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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Off Beat: Years later, Capt. ‘Grumpy’ flying high

By , Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter
Published:

Read about Capt. Kimberly’s record-breaking landing.

Navy Capt. Keith Kimberly is Grumpy.

Really?

The Vancouver native recently achieved a rare aviation milestone, as we noted in a Columbian story on July 28.

Kimberly became only the 371st fixed-wing pilot to log 1,000 carrier landings since the dawn of naval aviation more than a century ago. That ought to cheer up any flier.

But the Navy press release that announced Kimberly’s achievement called him Grumpy.

So did an official Navy video. After showing Kimberly landing an F/A-18F Super Hornet on the deck of USS Harry S. Truman, and after showing the pilot being honored by his shipmates, the tribute closed with these words on the screen: “Congratulations, Grumpy.”

(As a boy, Kimberly attended Vancouver’s Walnut Grove Elementary. His parents graduated from local high schools in 1956: Randall Kimberly from Fort Vancouver, and Joan Thompson Kimberly from Providence Academy.)

At one point in the video, you can see “Grumpy” embroidered on Kimberly’s flight suit and you realize: OK, it’s not an attitude; it’s a nickname.

‘Kind of depressing’

… Although it was an attitude for a while. As a student pilot, Kimberly had a close call during gunnery training in California.

He was flying an A-4 Skyhawk. The exercise was an air-to-ground attack.

He was so focused on the target, Kimberly said, that “I lost situational awareness” and didn’t realize how low he was flying.

Kimberly pulled back on the stick so hard that he overstressed his A-4 Skyhawk; the aircraft was grounded briefly.

“It was one of those moments in your career when you realize that life is quite precious, and how close you are to dying, through all the things that you do in a training environment,” he said.

“It was kind of depressing. So they called me ‘Grumpy’ for a few days, and it happened to stick.”


Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.

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Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter