Pierson Senior Hopes To Fly Fighter Jets for the U.S. Navy

Pierson High School senior Sebastian De Felice has a mission in life.

Like Zack Mayo in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” he wants to fly jets — and not just any jets. He wants to fly U.S. Navy fighter jets, like the F-18 Super Hornet.

It will be years before that might happen — but he’s got two legs up on the goal.

The 18-year-old son and grandson of former Alitalia airline pilots, he’s a pilot himself, having soloed at East Hampton Airport at age 16 and winning his private license at age 17, the minimum ages that the Federal Aviation Administration allows for each step.

He also has been accepted at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he’ll head for a tough seven-week indoctrination known as “Plebe Summer” this June, right after his graduation from Pierson High School.

Nominated as a candidate for admission to the academy last year by U.S. Representative Nick LaLota, Sebastian got word earlier than most candidates in a “letter of assurance” he received in November, five months before all the candidates for the Class of 2028 will have been notified.

Sebastian does not come from a line of military men and women. What made this son of restaurateurs Gianpaolo and Gabby Karan De Felice, co-owners of the Tutto Il Giorno restaurants in Sag Harbor and Southampton — and the grandson of fashion designer Donna Karan — want to face the grind of a Plebe Summer, the rigors of four years at Annapolis, and the required eight years of military service after graduation in 2028?

“I believe it stemmed from my father,” Sebastian said in an interview at his family’s Tutto Caffe in East Hampton recently. Trained to fly by Alitalia, Italy’s national airline until 2021, and later a career corporate jet pilot, Gianpaolo “was very disciplined with me growing up. He taught me a lot of values that later on I found out aligned with the curriculum at the Naval Academy, like honor, courage, commitment, which are the pillars of the academy. He always emphasized these three things throughout my entire life.”

His father’s coaching and informal flying lessons paid off. His official flight instructor at East Hampton, retired Air Force Colonel and former FAA official Louis Cusimano, praises Sebastian’s commitment to excellence as a pilot.

“He’s the best student I ever had,” Cusimano said in a brief phone interview. “For a young man of his age, he’s just remarkable in so many ways.”

President of his class at Pierson, a football player through all four years of high school, and an ocean lifeguard for East Hampton Village for two summers, the 6-foot-2-inch, curly-haired Sebastian was born in Manhattan and initially went to the Rudolf Steiner School, a nursery-through-grade 12 Waldorf school on the Upper East Side.

He switched to Pierson in sixth grade after his parents decided to move the family to the Sag Harbor area full time after they launched Tutto Il Giorno there with partner David Mayer in 2008 and their Southampton location in 2011.

The change was fine with Sebastian and his sister, Stefania, whose passion is horseback riding. “Flying on horses is what she does,” Sebastian said. “She flies, but not for long. She’s a jumper.” Both had friends and felt more connected here.

“I never really fit in in the city environment,” he explained. “I tried all the sports. I tried many different things, but I never really felt like it was home for me.” It was the “highlight of my week, getting to come out here” on weekends “and see my friends.”

He praised Pierson High School, where he has followed an International Baccalaureate course of study, which he said is akin to an Advanced Placement program.

“I have a bright class,” he said. “The group of eight kids in my math class — they’re honestly the smartest people I’ve ever encountered in my life.” Pierson is “a great school,” he added. “If you are willing to do the work, they will give you all the tools you need to succeed.”

Part of his life here has been working in the family restaurant. He started at “probably age 12, cutting tomatoes,” he said, “and that was my least favorite chore, separating the red and the yellow — you have to cut them with this tiny knife. I’d be doing that for hours a day, and I’d be, like, ‘I hate this! Why am I doing this?’”

He also bused tables, worked as a host and “helped manage,” he said. He was never a waiter, “because you have to be 18 for that.”

“Being a host really exposed me to learning how to deal with people,” he said. “At first, it was difficult. But that challenge is what interested me. I started studying basic human psychology and human interactions. He said the first book he read for his personal study project was “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.

He also worked in Urban Zen, the clothing and accessories shop that his grandmother and mother have in the Sag Harbor restaurant. “Fashion is super cool to me, but I never really loved it,” he said. “That was more for my mom and grandma, even though I grew up around the fashion world. I would be, ‘Okay. When am I going flying?’”

Flying has always been a joy for him. “My earliest memories were being in a cockpit. It was a [six-seat] A36 Bonanza that my dad used to rent at Teterboro and fly us to East Hampton. I’d always be in the front seat, with three or four pillows under my butt. I remember it so well. I don’t remember much from my childhood, but I remember having pillows under my butt and, you know, getting to fly the airplane straight and level, and him teaching me all the little things.”

For several years now, his father has owned a sleek low-wing, two-seat Italian aerobatic airplane called a Marchetti SF 260, the same aircraft Alitalia once used for its pilot recruits’ early training. The plane has a “camo green” military-style paint scheme, and Sebastian has been flying it “every day,” he said. All it takes is a phone call first to secure his dad’s permission.

It will be a mark in his favor with the Navy that, like his dad, he flies aerobatics in the Marchetti — something he trained for with the famous professional aerobatics competitor Patty Wagstaff, who runs a school in St. Augustine. It was a gift on his 16th birthday.

Where did the interest in military flying come from? For one thing, it wasn’t his dad. “He never pushed me in any direction,” Sebastian recalled, “which I look back at and think about a lot. He was always very supportive of what I wanted to do.”

Flying for the military became a goal when he was only 12 or 13. “Dad surprised me,” Sebastian recalled. “We were in L.A. visiting my dad’s friend, and we were driving to the airport to head back to New York. I had fallen asleep in the car.” He woke up, finding they were at an airport that did not look like LAX.

“He said, ‘I have to show you something,’ and we were walking toward this hangar, and I see two airplanes,” both Marchettis, “with this camo paint job and these guys in flight suits, and I’m, like, ‘What am I doing here?” and he’s, like, ‘This is where we’re going to be training for the next several days.”

One of those guys in flight suits was Evan Levesque, an Annapolis grad who was “probably about 27 at the time and still flying Rhinos for the Navy,” Sebastian said, referring to the F-18 Super Hornet. (The nickname comes from the array of protrusions on its radome.) Now an airline pilot, Levesque then and still offers aerobatic and combat training.

Sebastian’s father had signed up because he had recently bought his own Marchetti and wanted to hone his skills. Sebastian did more than go along for the ride: With Levesque aboard as his instructor, he got to be at the controls of his own plane.

A high point was the dogfighting exercises. “I did one against dad with the Navy guy. We waxed him.”

Those four days were a defining experience for Sebastian. “That was when I was, like, ‘I want to do military flying,” he said.

The decision to go Navy evolved over the years. Of course, there was the original 1986 “Top Gun,” the Tom Cruise film about pilots training under intense pressure at the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School in San Diego. It was Sebastian’s favorite movie growing up.

“So I always knew that was a career,” he said. “But getting to talk to a pilot who actually did it was, like, ‘Wow!’”

He got the chance to do that when he joined his father on another one of Gianpaolo’s training missions, this one to prepare for work flying a Gulfstream corporate jet. One of his instructors at CAE Inc., a simulator-based aviation training company at Morristown Airport in New Jersey, “was a Top Gun graduate and a Tomcat pilot,” Sebastian said. It meant a lot that he flew the F-14, the same type that Tom Cruise flies in the movie.

“I met him and expected him to be, like, Hollywood, super-charismatic, and he was the most humble, coolest, chilliest guy I’ve ever met. He was so down to earth,” Sebastian said. “The way he talked … He was slow and he knew what he was talking about and that lit a spark for me. It was pretty cool.”

Still, Sebastian was highly methodical about making the actual decision to go to Annapolis. He studied all the options for a military flying career: “one of the military academies, Officer Candidate School, or ROTC,” he said, or “civilian college and then the National Guard.”

“I explored all them,” sometimes by meeting military pilots at air shows and other events or seeking them out for conversations through social media, he said. “I know a bunch of people at the Academy who have been guiding me,” he said.

It was in his sophomore year that he decided “I’m going Navy” by way of Annapolis, unlike Zack Mayo, who was an OCS trainee in the movie. It all came down to one thing. “The academy makes the best leaders in the world,” Sebastian explained.

Sebastian won’t find out if he will go on to Navy flight training until after he graduates from the academy. As for TOPGUN — that’s how the Navy writes it — it has evolved since 1986 (it’s now based in Nevada and is focused on producing combat instructors) but it remains extremely selective. Pilot candidates need at least hundreds of hours of flight time in the right kind of aircraft to even apply.

“My flight instructor, Lou, tells me there are statistics and probabilities and if you look at the chances for getting a fighter pilot spot is like one in some crazy number,” Sebastian said. “But he says if you stay determined and you stay on track and you don’t let anything discourage you, you have a pretty good shot at achieving your goals.”

Both his mom and dad are proud of him, he said. “He’s a little reserved, being from Napoli, and his father was tough on him, too,” Sebastian said of his dad. “But I definitely know he’s proud about it.”