CARLSBAD —— When Mel Holmes decided to retire, he wasn't thinking about a life of leisure. Oh, to be sure, he picked a place that doesn't look or sound like a workaholic's dream. His choice was a collection of islands in the Pacific Ocean called the Northern Marianas. But he wasn't there to play golf: He started an airline and flew vacationing Japanese and Koreans to resorts on Saipan and casinos on Tinian.

He had been an airline pilot, flying jets for Northwest Airlines, but he had been idled by a wrist operation in 1998. In January 1999, he hit the mandatory retirement age and took up crossword puzzles at the home near Escondido's Wild Animal park where he and his wife, Jeannie, live. Boredom drove him to start up Marianas Airlines, but in 2002, the economies of Japan and Korea softened and the tourists stopped their island hopping, so Holmes decided to move home.

"I renamed it Grey Eagle Aviation because nobody here has any idea what the Marianas are," Holmes said.

Next on the list of things to do was open a flight school, which he did at McClellan-Palomar Airport under the name Grey Eagle Academy. There's a wall inside with photographs of the 75 or so of Grey Eagle's students who have soloed —— progressed to the point that they made a cross-country flight alone.

Training pilots isn't anything new to Holmes. The Navy made him do it.

He found himself in the Navy in the early years of the Vietnam War because the Navy was his ticket out of the farm country of eastern Oregon.

"I worked in the wheat fields as a combine driver when I was a kid, but I had terrible allergies. My eyes would swell shut, but it was the only way a young man could make any money in La Grande," Holmes said.

"I was going to be a teacher or a coach if I stayed there," he said, so he took a chance and applied for the Navy's pilot training program.

The combat kill ratio —— the number of planes the enemy shoots down vs. the number the U.S. shoots down —— for Navy pilots in the skies over Vietnam at that time was 1-to-1. After three deployments to Vietnam, Holmes became one of five experienced F-4 jockeys chosen by the Navy to reinvent the process of teaching combat pilots how to fly and fight at the same time.

"We wrote the manuals and designed the program," as he tells it. "We were kind-of given our head to come up with it."

What they came up with needed a name, so the Navy called it Top Gun. "I didn't like the name," Holmes said, "but it stuck."

Most of what Grey Eagle does today is considerably more laid back than what Top Gun teaches. Its airplanes tend to be single-engine Cessnas. There's a Piper twin. The biggest plane is a turbine-powered Cessna Caravan, a nine-seater available for charter.

Holmes still flies, just not as much as he used to. "I get about 5 hours a year, I think," he said.

"I'm uncomfortable in these little airplanes when I get them in landing configuration," he said. "But once I get up there I love it."

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675 or ejacoby@nctimes.com.