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The Pilot Project Podcast is an aviation podcast that aims to help new pilots learn what it takes to succeed in the world of flight, to help people in the flight training system learn what they may want to fly, and to give Canadians and the world a peek into life on the flight deck in the RCAF. We want to help pilots succeed and thrive! We interview real RCAF pilots for their exciting stories as well as the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll learn their tips to develop resilience and the tools it takes to make it in flight training.
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AI GENERATED AND WILL CONTAIN SOME SMALL ERRORS. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE CONTACT thepilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com. We understand the importance of good subtitles but currently as a one-person operation we just don't have the ability to edit these in a timely fashion and keep episodes coming out regularly. Thank you for your understanding!
All right, we're ready for departure. Here at the Pilot Project Podcast,
the best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF.
Brought to you by Skies magazine and RCAF today.
I'm your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is my instructor from
Moose Jaw days, Blake McNaughton. Welcome to the show, Blake.
It's great to be here, Brian.
Yeah. All right, so before we get started, we'll go through Blake's
bio. Blake was born in St. Catherine's, Ontario
and joined the Canadian armed forces in 2002 and graduated
from Royal Military College of Canada in 2006 with a
Bachelor of arts in Political Science. He served at the Joint
Task Force North Headquarters and 440 Transport
Squadron in Yellowknife, Northwest Territory as a two
Lt operations officer before proceeding to pilot
training in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan in 2008.
After earning his wings, blake took assignment as a flying
instructor with Two Canadian Forces Flight Training School on the
CT 156 Harvard, and then the CT 155
Hawk. During this time at the NATO Flight Training Center,
he accumulated over 1300 instructional hours
and achieved an A Two instructor category.
Blake joined four three, one Air Demonstration Squadron in
2015, serving as Snowbird ten advance and
safety pilot for the 2016 17 and 18
seasons. Following a fourth year with Four Three One Squadron
serving in a Snowbird Standards Instructor pilot role, blake
brought his over 3400 hours of military ejection
seat flying experience to the Sire community.
Joining the Canadian Mission Control Center in 2019,
he held the position of Chief Operator before serving two years
as the officer in charge. Having just completed the
training to convert to helicopters, he is headed to Four Four Two Transport
and Rescue Squadron to fly the Ch 149 Cormorant this
summer. So we'll get right into it. Where
did flying begin for you?
So I've got a great memory as a young boy
going to the St. Catherine's District Airport and
watching what I imagined was either a car and air show,
and my dad purchased a ride for my
older brother and I in a, uh, biplane.
And I can still picture and
feel the leather seat and strapping in. My brother
and I both sat in the front seat of the biplane together, sharing
one seatbelt. I could barely look over the
canopy rail and we went flying. And I
remember seeing the fields, the wineries,
the Lake Ontario, all from the vantage point of
this eight year old boy's, eyes upside down in this
biplane. And I think that was one of the fundamental
sparks that got this whole thing started.
That's really cool. Do you remember what kind of plane it was?
I have no idea. But it was enough to get
a young boy excited about aviation.
Yeah, that's so cool. Did you go to air shows and stuff
as a kid at all?
Not until I kind of got into it. So once I joined
Air Cadets and started learning about aviation, then
the bug spread and I started making efforts to go to
things.
Yeah, I was going to ask as well if you'd been in Air Cadets. So many
of us are.
Eh, I don't know what the Air Force
does with regard to stats, keeping on numbers, but I remember in
2016, of the eleven snowbird pilots on
Squadron, nine of them were ex Air
Cadets. And so it kind of speaks to
the training. Very few organizations are
teaching citizenship, public speaking,
teaching leadership to teenagers, teaching discipline,
focus, delayed gratification. You had to do
tests a um year in advance for a course that
you might not even be selected for the next summer. So glider,
power, all those things. And you have to start four
years in advance to go to basic Introduction to Aviation,
then Glider, then power. Like if you wanted a chance, you had to work towards
it. So I give a lot of credit to both the
officers and volunteers who helped mentor me when I was
an Air Cadet and the system itself.
Yeah, for sure. I've mentioned before the
people who got us started in my squadron, and Jim
O'Connor was the, uh, CI who was teaching the
Flying Scholarship. And I don't even know where I'd be
without that course. It was so formative.
And because of Air Cadets, I was a teenager who had a pilot's
license. That's crazy.
And some of the things I learned when I was 14, I
still use in my job today.
Yeah, I recently sat on the
board to do the interviews as one of the
interviewers for Flying Scholarship and Exchange here in
Manitoba. And it's really cool
to be on the other side of that and try to help put them at
ease. And you get the ones who are super nervous and
you get the ones who are just like, blow you away because they're just
so confident and they seem so adult and they're only
16 or 17. It's really neat.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah. So you've done a lot of training in the
Forces overall, how you found your flight training
experience. And I guess what's neat about that is you're just
finishing your helicopter training, but you also did how
long ago was your initial flight training in the forces?
So my PFT, my primary flight training was way
back in 2003. Then 2007
is when I started on the Harvard. Well,
uh, then I was on the Hawk by eight. I
did tutor conversion in 15
and then back here in
2022 to
start helicopter conversion on both the Jet Ranger and then the
Outlaw. So another two aircraft types.
It's changed, but it stayed the same.
Yeah, that was what I was going to ask.
Yeah. So I guess I would say I'm kind of an OD Duck Man.
I love this stuff. I really enjoy the
challenge. I love that every day. This um, is a
unique environment where you kind of have to show up or shut up. You have
to prove yourself every day. You're only as good as your last flight.
And uh, at the same time though, I love learning new
things. Uh, you never want to stagnate in life
right? And so, uh, that along with the
camaraderie that is pilot training, you're all in
it together, trying to get to the end state. Every day is a little
bit of a grind. Every day has got high points, low points.
It's been really good.
How do you feel about moving on from that environment after
basically a whole career in a training? Well, except for the snowbirds,
I guess. But most of your career has been in a training environment right?
Either as a trainee or as a
trainer.
Yeah, I would say I'm probably more lucky than good.
But the instructing side of things has fit
my personality and so even when I am outside
of an official instructional capacity, I find
myself gravitating to training or standards roles
in all the environments. And so I guess
I was naturally inclined to be a teacher of sorts. So
uh, those skills translate everywhere
I go.
Yeah, that's true. I mean, even you're going to the Cormorant, right?
In comox I am, yeah. So you're going to
get there, you're going to get trained and then it's not long
before you're in a training role again as a uh,
AC, teaching and mentoring FOS and
all that stuff, right?
I sure hope so. And even then when I walk in so I'll
have junior FOS who are on their first Otu and I'll be on my
fourth. And so there's a natural inclination there that
I'm expected to teach and mentor and make sure I guide
them.
That'll be a cool experience too, seeing people who are just
kind of showing up for the first time and figuring out what that all looks
like. Very much so. Be a new world for you too though, with uh,
it being an ah, operationally focused unit.
Very much so. It's going to be a steep learning curve, but I'm ready for it.
Yeah. Cool. It'll be neat to chat
in a year or two and see what SAR stories you end up
with. Do you remember any big hiccups
or failures or setbacks in your training?
So my student training generally went
okay. I had a few struggles or hurdles later
on FIS flight, uh, instructor training
or an Otu or two. But uh,
after any bad flight, you just have to come down, you have to
regroup. You have to realize that another day is coming.
You have to realize that tomorrow is another day
and you can bring your A game tomorrow and I found that
refocusing hit the books a little, and then always
the second or the reflight was always far, far
superior. Yeah, but that's where you have
to learn to compartmentalize. You have to learn to
regroup, and you have to be like water off a duck's back,
man. A bad grade or a bad flight or a bad
moment needs to brush right off, and you have to
move on.
Do you have any advice for how to help yourself
do that, or is it just something that everyone has to figure out?
You know what I remember in Moosha, them talking about square
breathing, and I know that worked for a lot of my peers. Whenever
I find myself in an instance like
that, uh, I don't particularly go directly to square
breathing. That's where you breathe, like, up the one side of
a square, and then you exhale on the top of the square, and then you
breathe in on the other side of the square, and you exhale and you
take a couple of seconds to kind of regroup. The
way I look at things is airplanes and aviation
is magic. If you think about the fact you have to go strap onto a
10,000 pound airplane with multi jets that are
exploding inside with gas and fuel and ignition,
and you're going to launch it to 40,000ft, and then you're going to go
300 knots, and you're going to do this and that and the other thing.
You're never going to be able to take that all in.
So the way I approach complex maneuvers and even
every flight is I got to move that switch, then
I've got to move that attitude indicator one degree, and then that
throttle has to move half a millimeter. So that dial
on that display moves two knots.
Small bytes, small increments, small
successes. If I can do that, then together,
the combination of all those acts creates
the magic that is the mission or the success that is the
mission.
So you were a Pipeline instructor, right?
I was, yeah.
And was that something that you wanted at the time?
It wasn't, actually, no. I was on the Hawk. I
was on the jet stream to go
fly Hornets in
2008 when a good budy
of mine, Rockville U, he was up on a training
sorty, and the engine threw a blade, and so
him and his instructor came back for, uh, essentially a
flame out engine cautionary, um, approach.
It didn't go well, and they had to eject. And after that
crash, everyone was okay, by the way. But after that crash,
they had to do a very deep investigation into why
the engine had thrown some blades and took many months. And so
the fleet was partially grounded in Canada, and
so a lot of our capacity to train new pilots
was gone. And so a bunch of the people on my course, we were
all sent back to the Harvard, and we were one of those initial
crews to get our wings actually on the Harvard.
I think I was like, the fifth guy ever to get wings on the
Harvard and that rolled us right into flight
instructor school. And, uh, there was a plan later to
go jets. As we'll talk about it didn't end up happening. My
career was a little bit of a curving road,
uh, and that's how I ended up as an instructor. But
it turned out to be an amazing experience. Uh, I didn't realize
it at the time, but I was a 25 year old lieutenant. I didn't
have enough time and to even be prone to captain. And
I had this amazing freedom as an
AC on this airplane. And we had so much
freedom to fly. Spent a lot of flying around the
southern prairies, but also around all of North America. So
we touched all the corners of most of North
America. I got over 520 hours my
first year on squadron.
Uh, that's huge. On a little twin seat
turboprop. That's a lot of time spent at Harvard.
Yeah, well, at 1.2 average flight
time, that's a lot of strap in.
Yeah.
But, uh yeah, man, so that freedom. As
a junior pilot, I had a lot of
opportunities for exposure, uh, a lot of opportunities to make
mistakes, a lot of opportunities to learn from those mistakes. And then
being at a place like Musha with a lot of other
senior instructors and people who've come back from operational
tours, they're on their third or fourth tour and they're now senior
senior instructors. Having them as mentors
was something I never anticipated, but really paid dividends.
Yeah, I guess in a place like that, you're really
in a place that has kind of
concentrated mentorship at, uh, like, a really
high rate of very.
Experienced people and people who have literally been trained by the
military to be mentors, because we're taught to
be better instructors, and we're tested, and you have to
be proficient. And those skills very quickly
translate across. So it's funny, I introduced
you to Jules Daintry, who was on one of your podcasts about the
Hawk. He was one of my first instructors, much as I
was one of yours.
Yeah, that would be really like, he's such a smart dude. I really
enjoyed chatting with him. So at the time, were you
disappointed because things weren't going the way you
kind of had planned?
Yeah, that was definitely one of those screeching break
moments in the Air Force when I got called into a briefing room
and my course director told me, hey, you're not going jets anymore, at least
not for the time being. You're getting sent back to the Harvard to get your
wings and then we'll figure it out from there. And I asked all this typical
questions that I think a lot of young people ask, hey, can I get like, a guarantee
in writing? Uh, what's going to get me back there, I'll do anything you
want. Send me to alert for six months. What do I need to do? But the
desperation or the moment of panic
is having a very myoptic view of things. As you
spend more time in the Air Force, you realize that
there's no straight path. Very few of us go a direct line
from air cadet to astronaut. Mhm the rest of us have
this Miranddering career. And like I tell
a lot of guys when they don't know where they're going to be posted coming out of
the wings or get selected out of Musha.
You will probably love your first airplane.
No matter what you get, you will find a place
in the Air Force that you geographically love,
that you never even thought of or even heard of before you joined the Air
Force. It's an amazing adventure.
I want to talk now about a little bit about your time on the snowbirds.
How did you end up on the snowbirds? And aside from
how you got there, did that goal exist for a long time or did that
develop during your time at Moosejaw?
So I've always been a fan of the snowbirds, uh, as a
kid, although I never knew if I would actually be on the
squadron. And so I was still young Moosha
instructor on both the Harvard and the Hawk with enthusiasm for
jets, and that was the way I was going to go. I lived in a
PMQ, um, a private military quarters,
so a little subdivision on the base, and my back
kitchen window looked right across the street on Seven
Hanger. So every morning I'd literally be eating my
Cheerios and I'd be looking at the squadron crest. So
there was that. I had a lot of mentors and
peers who, on the Harvard and the Hawk were trying out. And
that makes it more real, is when you know people who are on the team
and who are going through the process of applying and
then crazily enough. My neighbor Mark
Leverardier, call sign Happy, was always telling
me to try out. So he was a solo on the snowbirds, and we'd be out
shoveling the driveway, and of course he'd stop and you start chatting like you
do at the side of the street, and he'd be like, So, Blake, when are you trying out? And I'd be
like, Happy, I don't even have my wings yet. And then a couple years later, hey,
Blake, when are you trying out? Happy I'm, like,
200 hours into my first flying, uh, tour, and he's
like, oh, don't worry, you'll get there. And he always had the same
line, and I've stolen it is that, if I can do
it, you can do it. Happy is a very talented pilot,
and I'm not necessarily anywhere close to his level of proficiency,
but he kept saying, if I can do it, you can do it. And it
resonated. And mhm, I think you'd remember
like your first formation flight on the Harvard. I know they're
now doing it on the Grove here too, in Portage. But
your first flight in formation is very eye
opening. It looks easy and then
you try it and ah, then as you get better and better
and better, it looks less hard. And then you see some of the
stuff that the snowbirds are doing and you're like you have a new
appreciation for how hard that is if you try that stuff. Well,
not that you should be trying that stuff, but if you try more advanced formation.
And I absolutely fell in love with
formation flying, uh, at the school both teaching it because
there's nothing like giving someone their first formation
flight. It's so much fun, it's so
crazy. And then doing it like both the Harvard and the
Hawk and the Hawk was a real sweet platform to fly
formation. And we would have a lot of fun both
doing simulated operational formation
flying, but also, um, school type formation.
Like the tighter yeah, totally closed echelon stuff.
Yeah, I loved flying formation. That was
really fun. It's just such a cool experience.
And to do a rejoin on another airplane and kind
of zoom up on them and then at the last second, check your
speed as you approach close to them is just
amazing. You can't believe you're doing this.
Yeah, it's hands and feet flying and there's
very small margins of error, or at least it seems that way when you're a
student and, uh, you got to put up your shut up,
right?
Yeah. And it kind of I don't know, for me, when you do the
rejoin, it sort of feels like you're zooming up
on this little World War II fighter or
something. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
They're such a cool looking airplane. And, uh
I loved it. It was really cool.
So all of that, all of those experiences,
uh, gave me the impetus to go throw my name into the
hat, which is hard. It's hard to put yourself
out there to be judged by your peers and told
whether, uh, you are good enough or not.
Yeah, I believe it. I can only imagine that trying out for
that, like you said, it's kind of vulnerable, right?
Very much so.
Was it difficult to make the team?
Four through one squadron has impossible
standards. They are looking for superior pilots, but
they're also looking for this well rounded person who's also an
ambassador. And so to meet both those things
can be quite difficult. So my first tryout in
2014 was unsuccessful.
Okay.
But there's three kind of ways that you can be told that
at the end you can be said, hey, thanks for coming out. You can be told, hey, you
made the team, congratulations, or hey, this year wasn't for you. We
either didn't have enough spots or some other reason come back
and try out again. And so I was lucky enough to be invited
back and I did another tryout the year later,
which again is a lot of work, but at the end of it, they offered me a
job and I took it and had a magnificent
experience. But, uh, the tryout
itself, the flying portion, is again
looking for that superior pilot because
that person on their worst day has to perform
better than most people on their best. So
traveling the airshow circuit all summer, doing low over
aerobatics, over a variety of terrains and cities
and environments and weather, that person can wake
up, and I'm not saying like, be sick, but wake up and just
feel off.
You have an off day.
Yeah, you're 80%, but at your 80%
you've got to go up and you're well trained and you're well practiced, but you've got
to perform that show that most
people may never learn to fly to that level of
pilotage. So that's what the squadron is looking
for in their demo pilots. But at the same time,
you got to be a team player, m, you got to be able to put in front
of a microphone or on television. So the
two to three week tryout process includes all
those things. It includes eight flights. So you do like a two
ship, then a couple of three ships. A couple of four ships is all in the CT
1114 tutor, the iconic red and white snowbird
jet that we've all seen. And then at the very end, your
8th flight. So I think I said two ship, three ship, then we
do some four ships. And the whole time you're moving to all the positions. The
Snowbirds have very dedicated comms procedures. You
have to learn and be very tight on there's
like one day of ground school for type conversion. Most people have never flown the
tutor before.
I was going to ask that, are you expected to be like a full on
tutor pilot or are they at first mostly testing your
flying and you're going to get a chance to get better with the
aircraft over time.
You are going to have a conversion
when you show up on squadron, that is going to be official.
Like if you get selected.
If you get selected, yeah. But for the tryouts, they
throw it all at you. The tutor is not a
complicated airplane, so if you have jet experience as.
Well, that's what it's made for, right, is to teach people to fly.
So it's not crazy cosmic, but it's a lot to
absorb and yeah, they're going to debrief you on every switch you do out of
order, but you spark it up and you're always going to be with you never fly
it solo during the tryouts. So you're always with
an instructor, usually a seasoned demo pilot, and
they're evaluating you and they switch around so they get different eyes on you and
everyone has a big discussion about you every day.
Yeah.
Uh, so you do those seven flights, those seven formation
flights, and then you do one low level solo, which isn't actually
that low level. They only go up to 1000ft. And then you do low
level aerobatics. They essentially give you part of the book and say, hey, study
this and show us what you can do if you were
selected as a solo demo pilot.
Really?
But for most of us, the minimum altitude is
3000 EGL for aerobatics. So dropping that by
two thirds and doing your first, there's no practice,
you just go out there and do it. It's intimidating,
no doubt. So that's the flying stuff and at the end of it, they
evaluate you. So even if you're not on the flying schedule, you attend every
brief and debrief, which can be an hour to start,
an hour plus to end. The end of the day, they have a hot wash where
they say, hey, here's the general things that you guys did well or didn't do
well, work harder and be better tomorrow. It's a very
professional process. And then to the
ambassadorship stuff, there's interviews with the Co
team, lead SWO to check on your
officership, and then you do things with the public
affairs officer to see how you are with media. And then we
even have a planned dinner
where mes kit type stuff, where there's
intermingling of squadron members and candidates. And I
don't want to reveal too much behind the curtain because it's part of the process, but
they get to know what you're like as a person and whether or not
you're going to be a good fit. It's a small team, they spend a lot
of time away from home together and so you want to
make sure personalities jive.
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, how much are you on the road with the
snowbirds?
I spent about two thirds of every
year away.
Yeah. So it needs to be a group of people that have a good
dynamic and get along well and
can solve things well if they're not getting along
right. Yeah.
They are definitely your brothers and sisters.
So we've just done an interview with Scott Harding
on phase one and two training on the Grobe and I thought we could
talk a little bit about your time on phase three helicopter as well.
You're just in the process of finishing this. In fact, your
last flight is tomorrow and by the time this airs you'll be
complete. How's that gone so far?
It's been amazing. Now, again, obviously, I'm a little bit of an OD
duck being a, uh, retread coming back. There
is no conversion from fixed wing to helicopter because there's too
many foundational things that you need to learn. So they load us on the
standard phase three. So my peers on course
are second lieutenants who are just finished phase
two. And actually, uh, I'll say it right off the
bat. Pilot training is a team sport. And so
I got to throw out to, uh, Lee Shaver, tristan Thompson,
and Jordan Johnson, who are getting their wings in like, two weeks from
now to both congratulate them, but also thank them because
I probably wouldn't have gotten through the same thing without the
teamwork that's required to achieve this stuff.
But the course itself, hey, they're running a good
program here. The instructors are dedicated, the
facility and aircraft are great. Um, but the
process itself was very humbling. Yeah,
you can imagine having all the foundational
information, you know, about aviation challenged once again
from scratch. So it's very vulnerable
to have to put all that out
there. And, uh, especially if you were like a previous top
dog in an industry.
I was just going to say, was it hard for you to come in and kind of be
like, okay, not that you have a big ego, but you know who
you are, what you're capable of. You've been on the snowbirds, you've been an A
category instructor. You're used to knowing what you're
doing and being at the top of kind of where you can
go. What was it like then to be like, all right, now here's
a helicopter.
You know what? Even though you might have been a
top dog, you're now at Puppy Obedient School, so
you got to play the game. And I say game,
but everything here is built for our success.
The goal is to get you to the standard. It's in the best interest of the
Canadian forces and the taxpayer that we don't waste funds on people who
aren't going to be successful. So the process was really, really
good, but I would say the biggest area that
I struggled with was control reversal. So
in a fixed wing aircraft, your left hand is on the throttle
most of the time, and if you go forward, you add power. If you
come back, you reduce power. On a helicopter, there's a
collective in your left hand. If you go forward or
down, it reduces power, and if you
pull up, it increases power. So it's the opposite.
Oh, weird.
So there's a lot of muscle memory when you get into a high
stress situation, like hovering for the first time and your lizard
brain wants to do something, your hands are moving without you
consciously thinking about it. So I had to unlearn that stuff.
And the other big comparison, I would say, from going
from fixed wing to helicopters is a comparison with,
like, a nice sports car. So a nice sports car, you're driving down the
highway, you're in this cabin, it's comfortable, and
you kind of eventually lose a sensation of speed.
Mhm whereas a helicopter is more like a
motorcycle. The second you get on it, there's no warm
up time. You have to be on your game. That thing is going to fall
over and it's trying to kill you. From the get go,
and you have the sensation of speed, you have the sensation
of being close to the ground. Your situational
awareness is far, far greater. And the senses, the
sensory overload is very, very different. So that's how
I would compare the two.
I'm assuming you're having a lot of fun flying helicopters.
I'm loving it. I never used to drive down the highway and look at a field
and be like, that would be a cool place to land. But now that pops
into my head.
Yeah. What do you
think was harder, learning how to hover or
learning to fly formation with the snowbirds?
Like, to their level?
It's actually very similar. It's
very similar. All my friends used to say, uh, don't worry, you'll do fine in
helicopters. It's like flying formation with the ground. And it is. It's
the classic example of less is more. The big joke being that
in a helicopter, they're paying you a lot of money to not do anything
with the collective and cyclic, because the less
you move it, the less errors you input and the
more aerodynamically stable the whole thing is. Yeah, they were
harder in different ways.
So your whole career has been fixed. Wing your
initial goal was fighters. You're flying on the
snowbirds. How does all that then
lead you to choose helicopters? You know what?
I had an amazing twelve years flying
ejection seats. I did things that I
just smile thinking about. And there got
to a point, though, where I showed up in
Musha and I told my girlfriend at the time, hey, we're going to be here eight months,
and then we're going to be in Cold Lake and we're going to be flying fighters. It's going to be
amazing. Well, twelve years go by, and when we
finally left Musha, I had two kids in the backseat. And so
your priorities change a little bit, so your
decisions making in life takes on new
routes. When it comes to actual airframe, why didn't I
just go multi engine, fixed? Wing I guess it comes back to
me being a little crazy. Helicopters
look like they have an amazing
capability. Operation demands
the SAR world looks like something I want to do.
So despite the fact that I've got many years
flying for the Air Force, none of it was ever in
a fully operational role. And the job that was most
attractive was getting out there on the front line in search and rescue
and helping Canadians.
Mhm I think SAR is so amazing.
There's not too many people that I admire as much as I admire people
who work in SAR, especially Sartechs, but SAR
pilots who are making tough calls and flying in tough
conditions, and it's just like, such good work.
That was my next goal, was to go SAR before
I had my health issues. That led to a, uh, break in flying,
but I got all the time in the world for SAR. So I think it's going to be
really great. And I think if I had to pick a
helicopter, the Cormorant, I think, would be the one that I'd
want.
To do, you know? Man, there are not a lot of bad
rides in Air Force, so no matter.
Where you end up. You're going to have a challenging career trying to
employ an aircraft in the way that the caf needs you to do it.
And so, uh, the Cormorant just is the one that I was most
attracted to.
Yeah, I had a listener call this week. Every now and
then, someone will ask me some questions by email, and
if it's enough questions, I'll say, hey, here's my number. Give me a call
and we'll chat. And I was telling that to someone,
a lot of us get that you join and you're like, well, this
is the plane that I have to fly. That's my plan. It's got to
work out that way. And I'm sure you've seen 100 students
freaking out about selection and, well, my plane's multi,
so I better get multi. And then once you're on multi, that's the one I
need. Like, my girlfriend thinks I'm going to live in
Trenton, and I was just telling them how I
don't think I've ever met anyone, or at least they're an extreme
exception who hates what they ended up
on. They're all awesome.
Oh, I 100% agree. And you
can't get upset about things you can't control, like people's personal
lives and the impacts they have on their families, I 100%
appreciate. And those things have to come into players when you make your
requests. Um, but ultimately, it is the Air Force's
decision if you want to be part of this voluntary force and
all you control is how well you move that switch, and
then you change that dial and then you set that attitude and then you
fly that speed. You can only do your best
flying and your best officership every day. And
the rest of it is luck.
Yeah. You can, I'm sure, speak to the fact
that behind the scenes, everybody's working as hard as
they can to have it work out for as many people as possible.
100%, especially our course directors, are working
every day trying to do the best for their students, but they're working within the
confines of the institution.
That's right. And that was another thing I said, was
ultimately there's some skill involved there's. What can you
earn with your performance? But there's also some luck involved because
they may say, hey, there's three helo spots and
two multi spots and no jet spots. And hopefully
jet wasn't your dream because that's not
happening this round.
If your dream was to be an astronaut and go to the moon,
there was, like, a 50 year period where we weren't doing it.
So now that opportunity is opening up again
for Canadians. And so I'd say the same is true for air
Force platforms, capabilities and operations. You're going to
have an amazing career. It's just a matter of what timing you
get and what the world presents you.
Can you take me through a day in the life of a helicopter student?
Yeah, man, totally. So, first off, we live here in
Porridge the Prairie. So I'm away
from my family, who's back in Trenton, where I was, so I got to throw
props to my wife Jacqueline, who is a rock, and
taking care of, uh, the house while I'm away for this
long course. It's about seven months I've been here in Porridge the
Prairie. Typical, uh, day. It's a lot
different than the staff job I used to have, for sure. Waking, uh,
up at 630, hitting the mess for food,
hit the weather brief at 745. Usually we
walk the airplane before our brief just so that our instructors, uh,
don't have to do it. And then you brief with your instructor. It's
about an hour maybe. You go to Ops, you get your
airplane. You go flying for 1.5. You come
back, you debrief for an hour. And then you have to
absorb all that. Grab a sandwich in there at some point,
maybe have some water cooler. Talk with your coursemates about who
did what and why and what did you learn just so that you can't
make all the mistakes yourself. You have to learn from other people.
And then you're right onto prepping for the next day.
And if you got a little bit of time, maybe you hit the gym, but
mostly you hit the books. Another example might be
ground school. So much like university or high school, you're going to
spend most of the day in classes. And then the other
thing. And the biggest change that I noticed from when I went
through back 20 ish years ago
was, uh, the use of simulators. So with
a, uh, crew environment and the
technological advances with simulators, we do a lot
of our 412 training, about half of
it in a full motion simulator. And so
those are much longer days. Prepping for that flight
is more intensive because they can throw a lot more at you
pretend than they can in real life. The brief can be
an hour to.
An hour and a half.
The sims are 3 hours. So
1.5 evaluating one student
and then 1.5 on the other, where you just swap seats between
pilot flying and pilot monitoring or pilot and copilot. And
then you come out and you debrief that whole thing. And that can be like a
full seven or eight hour day, and you're just exhausted.
And I know you've been through it yourself.
Yeah, SIM days are exhausting because you're
dealing with tons of stuff. Like you said, you have no idea what they could
throw literally anything at you. The briefs are long, the
debriefs are long. And it's all the work
with none of the excitement of actually flying.
Like the SIM is great. It's where you're going to do a ton of your
learning and it's an amazing tool, but you know what I
mean?
Oh, man.
It's all the work without the payoff.
You got to ask my wife about my staff tour, but
flying recharges my batteries and yeah,
sims don't do no, no.
Sims are a drain for sure.
Where do you think students tend to struggle learning to fly
helicopters and what can they do to overcome that?
Well, we were joking about how much you have to prepare for, and I think
it's that it's the rate of learning. The Air Force has figured
out that you should be able to absorb this amount of information at this
rate, and it's just in time training. You
just figure something out and they teach you something new and you're
expected to be good enough at the other thing. So drinking
from a fire hose is a common expression that we do. I've
never been the most natural or talented of pilots, so
how I deal with all of that is both through
enthusiasm I love being here, but also through preparation.
So I think some of my coursemates, uh, looked at me
sideways for the amount of time and effort I was putting in. But I did
a lot of late nights and practice simulators,
which students are allowed to do on the side
extra um, in order to make sure that I
felt prepared for those flights and those sims, because feeling
prepared is half the battle. If you go in there confident, then
you can roll with the punches a lot better. Yeah.
There's a huge mental game to flying, and when you're down
on yourself, your confidence is not there. Those flights are awful.
They're scary. Like, you feel shaky even sometimes.
Yeah, man.
But when you're confident and you're feeling like, okay, I've got
this, there's no better feeling. Everything's going great. You're ahead of the
game because that.
Confidence is going strong and those curveballs are fun.
Yeah. And you got to do whatever it is that gets you to
that point of having that confidence. Totally.
You and I spoke previously about the importance of being
vulnerable to learn something new and that it can lead to some
really exciting adventures. Can you elaborate on
that?
Yeah, man. I'm a big fan of balance in life. It's
great to become an expert in something and it's important, and we need those in the Air
Force. But at the same time, you want to make sure you're growing and
not stagnating. If you stagnate, you're not getting
new ideas or fresh ideas. And those are the people that
I tend to notice, complain more. And if you're not
enjoying your time in the Air Force, I would say that you're part
of the reason you're not enjoying it. So,
as I've alluded to, the path in the Air Force isn't always going to be
determined by you and it might not be straight to where you want to
go, but there are a lot of things you can control.
You can control what opportunities you volunteer for.
So the Air Force is always coming out with, hey, we need a
volunteer to go to Japan to do this, or we need someone
to go overseas, or hey, there's a master's
program. We'll pay you your salary plus all the
fees for you to do a master's in a topic that you
are interested in. Or, uh, the snowbirds, hey,
you have to apply for that. It doesn't matter whether you're Army, Air
Force or Navy. You can apply to be Joint Task Force too. There's
all these opportunities out there that you have to ask
for. A lot of people, when they get higher in rank, start noticing that there's a
lot of foreign jobs, whether it's in the US.
Or Europe or overseas, where you can do what we call outCan
out of Canada postings. Those are amazing
adventures where you go overseas and you do a job for three or four
years and then you come back to Canada. So I
would encourage people to be vulnerable. If you try
for all these amazing opportunities, which there are a lot
of, if you look, you could have one heck of an
adventure. Mhm.
Does that kind of blend in with what you were talking about? With being
comfortable being uncomfortable?
Comfortable being uncomfortable is a way to summarize one of my
approaches to life. Like, uh, you talked about the mental game
of going in the airplane and being prepared at the same
time, knowing that you're going to get a curveball, having the knowledge
that no flight is ever going to be perfect. You're going to step on the
flight, there's going to be errors, you might do everything you plan
correct, and then all the things you didn't plan will go sideways.
But, uh, adapting to that. So having the mental model
of I'm going to be okay and I'm
okay being uncomfortable, I'll make it work, is one of the
things that, uh, I advocate.
So it's kind of like one of your tools for success.
It is, yeah. It is one of my tools for success. Be comfortable
being uncomfortable.
Cool. What would you say is your
most memorable flight?
Yeah, most memorable flight. Man, that's super hard to
choose. If you had asked me 20 years
ago to imagine what my most memorable flight would
be, I would tell you about a flight like going up on the Hawk, which was a
great jet with like three or four. Of your buddies and doing a
low level tactical navigation ripping over the prairies at
250ft 420 knots, cranking
and banking in double attack, setting up for simulated
bomb runs. And then, like, breaking
out over the base, coming back, landing
debriefing. And then you're still drenched in sweat as you walk to the
mess. That's the Top Gun version, which is a great
day. It's a phenomenal day. It's a day where you
go to bed so good, tired that you pass right out
and your heart is full. But there's a different
type of memorable flight and those are the ones that fill your heart in other ways.
So, like, a unique opportunity came up where
we got to fly formation with our families.
So one of the small perks about being
with the snowbirds was that oftentimes transport
airplanes like C Polaris or a
herc would be going to the same air show that we were at. And since we
spent so much time away from home, we would
negotiate or ask if our families could be picked up
on the way. And when they were, we would try to set up a
formation flight. So that means that you'd have eleven
tutors flying off the wings on both sides of
this, call it a C 130 J or something. And
inside are 30 crazy kids under twelve bombing
around and maybe ten adults. And then you've got
another Air Force crew that maybe you've trained or are
friends with. And they're doing this and we're flying alongside.
And it was super cool. The first time I did it. My kids were like
four and six. Ah, and my wife
had bought little red flight suits for them and they were allowed
up into the cockpit and they were put on headsets. And kids don't know how
to use a push to talk button, push talk, release,
listen. And they press and they would
just babble away and never release. You can't really talk,
you'd be echelon. So kind of like if your
audience can imagine Canadian goose in the V formation off
with the herc at the front. And you as an
individual, when your kids were up in the cockpit, would
fly, head forward a little bit of the V so that the kids knew which
one was you. And you'd turn your smoke on, uh, you'd waggle your wings and so
then they'd wave at you. So looking across into the eyes of
my four year old, my six year old, my wife in her cockpit
was pretty darn special.
That's pretty all time.
Oh, man. The, uh, year previous we'd done something
similar and my buddy was up and
kids will say the darnedest things on the radio and he was
like, daddy, daddy, do you have your helmet? Yes,
Oliver, I have my helmet. Daddy, daddy, are you
wearing your helmet? Yes, Oliver, I'm wearing my helmet. Okay, good,
daddy. Because I want you to be safe over there. I'll talk to you later.
Bye. And then just pieced out to the back of the
airplane.
So cute. Uh, that's so cool.
What was your hardest day flying?
Hard days flying are usually unexpected.
At least they have been for me, because I haven't been overseas, I haven't been in
combat zones where lives are on the line
yet. And so hard days of flying were often
tests or evaluations or times where
I struggled. So I remember very early in my
career, I had a flight. Just I knew
from the way the ground checks were going
and the first part of the trip that just
things were off and I had maybe potentially.
Already failed the flight. Yeah.
And we talked about mental game and being resilient, mentally
resilient, and having to know that, okay,
that might have happened, but I've got to press forward no matter what.
And I did. I failed that flight. And
the instructor was super professional about it. We figured
out what the root cause was. We went up the next day, we
fixed it, and I put that flight behind me. But
those skills don't go away. And being able to
compartmentalize a term I used earlier, being able to put things
in boxes and then put the lid on and forget about it
for a moment in time and pressing forward is super
important. So one of my hardest flights
was actually only a couple of years ago. So now I'm
fairly experienced. And I was flying a tutor from
Musha across the country, east to Trenton,
where they do second line maintenance. And
everything had gone wrong that day. The weather was bad. I'd gotten
behind the timeline. I was solo, and I
was coming into Trenton after clearing customs in the
US. The weather that was there, like a winter
storm was still kind of there and kind of
stalled, and it hadn't moved through enough.
And I was launching from a place where I was just on the
IFR weather limits for fuel. And
I was coming in, and my alternate on this time was
Pearson, which is downtown Toronto. So not a place you want
to kind of fly to unexpected all that
civilian traffic. So there's a little bit of get
homeitis or get the mission done. Itis to
fly into Trenton. And so I'm, um, low on
fuel. It's nighttime now because the day's gone long.
The weather is stalled and it's
turbulent, uh, over the airport. And I came in
high and fast, and I was not set up
nicely for the approach. So I'm shooting an Ils for the
listeners.
Ils is instrument landing system and is a
system that pilots can use to land in bad weather.
And you know how sensitive an Ils is when you're trying to track
it. I'm fast. I'm trying to slow down, to put the gear down. And I
realized nine or 10 miles back
on final that I was just all over the place
and I had to talk myself into going
back to basics. So as an instructor, we always talk about performance versus
control instruments. You want to put the control
instrument in so that it will have the effect you want,
instead of just trying to fly the airplane by looking at
the effect. So you want to put the input in, not fly
the effect and so I had to talk myself back to
basics, doing the things that I know will work
and letting them patiently get to where they need to.
Like, basically remembering attitude plus power equals performance.
Totally man type of stuff. Uh, like the stuff I had learned on Moose
job.
Yeah, the stuff you were teaching me.
So I had to revert to the basics, which isn't
cosmic to anyone who's been there. But you can find yourself complacent
when you get used to doing things. And
then you cause your own error. So there was no one sitting next to me that would have caught
my error if I had continued down that bad
track. I broke out. Not on center
line. Uh, it was not pretty. I wasn't on perfect
Airspeed or L Two, but it was a capable approach. I
landed taxied off in the dark. I took a couple of deep
breaths on that taxiway that night and kind of reevaluated
that maybe, uh, I
was not as proficient as I thought I was.
Okay.
And needed to, uh, dig in a little deeper. But it was
a hard trip only because it was completely
unexpected. It should have been an easy flight.
I got this.
And then I got behind my own power curve and maybe
complacent, and, uh, made a couple of bad
decisions that cascaded. And I had to
then solve it using the basics. So that was
hard.
Yeah. What would you say was your best day
flying? That's an interesting one.
I think you're going to be surprised because there's a lot
of amazing things that I could say here, uh, on
experiences I've done. But there's a certain
magic to the simplicity of flying,
um, on, like, Sunsets or dawns.
Yeah.
And so I remember very clearly in
2016, we were taking a two ship of
tutors into, uh, Brunswick, Georgia, on the east coast of the
US. But Hurricane Matthew was coming
up the coast. And so we arrived as the advanced
party. And the weather is horrible and it's just torrential.
And we're trying to set everything up. But, uh, my team
lead called us and said, hey, you know what? We've come up short,
200 miles in land. We want you to spark up
and get out of there before the hurricane hits. Which made all the sense in the
world because the air show was going to get canceled anyway. So we
launched near Sunset, and we flew up through
this torrential weather and we popped out on
top. And it was just heavenly.
The sun was just setting over on the
overcast layer. There were these huge thunderstorm
systems to the south, the giant animals up to
60, 70,000ft. And
it was serene, man. The top of the clouds looked like
candy floss. And, uh, I just remember looking over at my
wingman and just being like, man, this is the flying I saw
in movies. This is amazing. And there's been a lot of
moments like that. Some of my most favorite things in the world
was doing dawn or sunset flights, often
with training and having students see that stuff for the first
time. So there's that moment of magic. It's pretty
memorable.
We've talked a little bit about how sometimes the needs
of the service might trump your own needs, and you may end
up in a situation that is maybe not the one
you've wanted to find yourself in. What's the toughest situation
the RCAF has ever put you in and how did you make the best of
it?
So, first off, I want to say that tough is relative. I've
got a lot of friends who've gone overseas and done some real tough things
in their careers, and so mine paled to
that. But in the concept of doing the business,
my toughest challenge was the fact that, uh,
when I came out of a flying tour with four through one squadron, I was
looking for another flying tour. I wanted to go directly onto Quorums
and scratch that SAR itch. Instead,
the Air Force posted me to Trenton, which turned out to be
wonderful, to a unit I'd never heard of, the Canadian Mission
Control Center. So the Canadian Mission Control Center's job is
to receive satellite information on
detected beacons, canadian beacons all around the world,
or any beacon within Canada's area of
operation. So 18 million km² is
our responsibility. And so then we take that information and
we disperse it to the appropriate joint Rescue
Coordination Center, who will then task airplanes or
police or whomever to go help find the people in
distress. So I got there and it was a highly
technical job, all this satellite stuff with international
communities and partnerships, and I was way
out of my depth. As a fixed wing jet
pilot who had taught a few people and done a few
loops. I had a lot of learning to do. I'd
never been in charge of reservists. I'd never been in
charge of civilians. There is a lot that goes into the
back picture of running a budget of a unit and all these
other such things. So I
was assigned to be the officer in charge.
I jumped in 2ft to try to help some of the issues
and resolve things. It was a steeper learning curve than I'd ever had in
pilot training for sure. And
my takeaway after a year, after maybe spinning my wheels a
little bit and trying to do everything, was to
reduce my focus. So I remember
attending a change of command of a
Marine, US marine Co of a Herc
squadron back in 2010 at Cherry Point.
And he mentioned when he was handing over command
that he realized the only thing he could control was his
people's time. So I stole that. The only thing you
can control is your people's time. Whether you give them leave,
whether you employ them with value when they're
at work, and whether what they're working on is of
value to them and rewarding or to the organization.
If you waste their time, prevent them from
spending time with their families, you're just hurting them. So that's
where your true power comes in. As a
CEO or an OIC.
A CEO is a commanding officer, and an OIC is
an officer in charge.
And so I tried to
refocus on the things I could affect on my
people, helping them with their postings, helping them with
the courses they need to get promoted, things that will better
their careers. The Air Force and the
institution and the demands on the operational
capabilities will always be there. We can every
day try our best to keep that machine running, mhm,
but we can't do it at the detriment of our people as
Fodder. So that was my takeaway, and it was
hard. I learned that not because I remembered
what that other CEO had said, because I had to relearn
it by making mistakes.
Yeah. Did you find that despite the fact that you wanted
to go straight into a flying posting, like, in the
end, do you think you were better for the experience that you
had? Oh, very much so.
The SAR community sent me there, and it was a
partial education in how SAR works, both at
the operational and strategic level. I learned a great
deal from my people on how that plays
out in a real operational mission. And, uh,
I also got to know a lot of the upper
echelon of our SAR Tag, our career
advisory group, um, which helped guide me
for a better footing in the SAR community.
What is the most rewarding experience you've ever had in the
RCAF?
I've taken a lot of ribbing over the years for putting on a red flight
suit, but it's got to be hands down, the most
rewarding. You meet thousands of people
who are super enthusiastic. You have, uh, a
positive work environment every day. Like, you fly
around North America and every air show is like a
wedding. They've been planning it for a year or two, and they
want to make it go perfect, and they want to have a party afterward,
which can be exhausting, because on the snowbirds, every night is
a Friday night, but every morning is a Monday morning where you have to be
ready to work. So, uh, it's
exhausting. But the people you meet traveling around
Canada, all these small towns and all these big
towns has been super, super rewarding. And I'll tell you a couple
of anecdotes there was a Grad here only a couple of months
ago in Portage, where there was about
ten newly winged pilots.
And while they were reading their BIOS, it's common for people to say
what inspired them to become a pilot. And
seven of the eleven BIOS mentioned the
snowbirds by name.
Really?
So it wasn't me directly, but it
was that unit. Like, when you're there,
you're Batman. You don't own the suit, you don't get to keep it
forever. You get to wear it for a few years. Hopefully. You
don't mess it up and you hand it off to someone else. And
so it's the legacy of the snowbirds that I'm very
proud of. I was in the mess hall here in
Portage a couple months ago, and this young man was
sitting next to me. I'm not going to say his name for his benefit, he'd kill
me. But when he realized, because we just met
who I was, he pulled out his wallet and he pulled
out my business card. And we had sat at a
community charity dinner at Brantford, Ontario air show
in 2016, and he had asked me questions about
joining the Air Force.
No way.
I had given him my card and said, if you ever run into trouble,
call me. And he presented it to me at
that meeting in the mess. And he's getting his wings in a couple
of weeks, and he's going to be a multi engine pilot. So
man, that stuff's pretty rewarding.
Yeah.
You look at you. My
students have gone off and succeeded in
ways that I never could and given far more back to the
Air Force. So that's what I find rewarding.
That's really cool. What's the
craziest situation you've ever found yourself in flying with the
RCAF?
You might not guess that photosHIP
chase flying is that crazy,
but it's far more dynamic.
Can you explain what that is?
Yeah. So, like, if we put up either the
snowbirds or another airplane,
and you put a second airplane where the photographer is sitting, you
have to imagine anytime you see a picture of an airplane, there's a photographer
behind that camera. And if it's from the air, they were also in an
airplane.
Yeah.
The other thing you have to remember is that when you take a
picture on your iPhone, remember how everything always looks really
small. So you often have to get a lot
closer to these airplanes in flight than
you would ever imagine. So doing
that, coordinating that is both really challenging.
It's time consuming, but it's very, very rewarding
when you get the shot. I've got a couple amazing
examples of photo shoots that just
were phenomenal. The first one was my first
year. We heard that there was a possibility to fly
over downtown, uh, Washington DC. So there's a
especially after September 11, a very restricted airspace.
P 56 Alpha is what it's called.
And not only is it in the restricted airspace
around all of Washington DC. But it's a smaller restricted airspace that
covers the Capitol Building, the Wall, Lincoln Memorial,
White House, that type of stuff. Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery. It's
all that area. And so we did
months of high level coordination
with the Homeland Security Czar and his team and all those
people to get permission to fly our nine ship
1000ft, right down the mall. And I was the photo
chase. So I was the 10th airplane and so I'm, uh,
up above them banked as close to
the limit of legal aerobatics as possible because
I have to move my wing out of the way so the photographer
sitting next to me can shoot without the wing being in the way. So
I'm cross controlling flying. We're
all smoking and I'm not. But near
aerobatic over the house crazy
and it's super cool. We did something very similar at
Cape Canaveral. We reached out to them and said we needed
some training and we need to find some sterile restricted airspace to
do it. They were super accommodating at NASA there
and, uh, we actually put a show on for them
and the Canadians that are down there working. But we also
did a photo shoot where we're flying over the exact launch
pads that are now launching Artemis into space, but also
launched Apollo to the moon. And it was
phenomenal, but the whole time it's very
dynamic. Whether it's a big airplane or a formation of nine airplanes,
you're the 10th and you're trying to get as close as possible with the right
angle, with the sun, with the thing in the background
and you're trying to set it all up. And the tutor is very power
limited, so, uh, you have to use
angles to make it all work. You mentioned the beginning of the show,
Skies magazine. One of the founders is Mike Reno and
I did the photosHIP for the
CF 18 demo team in 2017 with Mike, so he can
tell you about that offline.
Okay?
But we went up into some real interesting
weather on a dark afternoon and went
up there with Glib who was the, uh, demo pilot at the time. And
trying to get all these angles on this tutor, it was a heck
of a lot of work. We were both drenched with sweat by the time
we landed. So photo chase
looks simple, can go sideways
real quick mhm, and an hour of planning on
the ground will save you hundreds of pounds of gas in the Airborne
trying to sort it out and also allow you to come back with something
that's super spectacular.
It sounds like there's a lot more to it than you would expect on the
surface.
Well, think about it. If you're flying, so this is one of ours. If you
have to fly by the Hollywood sign in California, what
angle do you have to be at what time of day and where do you have to put your
airplanes? The photographer has the right angle
and sometimes I wasn't even flying with professional photographers, so sometimes
we only have a snowbird tech in the seat next to
me with a good camera. And we had some minor training
on it, but I had to use my eye. And I'm a
bit of a visual person, but I would have to put him
in a way that the angles would line up. Like, what do
the snowbirds look like over the Golden Gate Bridge when you need the
skyline and elcatras in the background at ah. What altitude
do I need to be high? Do I need to be low? Do I want Top Side. Do I want bottom
side? Do I want to see the smoke? Do I not what do I want want?
And getting front side photos are the most
challenging. In 2018,
we did a photo chase over Hamilton, Ontario with the
Lancaster oh, um, cool. The CF 18 demo
and flying in formation. I was actually
with one of my best buddies, Robbie Hindel.
Oh, I was on squatting with him when he was an Aurora guy.
Oh, yeah.
Because he was an Axo first, right?
Totally. Yeah. So Rob was snowbird eleven when I
was ten in 2018. It made it easier to pass the camera
and then pass control so we could fly both sides of the formation
and up there with, uh, that priceless
Lancaster and a Hornet, and you're only operating feet
from each other at high speeds. And we're
like, flying around all these cumulus cloud over Southern
Ontario and trying to get these angles. It was
very memorable. But, uh, yeah, man,
photoShips are definitely the craziest stuff I've done.
It sounds like a lot of fun. It's so much
fun. We're getting into the
last few questions here. What is the
most important thing you do to keep yourself ready for your job?
I've mentioned learning new things, and I think that's
important. But you also have to relearn
the stuff you've forgotten. A colleague of mine recently said that
there's like, an acceptable level of knowledge loss in pilot training.
You cannot absorb every number in the Aois,
you cannot absorb every procedure. You can't read
every publication every week and have everything
at your fingertips. So you've got to go back and
refresh and relearn all that stuff,
because not only will you start to misinterpret it or
apply it incorrectly, but they go off and they do things
like changing the orders. Man, I remember I
got here as a seasoned pilot and the
instructors are saying one thing and I'm like, no, I know that that's not
correct. And then we pull out the pubs and they go and change
stuff on me. Their knowledge isn't applicable
anymore. So staying in the books
and being able to humbly go back, knock
off the rust and relearn things and knowing that we're all
human and you can do that and it's still cool
is something that I have to do.
Yeah. So for you, the big thing is staying in the books.
Yeah.
It's important to and you know what? It's not just books.
It's also procedures, it's also proficiency. As I
alluded to one of my hard that hard flight going in the winter and
trend, I think I was not as proficient
hands and feet wise. I had not done enough
current training to keep the skills where my
mentally thought I was.
Yeah, that can be a pretty easy thing to do, especially
depending on what job you're doing. Right. Like,
if your job is instructing and 90% of the flying you're
doing, you're very knowledgeable, you're very
proficient in your instructing. But if 90% of the flying
you're doing is someone else doing it and you're
critiquing and you're just doing a few
demos every now and then, and even then, once you get further into the
course, you're not demoing anything anymore. Right. So I would
imagine that that would be a really easy thing to have creep up on
you.
Yeah, I think it happens to everyone, given enough time.
Yeah, for sure. What do you think makes a good
pilot?
I've known a lot of good pilots, but I've only known a couple
great pilots. And what makes
a great pilot is their ability to roll with
the punches in a flight or a mission. They
were never rigid in their ability to
flex during a during a flight. And I
kind of compare it to a duck. Like, you look at a duck and they're
just gently floating upon the surface of a pond.
But we all know that underwater those feet are
flapping at 1000 beats a minute to make it all
happen. And so the best pilots might be
working really hard, but they don't show it in their
calm demeanor. They also listened. The great
pilots will listen to a crew. They'll listen to their
peers, their wingmen. They'll take all the info in,
but then they'll be decisive. And that also makes leadership on
the ground is very similar. But you need leadership
in the air. Whether it's making a decision about flight safety or
a mission parameter, that decisiveness is key.
And in making that decision, they also take full
responsibility for any errors. And so they get on the ground
and they wholeheartedly accept
that weather happens, that mission
tasks change, that traffic conflicts are
out of their control. The decisions on how
they deal with those things, though, are on them and they own
it.
Mhm.
So those are the attributes that I aspire to.
I'm still far off, man, but, uh, that's what I'm trying for
each day.
Okay, that's cool. I like that you took this up a
level from what makes a good pilot to like,
here's the greats. You've known such a large pool of
pilots by the nature of the jobs you've done, so it's neat
to get that input.
I'm very humbled to have worked with some
amazing people, like really, really
high functioning people. I actually feel spoiled
sometimes because we surround ourselves with these air crew
and very intelligent technicians
and it's really a blessing.
Yeah, absolutely. So if you could
give some advice to a new pilot, let's say there's
somebody who's thinking that aviation is for them and they want to
try out this pilot thing. They're about to join the Air
Force or just start flying, what advice would you
give them?
You know what? I'd almost say the same thing to a new pilot that I'd
say to an old pilot, which is like, you got to enjoy
every single day. You're going to do things
in your new training or in the Air
Force, in your old training or new opportunities that will simply
blow your mind. And most of it's going to be
unexpected. It's going to be exciting, but
you got to savor the quiet moments. We kind of spoke
about that earlier between the exciting
times. Some of the most memorable moments are
not the most stressful moments. They're the
hilarious moments with your crewmates. And that's part of it,
too. You got to treasure your coursemates, your
squadron mates and the crews, because they're most
likely going to share most of your big milestones in your life. They're
your pseudosecond family. They're the ones who are going to lend
you a, uh, drill if you need it. They're going to
have a beer with you after a really bad flight, which happens to
everyone. They're the most likely person to break you out of prison or
stand next to you at a funeral. So having those
Air Force brothers and sisters is something
you kind of have to cherish as you step to that
airplane every single day. So, yeah,
man, this Air Force gig is like nothing else. And
the road, as I said, may not be straight for everyone,
but, man, it's pretty phenomenal. And I'm confident that
whether you're new or old, there's a way to
have an absolutely epic experience.
That's great advice. I like that. I'm
inspired.
Well, then I've done my job.
Okay, man, that's pretty much it. Thanks so much for being here
today. I really appreciate you taking the time out, especially when you've got
your last flight coming up tomorrow. But, uh, I
know it's going to go great, and I'm just really thankful that you took the
time to be here. Thank you.
Absolutely. My pleasure.
Okay, that's going to wrap up our episode with Blake talking about
his time on the snowbirds as well as his experiences on phase
three helicopter. For our next episode, we'll be talking with
air traffic controllers who were on duty for 911 and
its aftermath. Do you have any questions or comments about
something you've heard in the show or would you or someone you know make a great
guest for the podcast? You can email us at
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Engineer. Shut down all four. Shutting down all
four engines.