That time a Marine mechanic took a joyride in a stolen A4M Skyhawk

That time a Marine mechanic took a joyride in a stolen A4M Skyhawk

How much could a Marine Corps fighter cost? That was probably one of the questions running through 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Howard Foote's mind as the enlisted flight mechanic climbed into an unarmed A4M Skyhawk in the middle of a July night.

In case you were wondering, the cost is roughly $18 million. Rather, that was the cost back in 1984, when Foote stole one of them from Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. Today, that would be the equivalent of $41 million, adjusted for inflation.

Sentries tried to stop Foote as he taxied the aircraft for takeoff, but they just couldn't get his attention.

"Foote joined the Marines to go the Corps' Enlisted Commissioning Program, hoping to attend flight school," Lt. Tim Hoyle, an El Toro public affairs officer, told the Los Angeles Times. "However, while flying at 42,500 feet in a glider he suffered an aerial embolism similar to the bends suffered by divers."

The bends is the divers' term for decompression sickness, where gasses in the body (like nitrogen in the compressed oxygen tanks used by divers) come out of the blood in bubbles because the body doesn't have time to adjust to the pressure around it.

Flight school was not going to happen. Foote became a mechanic instead. Still, he had to realize his dream of going up at the helm of a fighter.

"I had worked my entire life for this flight," Foote told the LA Times, four years later. "There was nothing else."