Fred Haise

Fred Wallace Haise Jr. (heɪz ; born November 14, 1933) is an American former NASA astronaut, engineer, fighter pilot with the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, and a test pilot. He is one of 24 people to have flown to the Moon, having flown as Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 13. He was slated to become the 6th person to walk on the Moon, but the Apollo 13 landing mission was aborted en route. Haise went on to fly five Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests in 1977, and retired from NASA in 1979. Fred Wallace Haise, Jr. was born on November 14, 1933, and raised in Biloxi, Mississippi, to Fred Wallace Haise (1903–1960) and Lucille ( Blacksher) Haise (1913–2005). He has a younger sister who was born in 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, his father enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the age of 38, and the Haise family moved to Chicago. The family then moved to Key West, Florida, until his father's ship, YMS-84, deployed to the South Pacific, when the family moved back to Biloxi. He graduated from Biloxi High School in 1950. He attended Perkinston Junior College with a scholarship for journalism, and played on the baseball team. He graduated in 1952, and joined the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. He went to ground school at NAS Pensacola, and then moved to NAS Whiting Field in 1952. He trained in the SNJ and F6F Hellcat, and completed his flight training in 1954. He served as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot, with VMF-533, then VMF-114 on the F2H-4 Banshee and F9F-8 Cougar at MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina, from March 1954 to September 1956. Haise also served as a tactics and all-weather flight instructor in the U.S. Navy Advanced Training Command at NAS Kingsville, Texas. Haise has accumulated 9,300 hours flying time, including 6,200 hours in jets. After his military service, Haise returned to school and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1959, concurrently serving for two years in the Oklahoma Air National Guard, as a fighter interceptor pilot with the 185th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, flying the F-86D.