Testing NEW Fighter Pilot Tech while Dogfighting

Welcome, I'm a fighter pilot for the Air Force. I spent the first half of my career flying the F-16. Now I fly the F-35. So I thought today I'd go over the gear that I fly with. Now, this is not the gear I go into combat with. This is the gear I use for daily training because obviously combat has some different implications. But let's get into it. All right, so here we go. First thing that we fly with is the helmet. So the F-35 is unique in that it does not have a heads-up display. So everything is pumped into that helmet and it's really an incredible helmet because it uses true augmented reality. So that means when I'm looking out, it's putting symbols over different things that I'm seeing and it's staying there as I move my head around. Imagine if you're in a car, you're driving and you wanna eat pizza. It'll put like a triangle over all the pizza restaurants. So obviously we're using it in a different way but the helmet allows us to synthesize large amounts of information. Now, all of that equipment is heavy and so the F-35 helmet is the only one to my knowledge that is made out of carbon fiber to try and lessen the weight and that's because we're pulling a lot of Gs, oftentimes nine Gs, nine times the force of gravity. That's 135 pounds on your neck. So every little bit they can shave helps a lot. And in fact, they have two different variants. There's a lightweight version because the F-35, they're trying to increase the number of pilots that can fly it. So the F-16 had a pretty narrow body size they were looking for. The F-35 expanded that and with that brought the lightweight helmet. Now I like the traditional one because there are a lot of straps on there that you can adjust because you're looking through that helmet and you get all that data through there. It's important to make sure your eyes are lined up perfectly and that's what the standard helmet helps with. All right, so next up is the visor cover. So the visor cover is important because all of the stuff on your visor can scratch really easily. So you have to protect that. It's really expensive. And you need a custom visor cover to represent your squadron. So this is my favorite visor cover that I've flown with. So as soon as I graduated from pilot training, I went to Kunsan Air Base and there are two squadrons there. There's the Pantons, which they're not that great. And then there are the Juvats. So this is made out of snake skin. You buy it from a third party and you use it to protect your visor as well as to represent your squadron. All right, next is the helmet bag itself. So this is a third party one. This isn't the one I actually fly with. But just like the visor cover, you need a custom one. Now the F-35, we've been a little bit late to the game because that helmet is so expensive and it's a different size than the standard 55P one that fighter pilots fly with. So we've been late to be able to find suppliers to customize our helmet bags. But helmet bag is important. Plus it stows all your stuff that you're carrying after the jet. I like putting everything into just one bag, try to be as minimalist as possible. All right, next is the G-suit. So we don't carry this in the helmet bag but it's really important for us to fly with this. So like I was saying before, we're pulling up to nine Gs, nine times the force of gravity. So if you weigh 200 pounds, that's 1800 pounds of force on your body just squeezing you into your seat. And so the problem is the blood can drain from your brain and be pulled into your extremities and you can pass out. So we fly with a G-suit that squeezes our legs, squeezes that blood back into our brain. All right, so next is a EFB. So again, this is just a iPad mini that I had laying around the house. We fly with a couple of EFBs and that has all of our in-flight guides on there, all the documents we need. We were actually, again, late to the game with this because of operational security. We had to make sure that the iPads were good to go with that. But it's a big help because before we'd have to print out everything. We'd fly with in-flight guides. And if there were any changes, which there always are, we have to actually do write-in changes with a pen and document that we had made those changes. So it was a lot of work. Now with an iPad, you can just download a new file and you're good to go. So we carry our pubs, we carry a checklist. We carry everything on here, which streamlines everything. All right, next is the knee board. So again, this is just one that I had laying around the house. Now, the big thing with flight gear is that great flight gear is not gonna make you a better pilot. So this is just a standard Flyboys one. This is perfectly fine to fly with as long as it can hold the documents that you're carrying with you. So I just strap this on my right leg, write notes on it. It's really important for CAS, so close air support. It's very procedural. So you need to have a good writing surface to be able to write down those nine-line cards on there. So on the topic of CAS, it's really important to be able to hear the JTACs out there. So when we're flying, we're sometimes listening to three radios at the same time. And so all these helmets, they have speakers built into them but I really like the in-ear headphones. And so there are a couple of different variants. I used to fly with the AXS ones where they actually mold it to your ear but I actually found these cheap foam ones that you stick in your ear, you can get really crisp audio on there. You can hear the JTAC. Oftentimes when you're at range, it's kind of difficult so you can turn up the volume a little bit louder. So I really like in-ear headphones for that. All right, next is one of my favorite ones and that is ice packs. So the F-35, we have to wear a jacket when we fly. And the reason is the B model has some auto eject mode. And so those auto eject modes, you won't have time to pull your arms in if you have to eject. And so there are lanyards built into this jacket that pull your arms in if you have to eject. Now that's great. We use an A model because there are actually a lot of flailing injuries when people eject at high speed. So it's actually a benefit for us. However, if you're flying in like Las Vegas at Nellis Air Force Base or Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, it can get really hot. And so the original way they were gonna solve this problem is like how astronauts do it. So we were gonna carry this like suitcase which was refrigerating the liquid that was flowing through tubes through a garment that we were actually wearing but it's really bulky. And again, as fighter pilots, we wanna be minimalist. We don't wanna carry any extra stuff. And so a pilot actually came up with the idea of, hey, let's just wear ice packs, put it into that jacket we have to wear. And once we got that approved, it was probably a $2 solution to be able to cool us down. And they work well. They work for about an hour, hour and a half. And the important part is stepping out to the jet. Cause once you're flying, it's pretty cool. The air conditioner works well but stepping out to the jet starting, if you have to go to a spare, it gets really hot. I probably lose about five pounds on every flight. So those ice packs are awesome during the summer. All right, next is water. So this might be the most important one. So water is extremely important for pulling G's. So if you're just 3% dehydrated, you will reduce your G tolerance by 30%. So it's extremely important to be sipping on water. As I learned when I boxed at the Air Force Academy, hydration starts three days before the actual event but you wanna be sipping water all the way up through the sortie. And this is again, one of those things I've tried everything. I've tried Nalgene bottles. I've tried camelbacks. I've tried, you know, roll-up bags but I just find a plastic water bottle works the best. All right, so next is a writing utensil. So I use three. So in the jet, I use this one right here. So it's the Pilot Precise V5 RT. So I find it writes well. It's I think about three bucks off Amazon. So I like writing with that. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit in my flight suit. So for my flight suit, I use the Pilot Skillcraft B3 Aviator Pen. And so this, I think we just get this at the squadron. And so the good thing about this is it's a pen. It's a pencil. And for all those grade rides that you do, it's a red pen. So you can put a lot of ink on those grade sheets. And then this might be my favorite pencil right here. So this is the Graph Gear 500 with a 0.9 millimeter lead. So this is like five bucks off Amazon. And so it writes well. It has that 0.9 millimeter lead because when you're flying, it's easy to snap the lead off. So you want a little bit thicker lead for that. All right, and lastly is the watch. So this is the watch that I fly with. It's made by Bremont. It's the Alt-1Z. Again, can't stress this enough. Equipment isn't gonna make you a better pilot, but this is something that I like. So I think that time and aviation have been linked since the beginning. And I know now we have fancy GPS in the jet. We don't really need precise watches, but I like how this is a self-wound watch. So it's not using any batteries. It's just using the movement of my body. And it kind of goes back, I think, of this as the great, great, great grandchild of the original clocks that they used to navigate the Atlantic Ocean. So they're using modern equipment to make a updated version of that. So that's why I enjoy these watches. They're almost like works of art. All right, so I hope you enjoyed this video, the gear that I fly with. So I know it doesn't sound like much, but I've spent a lot of time changing all this stuff over my 10-plus years flying fighters. And this is what I've found to work for me. If you enjoyed this video, I think you'll like this one up here. It's on how we do flyovers and everything that goes with them.