I started learning to fly at the quaint, waterfront Albert-Whitted Airport in St. Petersburg, Fla., back in the 1980s. It was a great place to fly—beautiful scenery, plenty of options of places to go for practice landings and a reasonably easy airspace set up to facilitate painless statewide cross-country flights. There was one caveat, however. Just across Tampa Bay, off the end of what was then Runway 6, sat MacDill Air Force Base. At the time, MacDill was the home to extensive fighter pilot training, with a constant flow of F-16s doing practice landings or traversing to and from training grounds.
The airspace over the bay buzzed with fighter jets, often akin to the proverbial flies on you-know-what. Thankfully, the jets stayed at or above 1200 feet msl, and we stayed at or below 1000 feet msl. The system worked out pretty well—as long as you played by these rules and, preferably, kept in contact with Tampa Approach. In doing so, one was unlikely to be surprised by an up-close encounter with an F-16. Even when one got used to the arrangement in Tampa, you would occasionally get a friendly reminder via the eerily loud sound of GE turbofans, sometimes with lit afterburners.
