K.T. to fly with the Blue Angels

It's fitting that Corey Brock's off day story on padres.com was about Kevin Towers' need for speed.

Brock writes about how the team's general manager had remade the Padres by adding such players as Tony Gwynn, Everth Cabrera and Will Venable.

Now Towers is showing his "need for speed" in the "Top Gun" sense of the phrase. Towers is scheduled to take a ride with the Blue Angels on Wednesday out of MCAS Miramar.

"I'm excited," Towers said. "It's an incredible opportunity. On the flip side, I've heard some horror stories. When you're pulling 7G, you go from 200 pounds to 1,400 pounds. So that should be interesting."

Towers joins a list of Padres personnel who have flown with the Blue Angels -- the U.S. Navy's Flight Demonstration Squadron -- that includes Kevin Kouzmanoff, Trevor Hoffman, Ken Caminiti and John Moores.

"I consider myself a military buff," Towers said. "I like to read a lot of miliary magazines, and I have the utmost respect for those who serve in jets and on aircraft carriers. To be in the back of an F-18 Hornet with the top aviators in the world, it's exciting."

Towers was one of three San Diegans invited to participate in a "Key Influencer" flight with the Blue Angels. Such ridealongs are held in cities where the Blue Angels perform. During the 45-minute flight, the pilot will demonstrate the high-performance maneuvers used by the Blue Angels team and pilots in the fleet.

The "Top Gun" reference above was very much intentional. The Padres' director of military marketing, Capt. Jack Ensch, served as executive officer of the Top Gun training center at Miramar in the 1970s, when it was a Navy station. That was real life, not the movies.

But Towers has a loose connection to the "Top Gun" movie, too. When he was a pitcher for MiraCosta College in the early 1980s, he lived in a house in Oceanside that was used for scenes in the movie.

Speed, indeed.

Check back at the blog after Towers' flight for photos and more info..

FJ