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Welcome to The Pilot Project Podcast, your premier source for stories and insights from pilots in the RCAF and mission aviation - brought to you by Skies Magazine! Whether you're an aspiring aviator, navigating flight training, or simply fascinated by the world of military and mission aviation, this podcast is your guide. We sit down with pilots and aviation professionals to hear their thrilling experiences, lessons learned, and expert advice on resilience, training, and the skills needed to succeed in this exciting field. Strap in - we’re ready for departure!
New here? Start with "Logbook: First 100 Part 1: The Climb".
Fuel and ignition switches. On. RPM switches. Set. PD switches.
Bryan:Normal. Doors and hatches. Closed. Lie down. Drill blade.
Bryan:On. Research check-in. Complete to your left. Engineer. Start number two.
Bryan:Starting two. Wing three one zero ten, Pilot Project Podcast, clear takeoff runway three one left.
Bryan:Alright. 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 Sky's 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.
Blake:It's great to be here, Brian.
Bryan:Yeah. Alright. So before we get started, we'll go through Blake's bio. Blake was born in Saint Catharines, 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 four forty Transport Squadron in Yellowknife Northwest Territory as a 2LT operations officer before proceeding to pilot training in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Bryan:In 2008, after earning his wings, Blake took assignment as a flying instructor with two Canadian Forces Flight Training School on the CT-one 156 Harvard and then the CT-one 155 Hawk. During this time at the NATO Flight Training Center, he accumulated over 1,300 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 Snowbird's standards instructor pilot role, Blake brought his over 3,400 of military ejection seat flying experience to the SAAR 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.
Bryan:Having just completed the training to convert to helicopters, he has headed to four four two Transport and Rescue Squadron to fly the c h one forty nine Cormorant this summer. So we'll get right into it. Where did flying begin for you?
Blake:So I've got a great memory as a young boy going to the Saint Catharines District Airport and watching what I imagine was either a car and air show. And my dad purchased a ride for my older brother and I in a 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, 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.
Bryan:That's really cool. Do you remember what kind of plane it was?
Blake:I have no idea. But it was enough to get a young boy excited about aviation, that's
Bryan:for That's so cool. Did you go to like air shows and stuff as a kid at all or
Blake:Not until I kinda got into it. So once I joined air cadets and started learning about aviation, then then the bug spread and I I started making efforts to go to things.
Bryan:Yeah. I was gonna ask as well if you'd been in air cadets, like so many of us are, right?
Blake:So I I don't know what the the air force does with regards to stats keeping on numbers. But I remember in 2016 of the 11 Snowbird pilots on squadron, nine of them were ex air cadets. And so it kind of speaks to the the training. Like, very few organizations are teaching citizenship, public speaking, teaching leadership to teenagers, teaching discipline focus, delayed gratification. You had to do tests, a year in advance for a course that you might not even be selected for the next summer.
Blake: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.
Bryan:Yeah, for sure. I've mentioned before the people who got us started in my squadron and Jim O'Connor was the CI who was teaching the flying scholarship and I don't even know where I'd be without that course. Like, it was so formative And because of Air Cadets, I was a teenager who had a pilot's license, like, that's crazy. So
Blake:And some of the things I learned when I was 14, still use at my job today.
Bryan:Yeah. Yeah. Like, I recently sat on the board to do the interviews as one of the interviewers for, like, 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.
Bryan:Like, it's really neat.
Blake:Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. So you've done a
Bryan: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?
Blake:So my PFT, my primary flight training was way back in 2003. And 2007 is when I started on the Harvard. Oh, then I was on the Hawk by '8. 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. Yeah.
Blake:So another two aircraft types. It's changed but it stayed the same.
Bryan:Yeah. That was what I was gonna ask.
Blake:Yeah. So I guess I would say I'm kind of an odd duck man. Like, I love this stuff. I really enjoy the challenge. I I love that every day.
Blake:This is a unique environment where you kind of have to show up or shut up. Mhmm. You have to prove yourself every day. You're only as good as your last flight. And, at the same time though, I love learning new things.
Blake:You never want to stagnate in life, right? And so, that along with the camaraderie that is pilot training Mhmm. You're all in it together trying to get to the end state. Every day is a little bit of a grind. Every day's got high points, low points.
Blake:It's been really, really good.
Bryan:How do you feel about moving on from that environment after basically a whole career in a training and Well, except for the snowbirds, guess. But most of your career has been in a training environment, right? Either on the As a trainee or as a trainer.
Blake: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
Bryan:Mhmm.
Blake:In in all the environments. And so I guess I was naturally inclined to be a teacher of sorts. So, those skills translate everywhere I go.
Bryan:Yeah, that's true. I mean, even You're going to the Cormorant, right, in Comox?
Blake:I am, yeah.
Bryan:Yeah. So you're gonna get there, you're gonna get trained and then, you know, it's not long before you're in a training role again as a AC teaching and mentoring FOs and all that stuff, right?
Blake: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 like fourth. Yeah. And so there's a natural inclination there that I'm expected to teach and mentor and make sure I guide them.
Bryan:That would 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.
Blake:Very much so. It'd be
Bryan:a new world for you too though with, it being a operationally focused unit.
Blake:Very much so. It's it's gonna be a steep learning curve but I'm ready for it.
Bryan:Yeah. Cool. It'll be neat to chat in a year or two and and see what star stories you end up with.
Blake:Do you remember any big hiccups or failures or setbacks in your training? So my my student training generally went okay. I had a few struggles or hurdles later on FIS, flight instructor training or an OTU or two. But, you know, 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, you know, tomorrow's another day and you can bring your a game tomorrow.
Blake: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 know, 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.
Bryan:Do you have any advice for how to help yourself like do that or is it just something that everyone has to figure out?
Blake:You know what, I remember in Moose Jaw them talking about square breathing and I know that worked for a lot of my peers. Whenever I find myself in a an instance like that, I don't particularly go directly to square breathing. That's where you breathe like up the so one side of a square and you exhale on the on the top of the square and then you breathe in on the one the other side of the square and you exhale. And
Bryan:you Okay.
Blake:You take a couple 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, you're going to launch it to 40,000 feet 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, like, 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.
Blake:Small bites, 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.
Bryan:So, you were a pipeline instructor, right?
Blake:I was, yeah.
Bryan:And was that something that you wanted at the time?
Blake:It wasn't actually. No. I was on the Hawk. I was on the the jet stream to go fly Hornets in 2008 when a good buddy of mine, Rockville U, he was up on a training sortie and the engine threw a blade. And so him and his instructor came back for essentially a flame out engine crashing approach.
Blake: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.
Blake: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.
Bryan:Okay.
Blake:And that rolled us right into flight instructor school. And, 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 curving road. But, yeah, and that's how I ended up as an instructor.
Blake:But it turned out to be an amazing experience. Like, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was a 25 year old lieutenant. I didn't have enough time and even be promoted 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.
Blake:So we touched all the corners of most of North America. I got over five hundred and twenty hours my first year on Squadron and That's huge on a little twin seat turboprop. That's a lot
Bryan:of time spent at Harvard.
Blake:Yeah. Well, at 1.2 average flight time, that's a lot of strap ins. Yeah. But, yeah, man. So that freedom as a junior pilot, I had a lot of opportunities for exposure, a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, a lot of opportunities to learn from those mistakes.
Blake:And then being at a place like Moosha 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.
Bryan:Yeah. I guess in a place like that, you're really in a place that has kind of concentrated mentorship at like a really, really high rate of very experienced people.
Blake:And people who have literally been trained by the military to be Mhmm. Because we're taught to be better instructors and we 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 Daintree who was on one of your podcasts about the Hawk.
Blake:He was one of my first instructors as much as I was one of yours.
Bryan:Yeah. That would be really cool. Like, he's such a smart dude. I I really enjoyed chatting with him. So at the time, were you disappointed because things weren't going the way you kinda had planned?
Blake: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 for the not for the time being. You're getting sent back to the harbor to get your wings and then we'll figure it out from there. And I asked all these typical questions that I think a lot of young people ask, hey, can I get like a guarantee in writing? What's gonna get me back there?
Blake: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 myopic view of things. As you spend more time in the air force, you realize that there's there's no straight path.
Blake:Very few of us go a direct line from air cadet to astronaut. Mhmm. The rest of us have this meandering career. And like I tell a lot of guys when they don't know where they're gonna be posted coming out of the wings or 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.
Blake:It's it's an amazing adventure.
Bryan:I wanna 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 Moose Jaw?
Blake:So I've always been a fan of the Snowbirds, as a kid. Although I never knew if I would actually be on the squadron. And so I was I was still young Moose Jaw instructor on both the Harvard and the Hawk with enthusiasm for jets and that was the way I was gonna go. I lived in a PMQ, a private military quarters, like a little subdivision on the base and my back kitchen window looked right across the street on 7 Hangar. And so every morning I'd literally be eating my Cheerios and I'd be looking at the Squadron Crest.
Blake: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 LaVidier, 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 so Blake, when are you trying out?
Blake:And I'd be like, Happy, I don't even have my wings yet.
Bryan:And then a couple years later,
Blake:hey Blake, when are you trying out? Happy, like, I'm like two hundred hours into my first flying tour and he's like, oh, don't worry, you'll get there. Like, and he always had the same line and I've stolen it is that if I can do it, you can do it. Yeah. Like, 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.
Blake:And it resonated. Mhmm. 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. Yeah.
Blake:It looks easy and then you try
Bryan:it. Yeah.
Blake:And 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 you try more advanced formation. And I absolutely fell in love with formation flying, at the school, both teaching it because there's nothing like giving someone their first formation flight. It's it's so much fun. It's so crazy.
Blake:And then doing it, like both the Harvard and the Hawk. And the Hawk was a real sweet platform to fly formation and we we would have a lot of fun both doing simulated operational formation flying but also school type formation. Like the tighter Yeah. Totally. Close echelon stuff.
Blake:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Bryan:Yeah. I loved flying formation. That was really, really fun. It's just such a cool experience and, like, to do a rejoin on another airplane and kind of zoom up on them and then at the last second, like check your speed as you approach close to them, it's just amazing. You can't believe you're doing this.
Blake:Yeah. It's it's like it's hands and feet flying and there's very small margins of air or at least it seems that way when you're a student And, you gotta you gotta put up or shut up, right?
Bryan:Yeah. And it kind of I don't know, for me, when you do the rejoin, like, it sort of feels like you're zooming up on this little World War two fighter or something. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Blake:I tell exactly what you mean.
Bryan:They're such a cool looking airplane and, I just I loved it. It was really cool.
Blake:So, all of that, all of those experiences, gave me the impetus to go throw my name into the hat, which, you know, is hard. It's hard to put yourself out there to be judged by your peers and and told whether you you are good enough or not.
Bryan: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.
Bryan:Was it difficult to make the team?
Blake:The four thirty 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.
Bryan:Okay.
Blake:But there's three kind of ways that 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.
Blake:But at the end of it, they offered me a job and I took it and had a magnificent experience. But, 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 air show 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.
Bryan:You have an off day.
Blake: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've also got to be a team player. You got to be able to put in front of a microphone or on television.
Blake: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 three ships, couple four ships. This is all in the CT114 Tutor, the iconic red and white Snowbird jet that we've all seen. And then at the very end, your eighth flight So I think I said two ship, three ship, then we do some four ships.
Blake: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. Yep. There's like one day of ground school for type conversion. Most people have never flown the tutor before. I was
Bryan:just going
Bryan: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
Blake:to get a chance to like 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.
Bryan:Like if you get selected. If you get selected.
Blake: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
Bryan:That's what it's made for, right? It's to teach people to fly.
Blake:So it's it's not crazy cosmic, but it's a lot to absorb. And, yeah, they're gonna debrief you on every switch you do out of order. But you spark it up and you're always gonna be with you never fly it solo during the during the tryouts. So you're always with an instructor, usually a seasoned demo pilot, they're evaluating you and they switch around so they get different eyes on you and everyone has a a big discussion about you every day. Yeah.
Blake:But, so you do those those seven flights, those seven formation flights, and then you do one little over solo, which isn't actually that low level. They only go up to a thousand feet and then you do low level aerobatics. They essentially give you a 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 3,000 AGL for aerobatics.
Blake:So dropping that by, you know, two thirds and doing your first, you know, there's no practice. You just go out there and do it. It's it's intimidating. No doubt. So that's the flying stuff.
Blake:And at the end of it, they evaluate you. So even if you're not on the flying schedule, attend every brief and debrief, which can be, you know, an hour to start, an hour plus to end. At the end of the day, they have a hot wash where they say, hey, you know, 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 CEO, team lead, SWO to check on your, like, officership.
Blake: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, you know, mess 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. Yeah. But they get to know what you're like as a person and whether or not you're gonna be a good fit.
Blake:It's a small team.
Bryan:They spend
Blake:a lot of time away from home together and so you want to make sure personalities jive.
Bryan:Yeah. I can imagine. I mean, how much are you on the road with the Snowbirds?
Blake:I spent about two thirds of every year away. Yeah. So it needs
Bryan:to be a group of people that have a good dynamic and, you know, get along well and can solve things well if they're not getting along. Right?
Blake:Yeah. They are definitely your brothers and sisters.
Bryan:So we've just done an interview with Scott Harding on phase one and two training on the Globe 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?
Blake:It's been amazing. Now, obviously, I'm a little bit of an odd duck being a 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.
Blake:And actually, I'll say it right off the bat, pilot training is a team sport. And so I got to throw out to, 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 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, but the process itself was very humbling.
Blake: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, you know, put all that out there. And, especially if you were like a previous top dog in an industry.
Bryan: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 like being at the top of kind of where you can go. What was it like then to be like, alright, now here's a helicopter?
Blake:You know what? Even though you're You might have been a top dog, you're now at puppy obedience school. So you just You gotta play the game. And I say game, but everything here is built for our success. Mhmm.
Blake:The goal is to get you to the standard. It's in the best interest of the forces and the taxpayer that we don't waste funds on people who aren't gonna 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.
Blake: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.
Blake: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.
Blake: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. 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 gonna fall over and it's trying to kill you from the get go.
Blake: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.
Bryan:I'm assuming you're having a lot of fun flying helicopters?
Blake:I'm loving it. I never used to drive down the highway and like look at a field and be like, that would be a cool place to land. But now that like pops into my head. Yeah.
Bryan:What do you think was harder learning how to hover or learning to fly formation with the Snowbirds like to their level?
Blake:It's actually very similar. It's very, very similar. All my friends used say, don't worry, you'll do fine in helicopters. It's like flying formation with the ground. And it is.
Blake: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 the collective and and cyclist. 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.
Bryan: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?
Blake: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 suddenly I showed up in Moosha and I told my girlfriend at the time, hey, we're gonna be here eight months, then we're gonna be in Cold Lake and we're gonna be flying fighters. It's gonna be amazing.
Blake:Well, twelve years go by and when we finally left Moosha, I had two kids in the back seat. So your priorities change a little bit. So your decision making in life takes on new new roots. 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.
Blake: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.
Bryan:Mhmm. 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 SAR techs, 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 break in flying.
Bryan:But I got all the time in the world for SAR, so I think it's gonna be really great. And I think if I had to pick a helicopter, the Cormorant, I think, would
Blake:be the one that I'd wanna do. You know, man, there are not a lot of bad rides in the McVane Air Force. So, no matter where you end up, you're gonna have a challenging career trying to employ an aircraft in the way that the CAF needs you to do it. And so, the Kormorant just is the one that I was most attracted to.
Bryan:Yeah. I had a listener call this week. Every now and then I'll 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, you know, a lot of us get that you join and you're like, well, this is the plane that I have to fly.
Bryan:That's my plan. It's gotta work out that way. And I'm sure you've seen a 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 gonna live in Trenton and 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.
Bryan:They're all awesome.
Blake:Oh, I 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 a 100% appreciate. And those things have to come into players when you make your requests. But ultimately it is the air forces decision if you want to be part of this voluntary force.
Blake: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. Like you can only do your best flying and your best offensorship every day and the rest of it is luck.
Bryan: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.
Blake:A 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.
Bryan:That's right. And that was another thing I said was, you know, 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 in this round.
Blake:If your dream was to be an astronaut and go to the moon, there was like a fifty 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 gonna have an amazing career, it's just a matter of what timing you get and and what the world presents you.
Bryan:Can you take me through a day in
Blake:the life of a helicopter student? Yeah, man, totally. So first off, we live here in Portage The Prairie. So, you know, I'm away from my family who's back in Trenton where I was. So I got to throw props to my my wife, Jacqueline, who is a rock and taking care of, the house while I'm away for this long course.
Blake:It's about seven months I've been here in Portage De Prairie. Typical day, you know, it's a lot different than the staff job I used to have for sure. Waking up at 06:30, hitting the mess for food, hit the weather brief at 07:45. Usually we walk the airplane before our brief just so that our instructors don't have to do it. And then you brief with your instructor, it's about an hour maybe.
Blake:You go to ops, you get your airplane, you go flying for one point five, 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 course mates 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 on to prepping for the next day. And if you got a little bit of time, maybe hit the gym, but mostly you hit the books.
Blake:Another example might be ground school. So much like university or high school, you're gonna 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 twenty ish years ago was the use of simulators. So with a crew environment and the technological advances with simulators, we do a lot of our four twelve training, about half of it in a full motion simulator. And so those are much longer days.
Blake: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 three 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 co pilot. And then you come out and you debrief that whole thing.
Blake:And and that can be like a full seven or eight hour day. Yeah. And you're just exhausted. And I know you've been through it yourself.
Bryan: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.
Bryan:It's where you're gonna do a ton of your learning and it's an amazing tool, but you know what I mean? Like Oh, man. I'm It's all the work without the payoff.
Blake:You got to ask my wife about my staff tour, but like flying recharges my batteries. Yeah. And yeah, sims don't do it.
Bryan: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?
Blake: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.
Blake: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, course mates 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 in extra, in order to make sure that I was I felt prepared for those flights and those sims. Because feeling prepared is half the battle. You go in there confident, then you can roll with the punches a lot better.
Bryan: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.
Bryan:Like you feel shaky even sometimes. Yeah, man. But when you're confident and you're feeling like, okay, I've got this, like there's no better feeling. Everything's going great. You're ahead of the game because that confidence is going strong.
Blake:And those curveballs are fun.
Bryan:Yeah. And you gotta do whatever it is that gets you to that point of having that confidence.
Blake:Totally.
Bryan: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?
Blake: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 air force. But at the same time, you wanna make sure you're growing and not stagnating. If you stagnate, you're not getting new ideas or fresh ideas.
Blake: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 volunteer for.
Blake: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 the Soberts, 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.
Blake:A lot of people when they get higher in ranks 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 out can 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.
Bryan:Does that kind of blend in with what you were talking about with being comfortable being uncomfortable?
Blake:Comfortable being uncomfortable is is a way to summarize one of my approaches to life. Like, 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 in 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 adapting to that.
Blake:So having a 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 I, I advocate. So it's kind of
Bryan:like one of your tools for success?
Blake:It is. Yeah. Is one of my tools for success. Be comfortable being uncomfortable.
Bryan:Cool. What would you say is your most memorable flight?
Blake:Yeah. Most memorable flight, man, that's super hard to choose. Like if you had asked me twenty years ago to like imagine what my most memorable flight would be, I would tell you about a flight like going up on the Hawk, was a great jet with like three or four of your buddies and doing a low level tactical navigation, ripping over the prairies at two fifty feet, four twenty 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.
Bryan:Which is a great day.
Blake:Oh, it's it's a phenomenal day. It's a day where you go to bed so good tired Yeah. That you pass right out and you just your 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.
Blake:So one of the small perks about being with the Snowbirds was that oftentimes transport airplanes like C-17s, the 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 11 tutors flying off the wings on both sides of this, call it a C-130J or something. And inside are 30 crazy kids 12 bombing around and maybe 10 adults.
Blake: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. It was super cool. The first time I did it, kids were like four and six. 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 and talk, release, listen. And they press and they would just babble away and never release, you can't really talk, you'd be echelon.
Blake:So kind of like if your audience can imagine Canadian goose in the V formation off with the Herk 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 that the kids knew which one was you and you'd turn your smoke on, 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 and her cockpit was pretty darn special.
Bryan:That's pretty all time.
Blake:Oh man, the 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.
Blake:Okay. Good, daddy. Because I want you to be safe over there. I'll talk to you later. Bye.
Blake:And then just peaced out to the back of the airplane.
Bryan:So cute. Oh, that's so cool.
Blake: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, you know, lives are on the line yet. And so hard days of flying were often tests or evaluations or times where I struggled.
Blake: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.
Blake: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 Moose Jaw across the country east to Trenton where they do second line maintenance.
Blake: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 cleaning customs in The US, the weather that was there, like a winter storm was still kind of there and it 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 wanna kinda fly to unexpected with all that civilian traffic.
Blake:So there's a little bit of get home it is or get the mission done it is to fly into Trenton. And so I'm low on fuel, it's nighttime now because the day has gone long, the weather is stalled and it's turbulent, 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.
Bryan:For the listeners, ILS is instrument landing system and is a system that pilots can use to land in bad weather.
Blake: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, you know, 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 wanna 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. Yep.
Blake: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
Bryan:to be. Like basically remembering attitude plus power equals performance.
Blake:Totally, man. Like the stuff I had learned on Moose Jaw.
Bryan:Yeah. The stuff you were teaching me.
Blake: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 caused 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 centerline. It was not pretty.
Blake:I wasn't on perfect airspeed or l two, but it was a it was a capable approach. I landed, taxied off in the dark. I took a couple deep breaths on that taxiway that night and kind of reevaluated that I needed to, maybe I was not as proficient as I thought I was.
Bryan:Okay.
Blake:And needed to 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, made a couple bad decisions that cascaded.
Blake:And I had to then solve it using the basics. So that was that was hard.
Bryan:Yeah. What would you say was your best day flying?
Blake:That's an interesting one. I think you're gonna be surprised because there's a lot of amazing things that I could say here on experience I've done. But there's a certain magic to the simplicity of flying on like sunsets or dawns. Yeah. And so I remember very clearly in 2016, we were taking a two ship of tutors into, Brunswick, Georgia on the East Coast Of The US, but hurricane Matthew was coming up the coast.
Blake: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 my team lead called us and said, hey, you know what, we've come up short 200 miles inland, we want you to spark up and get out of there before the hurricane hits. Which made all the sense in the world because their show was gonna 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 the on the the overcast layer.
Blake:There are these huge thunderstorm systems to the south, the giant anvils up to sixty, seventy thousand feet. And it was serene, man. The top of the clouds looked like candy floss. And, I just remember looking over at my wingman and just being like, man, this is the flying I saw in movies. This is amazing.
Blake: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 and having students see that stuff for the first time. So there's that moment of magic. It's pretty memorable.
Bryan: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?
Blake: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 pales to that. But in the concept of doing the business, my toughest challenge was the fact that when I came out of a flying tour with four thirty one Squadron, I was looking for another flying tour. I wanted to go directly onto Quorums and scratch that SAR itch.
Blake: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 Centre. So the Canadian Mission Control Centre'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 18,000,000 square kilometers is our responsibility. And so then we take that information and we disperse it to the appropriate Joint Rescue Coordination Centre 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.
Blake: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. Like, 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's a lot that goes into the back picture of running a budget of a unit and all these other such things.
Blake:So I was assigned to be the officer in charge. I jumped in two feet 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
Bryan:for And
Blake: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.
Blake: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 CO or an OIC.
Bryan:A CO is a commanding officer and an OIC is an officer in charge.
Blake: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.
Bryan:Mhmm.
Blake:But we can't do it at the detriment of our people as fodder. So that was my takeaway. And it was it was hard. I I learned that not because I remembered what that other CEO had said, because I had to relearn it by making mistakes.
Bryan: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?
Blake:Oh, very much so. The SAR community sent me there and it was a partial education in how SAAR 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, I also got to know a lot of the upper echelon of our SAR CAG, our career advisory group, which helped guide me for a better footing in the SAR community.
Bryan:What is the most rewarding experience you've ever had in the RCAF? I've taken a
Blake:lot of ribbing over the years for putting on a red flight suit, but it's gotta be hands down the most rewarding. You meet thousands of people who are super enthusiastic. You have 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 wanna make it go perfect and they wanna 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.
Blake:So 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 10 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 11 bios mentioned the Snowbirds by name.
Bryan:Really?
Blake: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.
Blake: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 gonna 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, you ever run into trouble, call me and he presented it to me at that meeting in the mess.
Blake:And he's getting his wings in a couple weeks and he's gonna be a multi engine pilot. So man, that that stuff's pretty rewarding.
Bryan:Yes.
Blake:You. Look at you. Like, 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.
Bryan:That's really cool. What's the craziest situation you've ever found yourself in flying with the RCAF?
Blake:You might not guess that photo ship 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.
Blake: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.
Blake:We heard that there was a possibility to fly over downtown 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, like it's all that 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, you know, a thousand feet right down the mall and I was the photo chase.
Blake:So I was the tenth airplane and so I'm 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 White House. Crazy. And it's super cool. We did something very similar at Cape Canaveral.
Blake: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, 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 tenth 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.
Blake:So you have to use, 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 eighteen demo team in 2017 with Mike. So he can tell you about that offline.
Bryan:Okay.
Blake:But we went up into some real interesting weather on a dark afternoon and went up there with Glib who was the demo pilot at the time and trying to get all these angles in 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 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.
Bryan:It sounds like there's a lot more to it than you would expect on the surface.
Blake: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
Bryan:Mhmm.
Blake:What angle do you have to be at? What time of day? And where do you have to put your airplanes so 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.
Blake: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 what do the snowbirds look like over the Golden Gate Bridge when you need the skyline in Elcatraz in the background? At what altitude? Do I need to be high? Do I need to be low?
Blake:Do I want topside? Do I want bottom side? Do I want to see the smoke? Do I not? Like what do I want?
Blake:And getting front side photos are the most challenging. In 2018, we did a photo chase over Hamilton, Ontario with the Lancaster and the CF 18 demo and flying in formation. I was actually with one of my best buddies, Robbie Hindle. Oh, I was on squadron with him when he
Bryan:was an Aurora guy. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Because he was an Axo first, right?
Blake:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Rob was snowbird 11 when I was 10 in 2018.
Blake: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 that priceless Lancaster and a Hornet and you're only operating feet from each other at high speeds and we're we're like flying around all this cumulus cloud over Southern Ontario and trying to get these angles. It was very very memorable. But, yeah, man. Photoshops are definitely the craziest stuff I've done.
Bryan:It sounds like a lot of fun.
Blake: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.
Blake: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.
Blake:I remember I got here as a seasoned pilot and the instructors are saying one thing and I'm like, no, no, I know that that's not correct. And then we pull out the pubs and they go and change stuff on me and 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.
Bryan:Yeah. So for you, big thing is staying in the books.
Blake:Yeah. It's important to and you know what? It's not just books. It's also procedures. It's also proficiency.
Blake:As I alluded to one of my hard that hard flight going in the winter in Trenton, 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.
Bryan: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, like 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, like, 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.
Blake:Yeah. I think it happens to everyone given enough time. Yeah, for sure.
Bryan:What do you think makes a good pilot?
Blake: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 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.
Blake:But we all know that underwater, those feet are flapping at a thousand beats a minute to make it all happen. And so the best pilots might be working really, 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 their peers, their wingman.
Blake: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.
Blake:Mhmm. So those are the attributes that I aspire to. I'm still far off man, but that's what I'm trying for each day.
Bryan: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 it's neat to get that input.
Blake: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 and very intelligent technicians and it's it's it's really a blessing.
Bryan: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 wanna try out this pilot thing, they're about to join the air force or just start flying, what advice would you give them?
Blake: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 gonna 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 gonna be unexpected. It's gonna be exciting, but you gotta savor the quiet moments.
Blake:We kinda spoke about that earlier between the exciting times. It's Some of the most memorable moments are not the most stressful moments. They're the they're the hilarious moments with your crewmates. And that's part of it too. You gotta treasure your course mates, your squadron mates, and the crews because they're most likely gonna share most of your big milestones in your life.
Blake:They're your pseudo second family. They're the ones who are gonna lend you a drill if you need it. They're gonna 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.
Blake: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.
Bryan:I like that. I'm inspired. Well, then I've
Blake:done my job.
Bryan: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 I know it's gonna go great and I'm just really thankful that you took the time to be here.
Bryan:Thank you.
Blake:Absolutely. My pleasure.
Bryan:Okay. That's gonna 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 09:11 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 the pilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com or reach out at at pod pilot project on all social media.
Bryan:We love hearing from our listeners. As always, we'd like to thank you for spreading the word about the show. We continue to see growth every month, and we're so thankful for that, but we still need your help with the big three. That's like and follow us on social media, share with your friends, and follow and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now.
Bryan:Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up.
Bryan:See you. Engineer, shut down all four. Shutting down all four engines.