradesman, but Hampton flies the F-15E for a living. As he moves through the squadron building, other officers junior to him pay him a respect that is borne from more than his higher rank. Hampton is gregarious, but carries a solid confidence and command authority.

Hampton came into the Air Force through the ROTC program at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, N.H., in 1983. He underwent his initial pilot training at Shepherd AFB in Texas before heading to England to fly A-10s at RAF Woodbridge. He spent several years as an instructor pilot in T-38s at Columbus AFB in Mississippi before making the transition to the ultimate airplane in the air force's inventory, the F-15E, at Seymour Johnson.

"I was a standard kid on the airport fence when I was growing up," Hampton recalls, "My uncle started my flying when I was eight." "I saved every penny I made when I was a kid, cutting grass, doing anything, shoveling snow in the wintertime. When I turned 16 I had like $2,300 in the bank. I spent a year in Sweden, but when I got back I walked into the FBO and said, 'Here's my money, teach me to fly,'" he remembers. "It's all I have ever wanted to do." Now 35 years old with more than 3,000 hours in A-10s, T-38s and F-15Es, Hampton enjoys nothing more than taking his 16-year-old son flying in rented airplanes. "We go up and putt around. I give him the controls and I sit there and watch," he says. "It's a kick."

Captain Doc Watson is a weapon systems officer -- a WSO or "wizzo" -- who flew into combat in the back seat of F-15Es during the Gulf War. He took me through the survival training facility at Seymour Johnson to teach me how to get out of a bird gone bad.

The egress training was pretty straightforward. If the pilot decides that it is time to leave the airplane and pulls the ejection handles, you are going to leave the airplane. The ACES II ejection seat in the Strike Eagle spends all of 1.7 seconds to blow the canopy, eject the backseater and then the pilot. Rockets in the ejection seat generate a 15-G ride that puts the survival of the occupant in the hands of the seat designers. The seat is a sophisticated piece of hardware with pitot tubes and a static port which enables the chair to decide when to deploy the pilot's parachute and cut itself away. The seat won't deploy the chutes until it reaches the relatively safe altitude of 14,000 feet -- survivable if you happen to be unconscious.

If the frontseater becomes incapacitated, the chairs can be fired from the back. I knew I would never have the nerve to switch the ejection control knob to manual and then pull the black and yellow seat handles. But now, at least, I knew how to do it. I spent some time looking at a big chart on the wall. Slow to 250 knots, try to maintain altitude between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, "bail out, bail out, bail out."

The survival equipment that is attached to the parachute ensemble weighs in at 23 pounds, and has everything you need to survive except for the bugs.

On the ground, the seats have a zero-zero capability -- zero altitude, zero airspeed -- that will send the seats high enough for the chutes to open. If an on-ground emergency exists, the words "egress, egress, egress" are commanded. What that means is, "Let's get the hell out of here," -- a rapid exit of the airplane and its environs are in order.

Our sortie of two F-15Es, call signs Arrow 41 and Arrow 42, would consist of Hampton and me in the lead with Major Al Botine, an experienced combat pilot, flying the wing position with Captain Dennis Schell as his backseater.

Schell had been out of the cockpit for several months, and needed a low intensity mission in the Eagle before resuming his regular flying rotation in the jet. Schell prepared the route briefings for the flight, carefully detailing the information that would be programmed into the fighters inertial navigation system.

The Eagle's INS is a Litton ring laser gyro. Three spools of fiber optic line carry beams of lasers over a long enough distance to allow measurement of changes in the frequency shift of the light as it accelerates or slows across three dimensions. Computers calculate the distance the jet has traveled since the INS was programmed with the coordinates of its ramp parking space before taxiing for takeoff.

The Eagle's INS is the most sophisticated in the world of fighter aircraft, and gives the fighter complete autonomy in navigation. After a sortie that covers 600 or 700 miles, the INS is usually no more than a half a mile out of register. Though not as accurate as a Global Positioning System, the independence from outside electronic jamming or other interference gives the F-15E a wartime capability that is unmatched.

The plan prepared by Schell was to depart Seymour Johnson and climb to a cruising altitude of 18,000 feet. I would not be going over water or above flight level 180 because I hadn't had water survival or high altitude training.

Instead, we would head northwest to West Virginia, where we would drop out of the sky to join VR-1758. The Visual Route followed mountain valleys, ripping and tearing across ridge lines and down riverbeds.

Schell had picked a few targets for us to find, including a railroad tunnel burrowing into a mountainside. We would do a few special exercises along the route, then climb out for the trip back to Goldsboro. Back home, we would enter the Echo MOA for some air work and individual "acro" before rejoining to land.

The preparations for the flight included the spectacle of dressing a short, dumpy guy up like a fighter pilot. After break dancing into the flight suit and enduring the sausage-like encasement ritual of zipping into the G-suit, I felt ridiculously juxtaposed next to the jet pilots.

Nevertheless, I sucked in as much gut as I could, and did my best Tom Cruise impersonation when it was time to step out to the flight line. Then, finally strapped into the jet, I began to feel the claustrophobia of the full flight suit with its bulky helmet and restricting oxygen mask bear down upon me.

We had spent about an hour in the F-15E simulator the night before the ride. I had a chance to become familiar with the panel layout and a few systems. Once in the jet, I turned on the four CRT displays that provide the wealth of information a crew uses. On the left side I had the moving map; in the left center I touched a button and the Heads Up Display repeater from the front seat came on; on the right center I brought up the air-to-air radar; and the on the far right I toggled between an HSI and ADI. Once we rolled toward the runway, I put my hands in my lap. We were cleared for takeoff. "Excuse me, Hampy," I thought to myself. "May I leave now?"

I watched the airspeed climb. Rotating at 140 knots and flying at 190, Hampton leveled off a few feet over the runway to build airspeed. "We're not going to get much performance today," he predicted. "Its too hot."

The airspeed darted to 350 knots as Hampton pulled us into the express elevator, a 45 degree climb that took us to 10,000 feet in 28 seconds.

I managed to reach out and snap a self-portrait of myself with the Seymour Johnson runway straight below us.

For all of the excitement leading to the flight -- the special equipment, the conversations about ejection -- I was mildly surprised at feeling comfortable with the environment when we leveled at cruise altitudes.

This was just flying. Hampton gave me the controls, and I flew straight and level, holding my altitudes as though I was on an ATP checkride. The difference was that anything more than a twitch on the stick resulted in a big change.

"If you want it to turn, all you have to do is think about it, and it will turn." Hampton had forecast. I didn't find out, stiffly sitting there trying to hold a heading.

I wondered whose ticket they'd get if I busted an altitude.

Hampton explained that air crews take their jets through a few G-loaded maneuvers, called a G-awareness exercise, before beginning a low-level run in order to acclimate their bodies to the stresses of positive gravity forces. He gave me a moment to think about it, then pulled the jet over into a hard right turn. I tensed my body and grunted while the effects of the 5-G turn pressed me into the seat. The G-suit crimped around my legs and waist inflated sharply, preventing blood from pooling in my lower extremities.

Before there was time for my heart rate to settle, Hampton ratcheted the Eagle to the left. "That's about six and a half," he noted over the intercom casually. This isn't so terrible, I thought. Later, on the video tape from the gun camera, I would hear myself in a noisy lather, making sounds akin to a bull rhinoceros in the throes of romantic fervor. We had reached the initial fix for entering VR-1758, and after making sure that the route ahead was free of traffic, Hampton rolled the jet inverted and hauled back on his stick for a 6-G pull. The world spun upside down and began to grow very large in front of us. He rolled back upright and pulled the F-15 into level flight with another 5 or 6 Gs. This combat descent took just a couple of seconds as we plunged 12,000 feet from 16,500 feet to a couple of hundred feet above the mountains.

The combat descent is way cool.

"When you're covering the ground at the rate of 10 nautical miles every minute, with vertical velocities of 30 or 40 thousand feet per minute, it doesn't take long to overrun an airplane that's doing 120 knots and not be able to see it until the last second," Hampton noted.

His comments were sharply illustrated during the low-level segment of the flight, when a small airport materialized in front of us.

"Oops," Hampton blurted, as he raked the jet over into a high-G left turn to avoid the airport pattern area, turning back hard right to clear a ridge line. "Things can happen real fast," he explained, "I just messed that one up."

Of course, today Hampton was flying solo, with a lump of jelly-kneed civilian in the back seat. His WSO would have normally helped him with navigation through the terrain, but today he was doing all of the work by himself, flying the jet between 480 and 540 knots, navigating, monitoring the air-to-air radar, managing the aircraft systems and talking on the radio.

Even with the closer-than-normal pass by an airport, he had the reaction time to avoid the airspace conflict.

Hampy pays attention real good, I think.

Safety is the watchword for crews taking jets down low. While drawing circles on the charts around places to be avoided, like towers, towns and housing, a more uncertain threat comes from air traffic that may be flying along or across the route.

Hampton says that general aviation pilots can help kerosene burners and themselves by following a few guidelines.

"First and foremost, squawking 1200 is the most important thing a general aviation aircraft can do to help us see him," explains Hampton. "On low-levels, we look for 1200 codes, but we can interrogate any squawk."

The Hughes APG 70 pulse Doppler radar used in the F-15Es -- the same air-to-air radar that is used on F-15Cs -- is the most powerful radar found on any Air Force fighter. Its antennae alone costs nearly $1,000,000. Even with its sophistication and the fact that it can see targets that aren't squawking a code, it does have some limitations that keep it from being fool-proof.

For one thing, slow moving aircraft can be more difficult to see on the radar than those that are faster moving. And targets that are "in the beam" of the radar -- those at an aspect angle of 90 degrees to the flight path of the jet, can be hard to pick out by the radar. One of the most difficult targets for the radar would be the likes of a J-3 Cub flying slowly across the sky at 500 feet.

"If he's coming toward us or away from us, we'll see him," notes Hampton, "but we may lose him in the ground clutter."

And not all of the military jets flying on VRs enjoy the radar capability of the Strike Eagle. "It's a good thing Cubs are painted yellow." Hampy quips.

The bright paint job notwithstanding, Hampton makes it clear that when flying the jets so fast at low altitudes, the tried and true dictate of see-and-be-seen rules the day.

"Our primary method of avoiding potential hazards is looking out the window." Hampton says, "We expect for traffic to be in certain places along the low-levels, down in the valleys, flying along the routes, around towns with airports. The frontseater's job is to look out the window."

We had only been on the low-level segment for a few minutes when we did the sudden turns to clear the airport. Now my stomach informed my mind that it had had enough fun. And while I focused on quelling the uprising, I knew that it would be hard to keep from being airsick.

I have flown in plenty of hot, summer turbulence, and so managed to keep from throwing up, but for the next few minutes, I was pretty green around the gills.

The flight was actually rather smooth, but the combination of the anxiety, anticipation and excitement of the flight along with the rapid series of maneuvers we did since beginning the low-level run was enough to make me queasy. Being in the back seat probably enhanced the effects.

I mentally resisted the effects of the airsickness. The ride was too cool to let a little queasiness ruin it.

During our flight down VR-1758, Hampton called to Botine in the other jet to begin an acceleration exercise. I could feel each stage of the afterburner kick in as the scenery began to flash by the canopy. I peeked at the HUD repeater and watched the airspeed numbers roll up like a gas pump gone crazy. When we reached 622 knots of ground speed, Hampy called for idle throttles and threw up the barn door speed brake behind me.

From being pinned to the back of the seat, I was suddenly tossed forward against my harness as the momentum of the jet was arrested and the airspeed bled - no, hemorrhaged - a couple of hundred knots.

In flying VR routes, pilots in fast-moving aircraft practice nap of the earth flying, sometimes using terrain-following radar.

I looked over at the other jet as it darted along below the ridge line. I realized that the view I had was a familiar one for me. I frequently fly low over the ground, below 1,000 feet AGL. And I normally feel secure, thinking that most everybody else is at higher altitudes, leaving me to poke along above the treetops and rubberneck at the scenery.

Now, my perspective had been changed by the thought that I could have one of these streaking hunks of metal bear down on me before I would ever see it.

We broke off the low-level a little early, having spent extra fuel on the performance takeoff. "Bingo fuel," purred the feminine, but synthetic, voice of Bitchin' Betty to let us know it was time to head home.

On the way back, Hampy gave me the controls again. Hands on flying in the cool air at altitude helped me shake the earlier nausea, and as we entered the Echo MOA I was anxious to try some maneuvers.

We began with a turning rejoin, a standard effort to bring the ships together into fingertip formation from their positions in the tactical formation. The tactical formation puts the airplane abreast of one another, with about a mile of horizontal spacing. The positioning allows each pilot to view the others six o'clock, and provides room for making supporting turns.

In fingertip, the jets fly a few feet apart. The wingman's job is to maintain a relative position to the leader, jockeying the throttles to do whatever it takes to stay in sync. Hampton radioed Botine, "We're going to let Bravo try it." I was the guy in the back seat he was talking about.
"You ready?" he asked. "You have the jet."
Immediately, the jet ballooned 10 feet above Botine and Schell as I tried to work it back into position.
"Reminds me of my T-38 days," Hampton chuckled in my headset.
He put us back in position for a second try.
"You have the jet," he commanded.
This time I was perfect for about twenty seconds, just long enough to elicit a single syllable of praise from Hampy.

"Good," he said. Sounded good to me. So I started a PIO -- a pilot induced oscillation -- with more ups and downs than a Coney Island roller coaster to bring me back to reality. But it was the top drawer, flying in fingertip formation in an F-15E.

Once in the MOA, I did several aileron rolls, improving each time until I made a nice pivot around the nose of the jet. I tried a loop, nosing over to reach 550 knots, then pulling back, back, back, loading up with four or five Gs, then looking over my head to catch a glimpse of the earth again for the ride down the arc.

My loop was pretty good, as if I was flying a Stearman at 80 knots.

Low on fuel, we rejoined again with Botine and Schell and headed back to Seymour Johnson. We did an overhead approach, pitching out to the right in five second intervals to join the downwind in trail.

On final Hampy said aloud, "Flaps, pressures, gear is down." On short final, I piped up, "Check gear down."

Hampton greased it in, keeping the nose in a 13 degrees pitch during the roll out for aerodynamic braking. It is the same way in the Cessna 182. Stay off the brakes, they cost money.

Back on the ramp, I posed with Hampton for the obligatory Fighter Pilot on Ladder of Jet picture, the Fighter Pilot with Thumbs Up picture and the Fighter Pilot in Front of Jet picture.

I love those pictures.