What's it like to be a Blue Angel? 'Cheese' offers a slice of life

Don’t look for Christopher Kapuschansky in the next “Top Gun” movie.

“I move my head a lot when I talk and I don’t like the sound of my voice,” the Navy pilot offers as an assessment. “I’ll stick to the plan in place.”

That plan included a stint with the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy’s elite demonstration team.

In the new documentary, “The Blue Angels,” Kapuschansky – or “Cheese” as he’s called – is one of the pilots who fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Chronicling a year in the life of the Angels, the film shows him and his teammates going through intense preparation for those air shows that wow audiences.

Kapuschansky, a Massachusetts native, saw a Blue Angels show as a child and got “really, really into naval aviation. I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to fly jets off ships. Never did I think the Blue Angels would be attainable.”

After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor’s degree in oceanography, he earned his commission in the Navy and, in 2014, his Wings of Gold. In 2022, he was No. 2, the right wingman, to Capt. Brian Kesserling, the Blue Angels flight leader.

“I applied a few times” for the team but didn’t get in. Then, after a pandemic pause, “I was selected...and it was really eye-opening.”

Besides serving as ambassadors for the military, the Angels gave Kapuschansky a chance to embed with other pilots and learn how difficult it is to fly so close they could practically touch wings.

“You’re never going to fly this close if you’re in the fleet squadron,” he says. “We’re doing a slightly different mission. We’re not at the pointy end of the spear when it comes to the tactical stuff. We’re here to showcase the finer details and pride of what the Navy has to offer.”

To get to that level – some 18 inches apart – the Angels go through months of training. “When we get our confidence up a little, we make ourselves a little bit more uncomfortable by taking it a little bit closer. Halfway to two-thirds of  the way through the season, we get even closer. What we want to do is fight a sense of complacency. Once you have that sense of complacency, bad things tend to happen. We don’t start off super close. We work toward it.”

While the film puts viewers in the cockpit, it doesn’t give them other sensory experiences. “We are very sweaty,” Kapuschansky admits. “Most of us will chug a bottle of water before we get into the jet and then chug a bottle of water once we get out. You’re essentially holding a 40-to 45-pound spring for 40 to 45 minutes. It’s a workout.”

Kapuschansky says it’s unlikely the Blue Angels would ever become automated. “That’s the beauty of it. There are numbers associated with these things but it’s an art, it’s a feel. You can’t digitize or automate the finesse that goes in with this performance.”

While Kupschansky is now stationed at VFA-21 Black Lions in NAS Oceana, he jumped at the chance to see his fellow Blue Angels at the film’s premiere in Pensacola, Florida, last week.

“We spent about 300 days of the year with each other. We knew every single thing about (the others) because we trusted each other so much. I knew that Scott (Gossens, the No. 3 pilot) didn’t like bleu cheese on a salad, so he’d scrape it off every single debrief.”

The reunion wasn’t necessarily to catch up (“we text and talk all the time”) but to mark another milestone in their careers.

And those nicknames? “Everybody gets a call sign,” Kapuschansky says. “It started post-World War II so that you could go with that in case you were stuck. Typically, the Navy gives you a call sign and the Air Force gets to pick theirs.”

And “Cheese”? Kupuschansky got the name because somebody couldn’t pronounce his “and they just shortened it to cheese.”

“It’s typically related to something you’ve done in the past, usually something stupid. It rarely is really cool.”