When I was in the Air Force, my colleagues would tell the story of how some fighter pilots used to do touch-and-goes on a tall, flat mesa that stuck up somewhere in the southwest desert, perhaps in Nevada or Arizona. It was dubbed “Touch-And-Go Mesa.” (Imaginative, huh?) One pilot supposedly did the thing, and then bragged about it and told others. Then another pilot did it. And another. Soon it was a regular thing because word got around, the fighter jocks talking to each other, saying, “I heard this is fun to do.”
According to legend, the rancher who owned the land (and the mesa) got tired of the pilots doing touch-and-goes on top of his mesa and decided to do something about it. The story is that he put some obstacles on top of the mesa. The next pilot who tried to do a touch-and-go on Touch-And-Go Mesa tore off his landing gear and, somewhere on top of a mesa in the southwest desert is a set of fighter-jet landing gear. So goes the tale.
