I learned a lot about flying airplanes while working 60 feet underground. I served as a missile launch control officer in the U.S. Air Force in the waning days of the Cold War. We worked in two-person crews, a commander and a deputy, behind a sealed blast door in a small room filled with old-school electronics that ran hot. A huge, forced air cooling system did its best to control the heat. But the possibility of fire in that confined space was always there, either from the electronics themselves, malfunction of the air conditioning unit that cooled them, or other scenarios. Consequently we learned to recognize overheats and potential overheats very rapidly, and were trained to follow practiced emergency procedures swiftly and correctly while using detailed emergency procedures checklists ("EPs").
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