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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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That's all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep the blue

side up. See you.

Engineer. Shut down all four. Shutting down all

four engines.