Truth Duty Valour Episode 112 - Fighter Pilots

this week on truth duty valor I think that I was born thinking about flying one dream that few people in the world will ever experience five guys about to see that dream come true they are only weeks away from becoming f-18 fighter pilots the Canadian Forces most elite pilots it's the ultimate fly and give me all four wing cold lake located just three hours east of Edmonton Alberta is the home of Canada's largest tactical fighter training range and the place where all fighter pilots are trained unique part about NATO flying training in Canada we have some some several things which make us an advantage over most similar training places the world versus our airspace which is absolutely huge our low level training area goes from Prince George ACC to plinth law Manitoba north of 60 and just south by Edmonton we can fly down to 250 feet in that area so comparatively speaking if we put that over a year that's almost all of Germany Switzerland France combined so it's quite a huge training area we have the cold lake air weapons range which is located approximately 40 kilometers north of cold lake and it's a rather large range approximately 100 nautical miles long and 40 nautical miles wide along with airspace that encompasses approximately 200 nautical miles square which we can conduct large force exercises for training the practice poems I use here at 14 squadron exactly that they practice poems they're not high-explosive bombs they have the same shape size and character flight characteristics of a normal bomb however when they do hit the ground they don't explodes called an academic bombing range so you go down there everyone flies around kind of a racetrack pattern and you have practice bombs that you drop off your airplane we have different profiles we fly right now where we will be practicing 45 degree and 30 degree bomb deliveries and 30 degree strafing which is using the gun to shoot at a target and you just go around and you try and hit the target it's all happening really fast you get about 15 seconds on the downwind to kind of keep track of the airplane in front of you set your pattern spacing debrief your last drop see what went wrong and try to improve on the next one that all happens in about 15 seconds and it's time to roll in for the for the next attack if you ever want to go on a good puke ride that that would be the one do a 5g pull off the target and that's a 5g it's fairly long pull to a twenty degrees nose-up about 500 over 500 knots climb up to about 20,000 feet and then it's a big level off out there and then a big dive bomb again basically about a 20,000 foot roller coaster at 500 knots these five students are almost finished their eight-month basic fighter pilot training in the Hornet also known as the f-18 it's been a long road for these pilots the 410 course and for a fighter pilot is very much the the culmination of four years and the final official course that they'll go through after they graduate here they are all intents purposes our f-18 pilots and they can say that when truth duty valor returns the ups and downs of fighter pilot training a fighter pilots day starts early and as we learned with some uncertainty it takes perfect weather and the mechanically sound jet before anyone is allowed to go up on a mission we've got we've got at least two right now I was looking there huh sorry how's it looking yeah we hope to and they're looking at tomorrow small things can go wrong we have minor defects which get corrected almost on a daily basis there are major snags which we try to get them rid of overnight and then the next day they can fly again we're about every every mission which is about one hour 1.5 hours we do about depending on whether the aircraft is broken and on about it could be one whole ship which is eight hours of maintenance on it so the maintainer is keep them flying how are we as a decision been made what we're doing schedule here I just leave it everything shifting to the right so everything's just going a little bit later so just leave it as this right now will amend is required if the Jets go to relax in our day here you say okay this is called the obstacle it's just that whenever there's aircraft in the air we always have a pilot at the ops test I have a radio here and they can call in they can ask for information changing whether they need to help go onto your checklist or they have an emergency they can call and ask from some assistance here and and then just basically coordinate between the maintenance side and the flying side so we know what's going on which Jets we're going to use and just get the paperwork out of the way the other thing that's important here is the actual weather forecast and cold lake which was this segment here it shows us what the weather we're expecting today to weather's great the weather may be great but without enough Jets these guys might not fly this morning as usual we caught them studying for their anticipated missions first time flying upon it is like every other trip it's awesome I love it and you know my next trip is a solo the souls are awesome because there's no one in the backseat peeking at you telling you how he should do it I'll be up there thinking about something tactically fighting or whatever and then I'll you know look back and realize that I'm in a Hornet and I'm fighting some guy and you know I'll just start smiling because it's awesome it's not the first trip right away where you do your full afterburner takeoff it's not slow but I think the third trip but as soon as you get those afterburners in it's like a completely new aircraft to fly you get pushed back in your seat and you go for quite a ride the takeoff quick you accelerate quick and you have to actually worry about the sound barrier when you're climbing up because it does accelerate so quick that was that was a thrill ride alright waving at me if one of us breaks and we go singleship still on the schedule just later there's later yeah in a brief which is before the flight we will outline what we're going to try and achieve on the mission so we always give ourselves some objectives so that we can focus our attention training wise on what we're going out there to do then we'll run through exactly what we're going to do airborne we'll run through what they should see we'll run through a few what-ifs if things quite don't go according to plan these things might happen and how they should react to those and then we'll sum it all up the end we want to shave up since sort out their date if you don't do that they want to ask some questions and maintain mutual support from fight song talks winter we're done cutting out the afternoon now maintenance the regrouping regenerates ripped us five to be six cars the operations officer just come in and told us that we've fallen from three aircraft today down to one as a result we needed three aircraft to get this mission in with two blue air and one red air one bandit we can't get the mission in and I guess we're going to be cancelling the flying program for the day of course disappointing when this happens but it it's expected in this industry that Jets can't work all the time the weather could be a factor all the time and you got to be flexible next on truth duty valor learning to live with the power of G or this would be negative G and this would be positive shoot how's that it's very mentally demanding and as you know studying for anything for a long period time or concentrating intensely for any one thing on long period I'm mentally drains you but it's also very physically challenging and throwing the jet around the sky in every direction conceivable demand and up to 7.5 G does take its toll on your body it's a lot more work than I thought it would be not kidding myself if I like working hard and it's part of my character but it is a lot of work probably more than what the average person would think it's easy to think that flying a jet involves as much physical activity as driving a fast car but pilots learn pretty quickly that this is a job you have to keep in shape for and that you can't let the g-force bring you down being a fighter pilot ready I'm used to it or the guys are used to it so we don't think there's very much however if you come back off a couple of weeks leave and get back into the jet and try to fill up fighting a Hornet you come back and you are physically drilling for the rest of the day passengers that we take up in the aircraft get down and then they're like they basically don't do anything for the rest of day it's very demanding it's hard on your neck and plus you put a helmet on there and you're trying to look back over your shoulder and it's just uncomfortable you have to be very careful not to hurt yourself but more importantly than that you have to be very careful not become unconscious because if you pass out there's a good good chance you'll be sick in the dirt half as they say it does help if you are of a stockier build and have more muscle mass then if you're a excellent marathon runner you want the you want to eat a lot of faith foods and have high blood pressure is basically what you wanted to fight a farm and have been to be a short guy pull up to 7g and usually don't maintain that but seven times the force of gravity on your body your hand which weighs two or three pounds is now weighing a considerable amount more than that so we've been moving around in the cockpit or you could feel the pressure of your G suit or the the LC vest you're wearing you feel the pressure of that on your body and it does become quite a strain after a time it's a different feeling it's more being second to your seat by the G and anything else well this would be negative G and this would be positive shoot keeping in shape isn't enough to protect you from the G that's why the pilots were a G suit to help them out RLC packing our best course we wear in anthea and D a G suit and obviously what you don't want to do is is a passive the airplane would not be happy while you're flying because that's not going to be good so as you pull a bunch of G the blood wants to run down to the bottom of your body it's just physics right anything in the airplane wants to go down to the floor and of course when too much blood goes out of the body your body's not enough left in the top of your body and and your head is needs a lot of it so your eyes are very susceptible to it but as your blood pressure begins to drop a long way in your head your your vision will start to gray out that's kind of one of your first indicators all you know I'm trying to run out of blood up here and that you actually get black out and you can lose consciousness which is a which can be fatal of course because if you happen to be pointed at the ground when that happens you might be napping for up to 20 seconds and that is plenty enough time to end up in the in the ground so this suit is designed to forget that it's supposed to give us someone there were two extra gene capability basically it plugs into the BCS system on the airplane and it inflates as soon as there's a regular valve behind the seat people as soon as it feels that Valve feels the G coming on and starts to pump air into the student is basically a three bladders or five bladders I should say one on the upper upper thigh on each side one on each calf and one in the abdomen and it squeezes your body it's basically trying to push the blood back up there and you strain at the same time just imagine trying to push all your blood into your head that's what you're doing at the same time when we're up in the aircraft we control the amount of G that we're under simply by by relaxing the stick if we start to feel a great scenario so now there's there's no fear although the most each of these pilots will fly in a day is one 90-minute mission it takes the entire day to plan and study for that mission every mission that we fly here at 410 squadron is our briefing and debriefing there's a many hours of preparation for each flight especially for a new phase of flying there's several phases and you have to go throughout the ground school and the preparation in the face and each flight itself takes probably two hours of go a self-study before the flight couple hours a brief in the flight itself and a couple hours in the debrief so I say for each flight is about an eight eight hour day we get into the mindset of saying I've done this before I can do it again because there are so many different roles that the Hornet can fly and it's so dynamic it's quite easy to forget some of the fundamentals if you haven't briefed it very expensive training in these Jets they go through fuel at a phenomenal rate and we burn up a lot of money in one flight the airplane itself is extremely expensive it's very expensive to to look after especially as it gets older so you know one hour in this airplane is worth an awful lot of money so we want to pack all the training we can into it after we come down from flying we'll go through a debrief where we will assess how they did perform and then how we can prove on their performance next time they get in one so hopefully they won't make the same mistakes again that's why we spent a lot of time in briefings because it is so expensive to go up there and actually practice what we do we like to get it perfect every time we get airborne we can replay the flight especially for ECM engagements everything happens very very quickly and you're gone you know what just happened there and you're not really 100% sure you can go back and view it in slow-mo over and over again and get thoroughly debriefed on the errors that you might have made coming up on truth duty valor the jet that will take these men into a battle and bring them back alive Titan is a very reliable aircraft it's a it would be an excellent aircraft to go to battle in well probably a bit biased but it's probably one of the best aircraft no we're out in terms of combat survivability this airplane is I believe second to none and there have been stories of training accidents midair collisions where one of the entire vertical stabilizers been knocked off and the pilot did not know about it commonly known as the Hornet the cf-18 fighter jet is the fastest airplane in the Canadian Forces and one of the top fighters in the world starting here at the front is the radars in here this is actually a hollow cone and in behind it as a radar just a very high-powered radar a very capable radar in the world today and this is probably one of the biggest challenges that the students face is managing a radar as a flying the f-18 and learning to fly the f-18 it it has a tendency to draw one into the screen and it is very similar to a video game screen but the the problems inherent of that is that you want to stare at it all the time to the detriment of flying the airplane itself so part of the the lessons that we we give to the students here is how to manage their their time and their task management from looking at the radar and working with the radar to actually fly in the airplane it's a real real challenge for them and it's not uncommon for people to repeat trips here and repeat missions just for a radar use alone and learning to incorporate that into their cross-check this right here is actually a fuel tank and most people when you're at an airshow or or or similar type of public function they they consider this a bomb or they ask us how to bomb no it is not it's in fact fuel and all fighter jets are very fuel critical almost from the time they take off because of the high burn rates of the airplane the f-18 with both engines at afterburner at sea level can burn almost 1,000 pounds of gas per minute so an enormous amount of fuel consumption that goes on in full afterburner obviously we don't fly in that regime of flight off and we save it for you know running to a fighter running away from a fight if you need to burn right in the Hornet can be anyway from say a thousand pounds an hour burn right on the ground when you're sitting on the ground up to a thousand pounds per 360 degree turn so that can take anywhere up to probably thirty seconds to complete a full turn so the burn rates are incredibly high when you're concentrating all your attention on another aircraft outside and trying to fight and kill another aircraft then all your attention is not focused on the fuel unless you're intimately aware of how quickly you burn that fuel and constantly refer to your fuel you can on any fuel which obviously has its dire consequences we're often asked what the the cougar insignia is on the on the little the fin that's on the top of the Lexx and that's just a squadron insignia we are the Cougars water in the 410 Cougars and as a 410 students and instructors will wear the patch with the the cougar insignia it just identifies that it is in fact our airplane it's a little motivator I guess for the the pilots and the ground crew that work on it that as they're walking around the airplane they see that they know it's one of our Jets and the motto is nocte Vega different interpretations but stalked by night death by night and that harkens back to World War two when 410 squadron was a night interceptor squadron that flew mosquitos and that was a night intercept airplane and that's where the motto I I believe was generated from quite a bit of lift in this sense means you need quite a bit of power to sustain it and that's what that's why we have two engines with the with almost 32,000 horsepower to be able to sustain those high drag high lift regimes of flight that we like to fight the airplane the again the new student here with all the different challenges that they faced with radars and fuel management and engines one of the new the other challenges they have to face is is the raw power that the f-18 has with two engines producing 16,000 pounds of thrust each 32,000 pounds roughly 32,000 horsepower is quite a handful full afterburner and it's a it's interesting on about the second trip I believe we do a full Power Max afterburner takeoff and climb and our joke is they're waterskiing behind the airplane because they literally you know the airplanes just they're barely keeping up with it because the things are going so fast and usually in the back we're more concerned about them not going supersonic off the end of the runway but it's quite a bit to handle that much raw power it's a you hear the the joke sometimes or the the cliche perhaps that there's more horsepower in this airplane than there is in the starting line at the Indy 500 just in this one airplane because this is such a big airplane and has 32,000 pounds of horsepower at 32,000 horsepower 32,000 pounds of thrust a lot of air goes through this engine and these intakes they're they're killers literally there have been more so and they in the US Navy on the carriers confined spaces there have been people sucked down these intakes so again one of the challenges that's on this airplane that they haven't experienced on other appliances in very conscious of who's walking around the airplane and when a new pilot says just even learning to start this airplane there's so many switches to throw literally hundreds before the airplane can taxi off and take off they're so drawn into their checks in their cockpit that they occasionally forget to observe what's going on in their surroundings outside the airplane with the ground crew in particular so this is the business end of the jet this is where the jet exhaust comes out and I suppose equally as dangerous as the intake for in terms of sucking things things in whether it be ground crew or or fought for an object damage that might be lying around on the ground rocks and whatnot this is dangerous because it's an extremely hot gas I think it's a proximately at idle on the ground it's around 600 degrees Celsius coming out the back of this soak and you can imagine you wouldn't want to get this too close to anybody or anything and particular when the power comes up on this airplane it throws quite a plume of exhaust back and can cause quite a bit of damage you know blow ladders over and knock windows out of buildings if you're that close these engines you'd speak to the maintainer they they do an amazing job with these airplanes and this airplane was designed for a combat survivability and for combat turnaround time I believe they boast that in a wartime scenario that an engine can be changed out completely in half an hour or just over half an hour and it's all designed with quiz excuse me quick disconnects that allow the airplane we know the engine to be disconnected and dropped onto a platform another one wheeled in raised up Andrey bolted in quicker than anyone could change any small motor and a lot more probably the maintenance schedule on these is very rigorous they they literally rip them down to their skeletons and build them back up almost once a year as they reach a certain number of our flight hours and they reach a point they say okay this airplane will go into phase as they refer to it as and it takes a month or two and they they basically gut the airplane and rebuild it back up in effect they basically give us new airplanes every year and which is comforting to the pilots as you can imagine the f-18 is a multi-role fighter in that and we what we mean by that is we are both have an air-to-air and an air-to-ground capability we are also embarking on acquiring night-vision goggles so we will become truly multi-role air-to-air all-weather day/night fighter yeah the most interesting weapons on the the f-18 is the Canon and this is located in the nose of the airplane just behind the radar and as saying as a men a tremendous firepower and rate of fire it can shoot at about 6,000 rounds per minute 60 bullets per second so as you can imagine it would burn up quite a few bullets and we don't have room for six thousand bullets we actually carry just over 500 rounds in this drum and when we're teaching the students to use the cannon they we teach them to take very short bursts of if you go to the range and you hear this this can and being fired it doesn't even sound like a gun which is bang bang bang it's more sounds like a whoop it just sounds like a stream of bullets coming out so this is a fighter pilots office and as you can see it's actually quite quite snug and and we we often refer to it as strapping the airplane on because there's not a lot of room to move around in here it's for me it's a very comforting feeling to to actually strap strapped into the jet and very tightly strapped to this thing and you feel very secure in it such that when you're fighting and you're moving the airplane aggressively you're not moving around in the cockpit all you're not flopping around in most squadrons and most of the f-18s Canada has are our single-seat FA teens at 410 squadron because we do all of the instruction here we have the majority of the two-seat versions and we call them the family model and they're referred to as a CF 18 be their designation and much of the same information is duplicated in the back seat and some of the safety items like the emergency brakes and the gear handles and those critical items that may be an instructor would have to function in the back seat is back there as well as well the back seat has an override for some of the radios and it also has the command eject back there so if a student was in trouble in the front and a pot and the instructor had to initiate an ejection he or she could do that from the back seat and without the students input if you know worst case scenario that was required there's a lot to remember for these pilots and the added pressure of flying a multi-million dollar plane makes the training very stressful not too many people in the world make it to this stage of the game the 4:10 course this f18 course is probably the most difficult course that the students will have seen in their lives at least it was for me you've got to really enjoy what you're doing so that you can put in the effort takes a little bit of natural ability it's mostly mostly dedication hard work and to be able to analyze mistakes and yourself and see things see things three-dimensional I'd say right and that's what we really look for here is that a prospective fighter pilot is very critical of themselves so that they're always trying to be the best so that they will win and they have that attitude going in that winning is what they need to do and they have to be able to act in the airplane and think critically and in timely fashion to make the proper choices so one of the areas we focus on is for them to be able to make decisions on their own in the cockpit to affect their their mission and the safety of their flight as well in such a serious environment it's important to lighten up from time to time poking fun at each other helps and it isn't hard when you have names like pinky bug and scratch so inevitably everyone gets a nickname just like the movies you know everyone refers to each other by their nicknames but unlike the movies it's not for something cool and we seldom get cool nicknames usually call signs are there to make fun of you or poke fun at you in some way so you screw something up or you do something you're going to get a call sign and it's just our way of keep keeping poking each other in the chest and keeping us humble I guess all science Potsie and I was on on-the-job training which is what we call waiting we developed the skills of an officer while we wait for further training so I was waiting for 410 squadron and I was working with 416 squadron which is here in Cold Lake at the time it had been about eight months since I had been on squadron with them and they didn't have a call sign for me so I guess a bunch of the majors got together in Calgary one evening and we said we have to call Mike something other than Mike so I said well an email had gone around the squatter and someone made fun of me saying you know I'm the coolest guy in the squadron and it said something about well let's call the Fonz and they sat on the table and they said yeah he's not quite cool enough to be the Fonz so we'll call them Potsie all sign is pinky and that's because the first day I was here at squadron I kind of had a pink lock on my locker and the guys are pretty quick to pick up on that though I think it's red perhaps a little color challenge callsign is bug and it's actually an acronym and I can't tell you what it stands for I can't tell you that on camera in my case I'm referred to as scratch and one of the things we do in in fighters as we are to refuel and one of my first times I went up and indeed scratched the canopy and so they were looking for something and it's stuck when truth duty Valor returns danger in the sky awesome first low level trip in the Hornet so we're flying around at 300 feet so that's pretty cool place is fast and good fun it's a nice jet pace ride mentally it's it's very challenging it's a lot of things that the students are doing here on course they wouldn't have done before in their training up to this point in time they've learned how to fly their aircraft types quite safely and efficiently however a lot of things that they do on Hornet be seen and being exposed to for the first time fighter pilots have to keep on top of every aspect of flying this nimble jet knowing one wrong move can kill you adds to the stress doing all our speaking before we try to do these manoeuvres because you have to actually be able to talk to yourself through the maneuver as you're doing it because the date the maneuvers is quite dangerous and the guy in the back wants to make sure that you're able to keep up with the airplane and that he's got a long work no feeling in the back that everything is going well soon as you start saying things wrong it's an indication that your thought processes are starting to break down and that's good time to make and we reset that it's all difficult it's all building blocks so each flight adds on to the next flight you're always learning something constantly so it's probably just juggling all those balls keeping everything in order not to screw up then you need to be able to picture what's happening around you the systems that we have in the aircraft don't give you enough to tell you all the information and and tell you the result they just give you actual information facts what's having inside your aircraft for me although the instructors take every safety precaution when training pilots no one can deny that it's a dangerous job at the unite nature of bhatta flying is dangerous we train the students how to recognize those dangers and how to avoid them obviously if you've got two jets pointing at each other at range if they're traveling at a thousand knots say in a thousand kilometres an hour towards each other then the time it takes to actually get to the same point of sky is very minimal so we have to teach the students how to use cues to recognize that Muse the aides available to them to avoid each other now in training we avoid each other by a thousand feet in the air at all times so that's mechanism we use for that one thing no amount of training can really prepare a pilot for is that worst case scenario having to eject from the plane a worst case scenario if someone had to eject out of this airplane there's a handle that's it's right down here between between the thighs as you're sitting in the cockpit and it's with 2030 pounds of pull you actuate that and the the seat is ejected out somewhere depending on your weight somewhere in the order of 20 G acceleration up vertically to get out of the airplane this headrest the head box here it actually contains the parachute and unlike the the sport parachutes this one is very very small it's actually a survival item it's a last last ditch effort to keep you alive and the rates of descent depending again on your weight but it's like jumping off a two-story building some quite traumatic on the body and not at all comparable to sport parachuting so you will handle now you're out in the elements and you might be high altitude at the time out here we might be a 100 miles away help north and now we've got survival helicopters here that will come and get us but as I say you've got to be prepared to spend a couple nights outdoors if a pilot survives the ejection the second form of survival takes place when they hit the ground and they're always dressed for it weight dressing for worst case so if you have to overnight obviously north of cold lake and -30 whether you want to be warm so it's not a problem you're always sweating in the neck in the cockpit you're working so hard wreck things we call bunny pants they're basically like a snow suit like your mom used to dress you up in so you could party even move when you walked out the door that's that's pretty much what we're like when we get to pull up old bunny suit on this is a brand new vest for me for us it was developed in that lost count complex we're in a VN and you can see you just put a little it's like a little space blanket type of deal reflective space blanket kind of thing so I guess if you go to sit on the snow or what have you you got your fire going in it's great because if you do ever eject and you're out in the middle of nowhere I mean first of all make sure your body is in one piece and no was raining got some first aid stuff in here and addressed that right away find a fire shelter major player here just like the TV show that's right I mean he had to hit the ground and the race is on nightfall is coming you got to get you got to get moment and you got all this stuff to go through after he's done that after you got your fire going your shelter built and come down we'll parachute that's going to be a part of your shelter this vest is far cry better than the old one and of course the old one is found that you would not survive the ejection so most of the contents of these pockets would not actually be with you anymore by the time you got down depending on how fast the ejections paracord good thing about landing with your parachute is you've got miles and miles of the stuff already written so all you need to make when you go all this gear we wear like I said before the military make sure we're we're we're nice and warm you don't see too many guys walking out to the airplane now we're half the gear that we learn we we are prepared for basically injecting out of this airplane into three equal load 800 miles away place all our gear is geared toward that worst-case scenario yeah it's uncomfortable you add ball keep fly-in but you realize you know it's pretty amazing to be able to punch out of a punch of an airplane two or three hundred knots having successful objection - three down around so I'm still good to go and I've got all this gear here I'm ready to spend a couple nine-tailed or sir next on truth duty valor this state-of-the-art simulator takes us for a ride before a pilot graduates to the Hornet they have to spend some quality time on the hawk a pretty exciting jet with an awesome simulator the hawk Hawks brand-new the button still make the clicking sound when you push them and that Hawks it's a great lead-in aircraft because it has a heads-up display hands on throttle and stick switch ology so you can do most of stuff you need to do they were taking our hands off the throttle and stick to to accomplish your mission it is a relatively speaking it's a smaller plane when compared to other fighters it does go quite fast 575 knots down low we typically operate around 120 knots above 300 feet above ground or doing loyalty training when we're fighting up I will be doing about 400 aughts leaf using a hard deck of 5,000 coming from an aircraft that didn't have any simulators at all and knowing what the Horde is cuz I've been in some backseat rides the simulator here is just absolutely amazing little no graphics and getting it on a handle plane by the plane but symbology for weapons delivery for getting a sight picture for some basic fighter maneuvers when your fella fighting in the air is this absolutely amazing pretty much every trip that I did here in the air I flew it before in the simulator and it's just a just a biggest bonus there is it's amazing it's a place to make your mistakes first mistake second mistakes go in there I learn the habit patterns of all the switch ology and the checks you need to do so when you do get off the airplane you're not filming around with some minor stuff when there's some big-picture issues to take care of the cockpit here is identical the ones in the plane and the performance is identical you can depending on your fuel load or what do you have what stores you have under the wings makes the performance slightly different and the sight pictures that you can you can pick up planes three four or five miles away is just just like a just like the real thing yeah all the same dangers if you're not monitoring your fuel you can easily run out of fuel the instructor in the console can give you any number of emergencies to make you have to come back and land and usually every simulator trip you you do there is an emergency to keep you up to speed on your embers handling procedures so it's everything that can happen to a plane can happen to you where the lakes are in the local area and the cold lake air weapons range is identical to here as well the lakes the land the landmarks simulators are incredible they're a wonderful aid the Hawk simulator over at 419 squadron I'm not sure if you've been into it or seen it but it has wonderful graphics it gives you the sensation that you're moving even though it is stationary on the ground through bubbles balloons which inflate underneath your seat and the straps which tighten and loosen we don't have that ability here with our cf-18 simulator but this the simulation time reduces the cost of flying reduces the amount of time you actually have to get up in the air to practice it because by the time you do get in the air it's it's 100% the solid in your mind you know exactly what you're going to do when you have to do it lower truth Duty Valor when we return with only one month left of this eight-month fighter pilot course these five guys have become pretty tight good for a fun working environment and important for staying alive in the air when we deploy in war it's usually in the form of a to ship or a for ship - or for airplanes at a time teamwork is extremely important is for fighter pilots although you're the only guy in your jet we never go anywhere operationally alone we're always as a bare minimum of pair and we do that to take care of each other gives us two brains two sets of eyes two radars and twice the amount of weapons we would carry in your own cockpit you have to be able to use all the resources as one person but you're you're definitely a part of a team when you're up there you have to have good communications with your lead and you have to be able to be predictable when you're up there as part of the team you know the environment we train for is you're trusting your your buddies with your life and they're trusting their life and they're putting their life in your hands no matter how many times they fly the Hornet each one of these pilots seems to maintain a high excitement level for each mission what's behind the big grins coming off the runway beautiful fighter pilot rules it's it's everything I dreamed it would be and in fact it's more almost on a daily basis that I fly this aircraft I'm I'm impressed I come down happier than I went up 32,000 pounds of afterburning thrust and push you through the air it's unimaginable really I would say one of the coolest moments of my flying career at a point is my first Hornet solo you're so engrossed with what you're doing you're still concentrating on not screwing up anything and then you get to a point where you look back and you realize you've got this huge jet behind you and yeah that brought us smiles my face and I thought that was pretty cool being able to go supersonic and roll inverted just cuz I can I always wanted to be a bird ever since I was a little kid and so this is the closest thing to be in a bird I think flying around like this and I think f-18 being at the sharp pointy end of things is pretty neat and just an exciting life around there's nothing better than flying fighters so the only place you can fly an aircraft like that it like this high performance it's exciting exhilarating you can go high fast go straight up straight down upside down you can't do that in any other plane or helicopter so that's why I wanted to fly fighters fun to be a pilot ever since I was a 5 years old I saw the air shows and all the fighters going by and I've always wanted to be a fighter pilot I think that that was the the best type of pot when I was a young kid and I'm I'm happy to done what I've done so far I have a keen interest in space love to be an astronaut but it's a goal that I look look forward to but it's one of those things you can't expect if everyone has a very low chance of becoming an astronaut I think so but I'll give it a whirl join us next time for another episode of truth duty valor

Channel: Truth Duty Valour

Views: 62,878

Rating: 4.9138241 out of 5

Keywords: Fighter Pilot (Profession), Fighter Aircraft (Aircraft Type), War (Quotation Subject), CF18, F18, Hornet, fighter bomber, Royal Canadian Air Force, Canadian air force, Canadian Armed Forces, Canadian Forces, Truth Duty Valour, Truth Duty Valor, Pilot, Flying, Military, Combat, War, Fighter jet

Id: dql3qu6tEHY

Length: 44min 36sec (2676 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2015