Real Fighter Pilot on What Happens if you Take Off your Mask?

Welcome, my name is Hazard. I'm a fighter pilot for the Air Force. Today we're going to be answering the question, do you get your own jet? And if you do, do you fly that jet all the time? Before we get started, I'm going to be giving away the patch that I fly with. So in order to win this, make sure to subscribe, turn on notifications, and I'll be releasing a video next week on how to win it. All right, to answer the first question, do we have our name on a jet? The answer is, for the most part, yes. So if you look on an aircraft, there are usually two names on there. The first one is going to be a dedicated crew chief. So there's a lot of maintainers that keep the jet in the air. Shout out to all the maintainers out there. It takes about 10 hours of maintenance for every one hour that we fly. And so they'll have a dedicated crew chief for that aircraft. As for the pilots, it depends on how long you've been with the squadron. Typically, when you show up to a squadron, you won't get your name on a jet for a while. The average squadron size is about 30 to 40 pilots. About 30 of the pilots are assigned to that squadron. That means they work within the squadron and they fly those aircraft. About 10 pilots are attached. So they are at the group or the wing level, and they'll fly generally a little bit less than the people that are assigned to the squadron. So all the fighter pilots, they try to stay in the squadron. Although I'll say for my last assignment on active duty, I was attached and it was a great experience. I had a chance to kind of break out of the protective shell of the fighter squadron, kind of see how the big air force works. When you show up to a squadron, you'll be put in line, and there's about 25 to 30 aircraft. So it takes a little while, probably a few months, for you to get your name on aircraft. That is unless you're the director of operations who's in charge with running the squadron or the squadron commander who's overall in charge of the squadron as well as advocating for the squadron. And keep in mind, there's an asterisk to all of this. It's obviously not our aircraft. Uncle Sam owns the jets. I remember being in Korea and they had tail numbers that were built in the late 80s, early 90s. And even at Shaw, we were flying the newest F-16s in the air force inventory, Block 50s. And they were built in the late 90s, early 2000s. Now by contrast, on the F-35, we were getting aircraft that were coming from the factory with five hours on them. They had that new jet smell. So it's been pretty cool to be on the F-35 program, but it really depends. And your name is only on there for an assignment and then you move on. So those tails that were in Korea, we've had probably 20, 30 pilots that have had their name on that aircraft. To answer the second question, do you fly your jet all the time? The simple answer to that is no. And the reason primarily comes down to configurations. So there are all these different configurations that aircraft can fly in, especially the fortune world with like F-16s, F-15s. In the F-16, we would have air to ground configuration. So that would be two fuel tanks on there. There'd be an air to air configuration where we'd have a center line bag. And sometimes we'd fly the jet completely clean. And you have to realize that most of the flights that we're going on are upgrade sorties, at least in training. So that means that somebody is being graded on a flight. They're trying to either become a wingman or a flight lead or an instructor pilot. These are highly scripted sorties. So they're going out to do specific things and get desired learning objectives from those sorties. And so they need the correct jet. If they're flying, for instance, a surface attack ride, they're gonna need a air to ground configured aircraft. Now, it's also important as a side story in the jet to make sure that you're set up properly for those configurations. I can remember flying on a sortie in Korea and there was a flight lead. He was going out. He was doing his DCA upgrade, defensive counter air. He was leading a four ship for the first time. And we were committing on a group of red air early on. And he was at 30 plus thousand feet, Mach 1.1. And he had a SU on the jet. So a SU is a specific type of rack that holds training bombs. So six training bombs on there. And when you have a SU, you have to go from cat one to cat three on the switch. And what that does is it changes the roll rates and how quickly the jet can maneuver. And he forgot to do that. And so on the out after he shot his missiles, I remember looking out, he was about a mile away and seeing him just tumble out of control because he had left the switch in cat one when it should have gone to cat three. And he lost about 10,000 feet in like three or four seconds. And fortunately he was able to get the jet under control and it was fine. But definitely something that is really important to set up the jet correctly in accordance with your configuration. Now in the fifth gen world with the F-35, there are fewer configurations and that's primarily because we keep things internally. But you can still have training weapons on the jet. You can vary your weight quite a bit. We carry GB31, so 2,000 pound bombs. And even if you're going on a training sortie, you know, 4,000 pounds matters quite a bit. Additionally, we can throw racks on the wings as well. So it's important, regardless of the airframe you're in, to make sure that you have the proper configuration. All right, the second reason is for maintenance. So the aircraft, in addition to the pre-flight, the post-flight, the through flight, they have to occasionally go through phase. And so for the F-16, that was every 300 hours. So they would go into phase for, I think it took about two or three weeks. And all the maintainers, they would break everything down, inspect it, make sure it was all good to go and then put it back out.