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intro/outro: 00:30

Fuel and ignition switches. On. RPM switches. Set. PD switches.

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Normal. Doors and hatches. Closed. Lay down. Stroblade.

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On. Research check-in. Complete with your left. Engineer. Start number two.

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Starting two. Wing three one zero ten, pilot project podcast. Clear takeoff runway three one left.

Bryan: 00:58

Alright. We're ready for departure here at the pilot project podcast, the best source for stories and advice from RCAF and mission aviation pilots brought to you by Skies Magazine. I'm your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is retired fighter pilot, Dan Alf McWilliams. Dan, welcome to the show, and thanks so much for being here.

Dan: 01:14

I'm happy to be here.

Bryan: 01:16

So listeners can go back one episode to hear about Dan's book, Tutor Tales, as well as an in-depth discussion on his days flying the tutor as both a student and an instructor. Today, we'll be talking about his book, Supersonic Stories, chronicling his time as a Cold War fighter pilot. So, Dan, you experienced a few unexpected turns in your career. Can you tell us more about that?

Dan: 01:37

You always plan, and then the plan never happens. The the cliche is that it does not survive first contact with the enemy. And even though when you have no real enemy, the enemy can be technical problems with an aircraft, for example. So I was super happy. I'd finished up in Moose Jaw.

Dan: 01:55

I was on my way to Bagotville, Quebec, which was where I wanted to be because I thought that I could enjoy myself a little bit more there because I speak the language and everything else. So I was posted from Moose Jaw to the course in Cold Lake, and I was supposed to go to Bagotville on the f five. Partway through the f five course, wing spars cracked on the aircraft. There was special inspection. They found out that, like, two thirds of the fleet had big cracks in the wings spars.

Bryan: 02:26

Oh, wow.

Dan: 02:27

So they grounded the they grounded the fleet. They closed four through three squadron and four three four, the two operational f five squadrons. Four nineteen where I was on the training unit, there were 21 of us on course. They they had, nine or 10 students continue with, just a tiny number of aircraft that were actually still flyable, and they were busy repairing the rest at the two other bases where they had these aircraft and then just ferrying them to Cold Lake. They had about the other half of the course was delayed four months.

Dan: 02:59

And myself and another guy who had flown T Birds in Germany before, Mario Gidmat, we both got delayed by one year. And Mario was sent to base flight to fly T Birds. I was sent to North Bay to take a two and a half week, not month, but a two and a half week t 33 course because I had lots of, similar time in the tutor. And I came back to base flight in Cold Lake and I flew t birds for six months, and then I redid the entire f five course and then the f 18 course. And eventually, two years, three months, four days, and two minutes after I got to Cold Lake because I love Cold Lake so much.

Dan: 03:39

I, ended up back in Bagatelle on April, but opening it with the new jet with the f 18. So lots of bad things happened to the course, but we all rolled with it, and, there was nothing we could do. So we we just, did our did our best.

Bryan: 03:53

You mentioned a stint there on the t 33. What were you guys doing on the t 33?

Dan: 03:57

T 30 threes were what we called, utility aircraft. So we did things like, for example, I would take an oil sample from a for the rescue helicopter in Cold Lake, and I would fly it to the Edmonton Municipal Airport, and I'd drop it off so that they could get it tested at the labs there to make sure that the helicopter was safe to fly. There were no chips in the, no metal chips in the engine oil. And that was an urgent thing. The lab was in Edmonton.

Dan: 04:25

It was a 300 kilometer drive. So just fly the T Bird there, drop off the soap sample, and at that point, they could have a rapid turnaround because during that time, the fighters couldn't fly because it was the middle of winter and, without the rescue helicopter, there was no flying. We did stuff like that. We carried people from place to place. I picked up a full colonel in Calgary, took them to Ottawa for a meeting.

Dan: 04:49

And then we did exercises with NORAD. We were the targets for say f fourteens off the coast of San Diego. So that was real hardship. And and then we'd we'd do also local target things for the f eighteens. We would be targets for them as they're doing the student training.

Bryan: 05:09

So that actually sounds like a pretty good go. Like, at least, you know, it's not what you had planned, but in the meantime, you had something kind of fun to do, a fun little jet to fly and and work to actually perform with it.

Dan: 05:21

Oh, it was great. We went all over the place. I flew three hundred hours in six months. It was a and it was a vintage airplane. It was it was quite an experience to, fly that old jet around.

Dan: 05:31

It was older than I was.

Bryan: 05:33

That's awesome. So with these unexpected turns in your career, a quote that I really like from your book is that during these times of unexpected change, it takes a special person to respond with resilience. So how can someone develop an attitude of resilience?

Dan: 05:48

Sometimes you have no choice because you just keep getting hit and you have to get back up again. You can't just stay down and moan and whine and complain because if you do that, you're not progressing. I think my parents taught me that as well. My mother especially as a spouse of a military member with my father was gone for three or four years during the period where I was about 12 years old and my youngest sister was four. There were four of us at home.

Dan: 06:20

My mother was by herself while my dad went all over the prairies and learned how to fly and become a one hundred four pilot. And she ran the household. And so she taught us a lot about resilience and about being self reliant and also teamwork, working within the family unit and, doing everything we could while dad wasn't around.

Bryan: 06:42

Okay. And it it's funny you say sometimes the hits keep coming. It reminds me a little bit of something we talked about in our past episode, which was those students waiting for their turn to get on the flight training. And and that attitude of resilience, I think, is gonna be really important for them.

Dan: 06:57

Oh, it's it's critical. If they don't have that kind of an attitude, I I don't wanna be callous and say they shouldn't they have no business being in the military. But in reality, military life is difficult. It's extremely rewarding, but it's not easy. Mhmm.

Dan: 07:13

So it takes a special kind of person to exceed or to excel in the in the military.

Bryan: 07:18

Yep. %. So when you write about learning how to air to air refuel, it's very tense. What is it like the first time you fly up to a tanker and attempt this maneuver?

Dan: 07:29

For years and years, I've been taught not to hit something. Now I'm supposed to hit it. And the basket, it's not this it's not made of unicorn feathers. It's a 300 pound steel basket and is bobbing around in the wingtip vortex beside or behind the seven zero seven tanker. And the particular day that I did it for the first time, I had we were in the ground attack phase and, of course, the great white cow, the seven zero seven, showed up at the worst possible time when our aircraft were super draggy and super heavy and really not suited for flying at slow speeds.

Dan: 08:10

And you're gonna laugh when I say this, but 300 knots at 20,000 feet is very, very slow for an F5. It just barely hangs in the air at that speed. Wow. Because it's it's it's got this wing that demands a lot of speed, like 400, four 20, five hundred. Those are the speeds you wanna fly the thing.

Bryan: 08:27

Okay.

Dan: 08:28

So so you're behind the power curve a little bit. So as you get the tiniest bit slower, you need a whole bunch more power. And the the instructors briefed us about this. And the other thing about the f five, the two seater does not have a refueling probe. So the first time you do it, you're in a single seater by yourself and you have an instructor flying a dual who's next to you just coaching you over the radio.

Bryan: 08:53

That's crazy.

Dan: 08:55

So it was a real challenge. But after a few pokes, I managed to get it done. But the one thing I also did was I got a little bit out of position. The basket is swinging around and it's going to hit the bottom of my fuselage and I'm thinking, oh no. So I instinctively pulled back a little bit and then I immediately stuffed the nose way forward and hit the rudder to move away from this big basket that's gonna put a dent in my airplane.

Dan: 09:27

Why did I do that? Well, because if you go up a tiny bit, you're in the vortex on the wing tip.

Bryan: 09:31

Oh, yeah.

Dan: 09:32

And it actually happened. An F5 was picked up by this vortex and flung over the tail of the seven zero seven upside down and almost snapped the tail off the aircraft and killed everybody on board.

Bryan: 09:45

Oh my gosh.

Dan: 09:46

So you never never go up into the vortex. And I instinctively pulled back because the basket was gonna hit me from below, but then I thought better of it. And the instructor was not happy with me. He said, no, over the radio as I as I did that.

Bryan: 10:01

Yeah. I bet. For the listeners, do you think you could quickly explain what wingtip vortices are?

Dan: 10:06

So behind aircraft, under the wing, there's really, really high pressure air. On top of the wing, low pressure air. But at the end of the wing, the high pressure air leaks out to the side and then spills up. And then because of the forward speed, it ends up in this huge thing like a horizontal tornado. That's the best way to think of it.

Dan: 10:27

So it's this spinning air. And if you get a tiny aircraft and the f five is not that tiny, but it only weighs about 33,000 pounds, but it can get tossed around like a toy if it gets caught in one of these vortices. And you could feel it when you're just in the right position in the f 18 and the f five, you can feel a little bit of vibration on your tail as the top of it just kind of skirts the bottom of this horizontal tornado. And it's extremely powerful air and has been known to flip aircraft upside down.

Bryan: 11:02

That's gotta be intimidating.

Dan: 11:03

Oh, it's pretty scary.

Bryan: 11:06

So the CF five Freedom Fighter is one of my favorite jets in terms of looks. It's always been a favorite of mine. How did you enjoy flying it?

Dan: 11:14

It was a lot of fun. It was a challenge to fly. It, it didn't it was not forgiving like the tutor was. The tutor was able to fly very low speeds and it was very, very conventional. When you stall in a light aircraft or a tutor or something like that, it shutters and then the nose pitches down.

Dan: 11:34

It's very, very conventional. In the f five, it doesn't really stall like a normal aircraft. What happens is, as the instructors put it, you go from having a slight tickle on the controls when you're max performing at a high excuse me, at a tight turn or a high angle of attack. And when you start stalling, that's when the elephants start jumping on the wings. And it's just the whole thing shutters and shakes, the nose is pointed up in the air, but you're going down like crazy.

Dan: 12:07

And it's really dramatic when you're just above an undercast, like a solid cloud layer, you're above it, you're doing some air fighting and you're getting really slow because you've pulled too hard and you're out of energy, you're in full afterburner and the nose is pointing up in the air and all of a sudden this cloud just comes shooting up from below and now you're in the middle of this cloud and you've just gone into it in this big, like a brick falling from the sky. And the airplane still feels like it's flying. So it's a very, very different kind of machine. Goes supersonic, you don't even know. I heard in your previous podcast with the active Hornet pilot from Bagotville, he said, yeah, it's basically a non event in the F5.

Dan: 12:52

First time I was supersonic, I describe it in the book. Dad said, you want to go supersonic? I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Want to go supersonic. He goes, well, we are.

Dan: 13:01

Just we're we're at 1.1, one point two. And I said, really? I didn't feel it. He said, that's the point. You don't even know.

Bryan: 13:09

It's kind of anticlimactic.

Dan: 13:10

Exactly. But it's it's a cool airplane. If you take it to an air show, you get a lot more chicks with an F five than you do with an F 18 because it's a sexy looking machine.

Bryan: 13:21

Yeah. It's always been a favorite of mine. What was it like to transition from relatively early jets like the c f five and the t 33 to flying the f 18?

Dan: 13:31

Both of those aircraft were they're very manual. Everything was there was round gauges, very, very standard old school instruments and and flight controls and everything else. The f 18 was all electric, and it was, we called it the plastic jet at one point. Flight controls were all fly by wire, so you didn't move any physical cables or anything. You just, we said the pilot was the, was the leader of the committee who decided what to do.

Dan: 14:06

So you would move the stick and the committee would say, ah, what does he want now? Let's vote. What should we do? And they would decide what to do with the control surfaces. And you'd move the stick in certain flight conditions.

Dan: 14:19

You had no idea what the controls were going to do.

Bryan: 14:21

Wow.

Dan: 14:22

It it had all this fancy electronic displays. Oh, and you also had a radar that you had to use to find other aircraft and to attack them. And you had a wide variety of systems and missiles that you had

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to

Dan: 14:39

manage. So I went from flying very basic aircraft where it was pretty simple, the actual mission you could do with it, to an airplane that was so complex that it was really, really hard to keep track of it all. If I can just tell the story when I was in Germany as an air cadet, we'd visit the base. The 104 pilots would explain their weapons and everything else. And they knew how many bomblets were in this cluster bomb.

Dan: 15:07

They'd know at what speed they'd be ejected, what the pressure was and everything else. When I was on the F-eighteen course, we never learned that stuff because there was so much to know about the airplane that the cluster bomb, it just works. Okay. You don't need to know that.

Bryan: 15:20

Yeah. There's no room for that knowledge.

Dan: 15:22

Yeah. It just spills out of the ears.

Bryan: 15:25

Yeah. Yeah. My days on the Aurora, there's so many systems and so many tactics and so many things to know. Some people would be memorizing extraneous facts and I would just say, Man, I don't have room for that.

Dan: 15:37

That's I completely understand that.

Bryan: 15:40

Transitioning to a new aircraft will always involve a learning curve. Can you tell us about any incidents that occurred early with the F 18?

Dan: 15:47

When you get onto a squadron, normally, Canada rarely has new aircraft. So when you get onto a squadron, usually there are a bunch of people around who've been there and done that, they know exactly how to do stuff. When we arrived at 04:33, there were about 18 of us, brand new aircraft. The technicians were also new. A few of our pilots had been with the other unit in Bagotville 425 and gotten six months experience operating the aircraft, but 425 was new added as well.

Dan: 16:18

So we arrived there and there's no what we call corporate knowledge. So we don't have a lot of really good procedures and they tried to adapt some of the ones from the previous aircraft, the f five, but doesn't always work. So I'll give you an example. Flight controls. It's minus 90 on a normal Baggettville morning And you park the aircraft and now it's cold soaked outside.

Dan: 16:44

So all the hydraulic systems, everything is super cold. And when it was shut down and towed into the hangar the night before, the person left the the flaps on the front of the wing, which are called the leading edge flaps. They left those things in the up position so they're horizontal and straight out from the wing. So now you start the aircraft up and one of the first things you do is you press the reset button on the flight controls, which tells the computers, okay, go into normal flying mode. So what it does is it senses where all the control surfaces are, and it moves them around.

Dan: 17:17

But the problem is the hydraulic systems, the fluids are all super cold and like slush. So they don't respond quickly. So what happens is the computer says, okay, I'm going to reset the flight controls but because it doesn't respond right away, it says, oh, this one failed. So it takes it out of the equation and says you can't use that. Oh, now what?

Dan: 17:42

Reset again. I still failed because it failed before and it's not coming back.

Bryan: 17:46

So Okay.

Dan: 17:46

How do you get around that? What are what are the things? So we develop techniques. We also changed the way we'd shut them down. We shut them down with the flaps down so that they would not fail.

Dan: 17:57

So there are all kinds of little tricks we learned. Rudder pedals would get frozen. They just had a spring to bring them back. So if you get some guy who is not vertically challenged like I am and the rudder pedals are way in the front, well, I'd get in and I'd want them to come back so I could actually use the brakes and taxi safely. Well, I'd push the lever down, but it was all frozen and cold.

Dan: 18:22

So the tiny spring that was supposed to bring them back that worked fine in the US Navy when the water's liquid, they would just stay full forward. And it was really almost impossible to get them back till the cockpit heated up a little bit. So as an SOP is a standard operating procedure, we would before you shut down, you'd bring the rudder pedals all the way back by the seat, leave them there and then it was easy with your big thigh muscles, you could push them out to the right spot, but they wouldn't come back with a spring. So we learned all kinds of little things and that's just a tiny example of the hundreds of things we had to learn to operate new aircraft. There was a mystique around the flight controls and it was a it was a little bit of we don't quite know how it works.

Dan: 19:05

And the guy who taught it in Cold Lake on the course was Cash Poulson, an old one zero four guy. He just made it he was hilarious. He he made it sound like it was some magic system that nobody could possibly understand. So with this mindset, four zero nine Squadron, and we talked about how things never go as planned, that squadron was supposed to be the first NORAD squadron, so defensive North America in Cold Lake. They did that for a few months, but then we were delayed for other reasons with equipping other aircraft or squadrons that were going to Germany.

Dan: 19:42

So now we were short on our NATO commitment. So we said, okay, the training squadron is gonna cover NORAD four zero nine in it was a very short time period, a period of a few months. You bought houses, you established stuff in Cold Lake, now you're gonna move to Germany. Oh, wow. Make it happen.

Dan: 20:01

So off they go to Germany. The first four plane that was supposed to go to Germany, the tanker aircraft takes off. It's circling around and the first f 18 rolls down the runway flown by the leader of the squadron. Unfortunately, this is the first time they'd flown with three external tanks because they were crossing the Atlantic and they needed all the fuel they could carry. And when you had a really heavy aircraft configuration, you had to trim.

Dan: 20:30

So set the, angle of the the stabilizer in the back to plus 10 degrees. Well, he made a mistake and he trimmed it to minus 10 degrees. And, the way the flight controls work, even if he pulled all the way back, it wouldn't go up high enough to be able to get airborne at the proper speeds. So he goes blasting down the runway, full afterburner, pulls back, nothing happens. And in the f five, when you pulled back too early, it would stall.

Dan: 21:01

It would take the lift away from that stabilizer, so you had to push full forward and then pull back again. So he does that. While he's doing that, he's accelerating, accelerating, accelerating, And he's doing almost 200 knots on the ground, still not getting airborne. And he says, uh-oh, this isn't working. So he does, he rejects the takeoff.

Dan: 21:22

So he goes idle, nails the brakes, and then he realizes he's coming up on the arrestor cable at the far end of the runway. He throws the hook down because if you grab the hook, it'll stop you before you run off the end. Right. Unfortunately, he was breaking so hard that the arresting hook was skipping off the ground and it missed the cable. And he went blowing by the cable doing more than a hundred knots.

Dan: 21:47

And now he sees the approach lights coming up. He says, that's it. I'm out of here. So he ejects. And he he comes out of the airplane with a little bit of forward momentum.

Dan: 21:57

However, the wind from the because he's an into wind takeoff blows him back towards where the aircraft has exploded in a big fireball and is now burning with black smoke from the toxic fumes from the composite material. And his parachute is going down almost in the middle of the flames.

Bryan: 22:16

Oh my gosh.

Dan: 22:17

And meanwhile, CBC and CTV and everybody else are filming this because this is the first deployment to Germany of an f eighteen squadron. So oops. And

Bryan: 22:28

So I assume he landed okay?

Dan: 22:30

He he wasn't injured. He he was a victim of just basically a lack of aircraft knowledge, and we all were in that position. In fact, when I was arriving at four three three, similar things happened to us. And after I left the squadron and retired, similar things happened, and we had similar incident all because of just a a turnover of personnel and a lack of continuity in the training and knowledge.

Bryan: 23:01

What was, like, the lesson learned from that incident from him having to eject?

Dan: 23:04

I actually became the simulator instructor for the f eighteen in Bagotville because I was, the most experienced instructor from my time in Moose Jaw. So what I did was I I would run people through that scenario and I would force their their flight controls to not rotate. And usually they would screw it up and end up going way too fast. And so I just freeze the simulator and then we talk about it. Let's say, okay, what you need to do, you go make sure you go full afterburner, full aft, trim all the way back.

Dan: 23:40

That's the key. Because if you don't trim all the way back, you might have prevented the flight controls from giving you the rotation to get the nose off the ground. So I talked them through how to respond to that. And like, oh, okay. So it was not an official emergency.

Dan: 23:55

I lobbied forever to try to get it put in as a failure to rotate. We never did, but at least during the time I was there in the simulator, I was teaching people how to recognize it and how to respond to it. So it became a lot safer.

Bryan: 24:08

Okay. Right on. So you were

Bryan: 24:11

part of forming four three three squadron in Beggaville, Quebec. How challenging was it to stand up or reform a squadron with new aircraft when a majority of personnel had very little experience on the Hornet? And we're not just talking about pilots. We're talking about the techs too.

Dan: 24:25

Yeah. The tiniest thing would happen. You'd be starting up and a code would show up in the nose wheel well. There was a little computer in there that would had a screen with codes and the tech would go in there and he would read the codes, come out and he'd show you a number of fingers. We couldn't talk on intercom or anything, but horizontal fingers, so like two fingers horizontal meant a seven.

Dan: 24:49

Two fingers straight up and down meant a five or a two that is. So we had codes like that. So you'd look at the code, you'd repeat it to the tech, you'd write it down, and I'd call back on the radio to operations and say, I've got this code. What do I do? At the same time, he's on his walkie talkie doing the same thing, but nobody knows.

Dan: 25:10

We're all looking at lists and going, oh, it says this. What does that mean? Can we fly with this? I don't know. So a lack of knowledge everywhere was very, very difficult.

Dan: 25:19

And every once in a while, one of the senior techs would go, oh, I heard about that. Yeah. He's good to go. And then, Are you sure? Yeah, probably.

Dan: 25:28

So off we'd go.

Bryan: 25:30

How did that feel?

Dan: 25:31

Well, it was a pretty safe aircraft. So we weren't that concerned. In fact, it was like, it was annoying. This code shows up and like, everything seems great in here. Like, what's what's up with this?

Dan: 25:44

So that that was one of the things. Of course, there was the knowledge of the aircraft and there were the techs, so the tiniest thing would go wrong and then the troubleshooting would take forever. So clearing a problem with the aircraft, if you get experienced technicians, they'd they'd listen to you debrief the symptoms, they go, oh, okay. And they'd know which black box to change or there was a connector or some other problem. But when they were so new and we were so new, it just made things a lot more difficult.

Dan: 26:14

And that's why our serviceability rate was very low at the start.

Bryan: 26:18

Right. And something you've mentioned is turnover and the subsequent lack of corporate knowledge this can cause. It's no secret that the Hornet community has experienced some turnover in recent years. What challenges do you think they'll face as a result of this, and what should the community be doing to overcome them?

Dan: 26:33

That's a very difficult thing to do because what happens is as soon as people become experienced and skilled, other job opportunities open up. And during a period where we didn't have a new fighter selected, we were drawing down the number of aircraft we had available, we were restricting what they could do with it because the aircraft are getting old and cracked and everything else. It's pretty hard to motivate people. And when you can't motivate them, it's hard to retain them. And when you can't retain them, now you get a bunch of young people.

Dan: 27:04

The other problem is, and you've seen this in the training system yourself, Brian, now you need to replace them. But you need instructors. You need experienced instructors, but, oh, those experienced instructors are also needed to fly the operational aircraft because we have taskings to do. So now you can't generate new pilots and replace people that are leaving. So it's it's like a vicious circle.

Dan: 27:27

It's a it's a very difficult position to be in.

Bryan: 27:31

What would you say is a potential solution?

Dan: 27:33

Well, certainly, the announcement that we're getting a new fighter, finally, the f 35, which is the best fighter for Canada, is going to motivate a lot of young people to, to go and do this. It's going to be a little bit of a difficult transition, mainly because the training will take place remotely. It'll take place in places in The USA and things like that. You'll also have, the same kind of teething pains that we had with the new aircraft, in 1982, '80 '5, around that that era. That's and will also be stretched thin because we'll have some people maintaining commitments to NORAD and other operational commitments while there are other people being sent to, learn on the new airplane.

Dan: 28:19

So the strain on the resources that we have is going to increase during the transition. But once we get the new aircraft, things should improve. And I'm very optimistic for that.

Bryan: 28:30

Yeah. I hope so. I hope that that does make an improvement. And like you said, it should. Right?

Bryan: 28:35

Like, think that's a huge draw for young people who wanna be fighter pilots to say, hey. Like, we've got the newest best fighter in the world, so let's go fly that.

Dan: 28:44

Oh, definitely. Like, we've always been proud as a fighter force of what we can do. But when you have an old aircraft and you're struggling to keep up with the the status quo, it's it's always difficult.

Bryan: 28:57

Yeah. For sure. So as time

Bryan: 29:00

goes by, cultures and practices change amongst pilots. What do you think are the biggest improvement in culture or practices from your time in the fighter community to current day?

Dan: 29:09

Well, the military is like, we talked about RMC in the previous podcast. RMC is, like, fifty years behind society. The military is about twenty years behind society. But we're becoming a little more, I guess grown up is the word or a little more mature in our approach to people. And there's less of a suck it up buttercup, make it happen approach.

Dan: 29:33

And there's more of a holistic, okay, we understand you as a person and we need you to be your best possible person. So what do you need for us to do that? I saw one example when I was this is about February. I was in Bagatelli as a civilian, and I was attending a Friday night beer call at at a squadron. And it was one of the pilots who stood up to to talk.

Dan: 30:01

And the tradition is everybody sings the, the drinking song, and the pilot who stands up has to down, like, chug a beer entirely. So she stood up, and I said she, that's another extremely positive thing is the fact that now we have female fighter pilots, which it's a long time coming and it's about time it happened.

Bryan: 30:21

%.

Dan: 30:22

She stood up. They started singing the drinking song. She shook her head, no. And I thought, uh-oh, this is not going to go well. And then she mimed the steering wheel.

Dan: 30:34

Oh, she had to drive home and she didn't wanna chug a beer. So they kept singing the song and the young pilot who was over by the beer fridge grabbed a Coke, opened it, and handed it to her, and she chugged the Coke and everybody clapped and cheered. And it was just normal. And I thought, wow. That that is a major improvement in approach and a added attitude amongst fighter pilots.

Bryan: 30:57

Yeah. That's something we've seen, I think, a culture that's coming in with new generations that we're seeing now is there's a lot less drinking. We see that in the students now. They just it's not like necessarily the center of their social lives and the center of their weekend activities. And, it I think it's good.

Bryan: 31:16

It's a good thing. It's a healthy thing to to maybe have that to be a little bit less of the focus.

Dan: 31:21

Yes. I I addressed that a little bit in my book, but I was careful about how I did it because I didn't wanna become preachy about it. Oh, for sure. But I am encouraged. I see the my students at PQFA in the Shikutami area.

Dan: 31:35

I went out last Thursday with a group of 10 of them. They invited me out for a hamburger and a drink in a burger bar. One person had a beer. The rest of us were drinking mineral water and iced tea. I thought, wow, this is a real change.

Dan: 31:51

And my kids who are 30, 30 one reiterate that to me that, yeah, it's a it's a change. It's an evolutionary change in, like, younger generation, and it's a very good thing.

Bryan: 32:01

Yeah. I agree. Things came full circle for you as you were deployed to Baden, Germany where you spent your formative years. What was it like to return as an f eighteen pilot?

Dan: 32:12

I thought it was a dream. It was like the best possible thing. I I took the commercial flight to Frankfurt and then a bus and a train down to Baden. And I just looked around and this place that was home to me for four years as a kid, and now I was coming back here to fly fighters. And I thought this this just can't be real.

Dan: 32:36

It can't be happening. It was such a fun thing. But walking into the squadron at 409, which as I said, it was deployed there to be the first squadron there. My job was to go and learn how to fly with them as if I were a squadron pilot. But it was fun because I walk in the door and like, hey, Alf, you know, Dan.

Dan: 32:57

And I was like, I knew just about everybody there because it's a very small community. They welcomed me in and they took me on. I was already a qualified NORAD wingman, And now they said, you'll be up to speed in no time. We'll we'll help you out. It was it was a lot of fun in that sense.

Bryan: 33:16

Did you find that the fighter force SOPs that you had learned at home meshed well with how they were doing business in Europe?

Dan: 33:24

They were a % different. We NORAD operates entirely differently from NATO in Europe at the time. However, within the air division, we call it the air division there at the time, the three squadrons that were there, they had common standard operating procedures and it was strict. And they would exercise it. They would take a pilot from one unit.

Dan: 33:48

They'd have three people or four people plan a mission. They take a pilot from another unit and say, okay, Bloggins is now flying with you guys. You, you're out. And after the briefing. So that he hasn't even seen the briefing and how he takes the mission card and everything and he flies as one of the formation members.

Dan: 34:08

And the idea was to see could they do it. And what we did in Baggottville with four three three, Cold Lake had four sixteen, which was the second rapid rapid reactor squadron that was also tasked for Central Europe. Both of our squadrons, when it came to NATO training, we applied European SOPs to what we did at home. So we created our own environment where we practiced them and made sure that we could seamlessly integrate with them when we deployed.

Bryan: 34:36

Okay. You've flown F-18s over the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, picking up fuel along the way from a tanker. What was that experience like?

Dan: 34:45

Yeah. All kinds of things happened on those flights. It was first of all, you're by yourself. I didn't dare to drink too much. I had this it's like an IV an intravenous medical bag that was filled with orange juice and a little straw that I could slip in under my oxygen mask and have little sips.

Dan: 35:09

I was terrified of having too much to drink because the little pea pack, and you asked the guy in your previous podcast about this, I tried to fit it on and I'm not saying why it didn't fit on, but I just it was like it hurt so much. Said, I'll forget this. So I didn't have my p pack hooked up. So I was dehydrated. I arrived in Germany.

Dan: 35:33

It's pitch black. It's 04:30 in the morning. We've been flying at night and I'm exhausted. And the formation lead without telling us says, Okay, we're all going to practice instrument approaches. I was number four.

Dan: 35:47

He said, Number four, you go first. I was expecting to do a visual approach and just like land visually an easy approach. No. So I had to find the approach plate, dig it out, look at it. I practiced it in the simulator before we left so at least I was familiar with it.

Dan: 36:06

But they're complicated. The high-tech and approaches in Germany are complicated. So here I am completely brain dead trying to fly this thing. And luckily, the weather was pretty decent, I could just look outside and make sure I didn't hit any hills in the Black Forest and I managed to land. That was tough.

Dan: 36:23

The other thing about flying en route, it's dark. We didn't have the tanker aircraft on radar. We had an airspace reservation. And the question is, we're supposed to be within 6,000 feet or a nautical mile total formation size, but we've got air to air tachand running and sometimes I'd be like seven miles away from somebody else and go, Oh, how did I get that far? Because all I can see on the horizon is flashing red lights and then the occasional green or something.

Dan: 36:54

And I go, Okay. So I'd be on altitude hold and heading hold and airspeed hold, true airspeed hold. I just turned a few degrees and then I'd be looking to see, am I getting closer? And I can't tell because it's really hard to judge closing at those distances when it's pitch black out.

Bryan: 37:15

Right.

Dan: 37:15

And all of a sudden the other airplane gets big fast. So I have to kick off the autopilot, squat the airplane, turn it hard so I don't hit him. And then, okay, now I get into close formation and then I, okay, what is his heading? What's his speed? Set the autopilot again.

Dan: 37:33

And it was just really challenging to stay in position for this long transit between refueling, brackets.

Bryan: 37:40

Did you folks, like, talk much over a common frequency or something to keep each other entertained? Or

Dan: 37:45

We didn't have any trivia games. We, we weren't really good at, at doing this, but, yeah, we did. And it was one of the guys who, at one point, he goes, that's better. So we asked, what's up alien? His alien review was alien.

Dan: 38:03

He goes, I finally got that stupid piddle pack off and now I feel good. He'd gotten unstrapped. He'd unzipped his immersion suit.

Bryan: 38:14

Oh, wow.

Dan: 38:14

He'd opened up his flying suit and everything and he pulled this thing off and then he got all strapped up again. It took him about ten minutes to do this and he's going, Oh, thank God I got that thing off. But that was our transit. We were all excited. We were the first transit of F-18s on a rapid reactor reinforcement and we're landing in LAR to do the real job.

Dan: 38:38

It was fun.

Bryan: 38:38

Yeah. That must have been really cool. You flew throughout the height of the Cold War. A lot of our listeners are too young to remember those times. What was it like to be a fighter pilot during the height of the Cold War?

Bryan: 38:49

And were you ever worried that fighting would break out?

Dan: 38:52

I was quite concerned because we knew that the odds of surviving in a World War three style scenario were very, very slim. Surface to air missiles, masses of aircraft on both sides, anti aircraft artillery, low level tactics. Also, we don't choose the weather when the war starts. So it could have been like really low visibility, hanging cloud, black forest, other mountains around that people could be running into them all over the place. We didn't think we could survive that long.

Dan: 39:27

So I hoped it didn't happen. On the other hand though, we knew that that's what we had to do. So we just basically crossed our fingers and hoped.

Bryan: 39:39

What did you think your chances were in a c f 18 against top Soviet jets and pilots at the time?

Dan: 39:44

No problem.

Bryan: 39:45

Oh, yeah?

Dan: 39:46

Those oh, yeah. The the Soviet and this is not just hindsight. In hindsight, I'm even more confident. But at the time, we knew that the Soviets were very, very rigid in their tactics and in their approach to things. They were being vectored by ground control.

Dan: 40:04

They had very little initiative. Our aircraft were just as capable. Even the MiG 29 and the the SU 27, those were the worst adversaries. But we practiced so much against f sixteens, f 18, f fifteens, the best of NATO's fighter pilots. We held our own and in fact did really well against them.

Bryan: 40:31

Okay.

Dan: 40:31

And we knew that we could attack the Soviets without a problem.

Bryan: 40:34

Wow. You flew near the buffer zone with The USSR. Were there ever any tense moments with Warsaw packed aircraft?

Dan: 40:42

My uncle actually told me about this. He was in a 104 and he flew. He got temporarily unsure of his position, which is pilot code for completely lost. And so he's he's flying over an airfield. He looks down and goes, uh-oh.

Dan: 41:01

Those are MiG twenty ones. So he realized he'd flown into East Germany by mistake. Oh, wow. So what what he did was he turned around, he pointed west, he went down to about 30 feet above ground, plugged in the afterburner and went out supersonic and didn't slow down or climb up until he knew he was back in West Germany.

Bryan: 41:24

Oh my gosh.

Dan: 41:24

When I did it, I was I'd gotten into some bad weather on an evaluation trip. We were being evaluated to get categories to fly in Europe and I couldn't stand just how murky and dangerous it was at low altitude. So I pulled up into the cloud and I kept going up and up and up and the cloud just kept continuing higher and higher. Finally above 18 or 20,000 feet, I break out into some semi clear weather. Then I remembered, oh boy, I'm not supposed to be here.

Dan: 42:02

So I made sure I turned parallel to the border and I also turned off my transponder so that nobody could see me unless it was on primary radar. And then I put my own radar down and I started looking for the blips of my own formation. I found them, then I saw a little bit of a hole. So I just kind of like spiraled down through it and find my way down. I slid into the formation and nobody noticed that I'd been gone because the weather was so terrible and the visibility they hadn't seen me disappear.

Bryan: 42:35

Oh, wow. Did you tell anybody?

Dan: 42:38

Not until about twenty years later.

Bryan: 42:40

And

Dan: 42:42

I was on pins and needles for the longest time waiting to be called into the commanding officer's office to explain myself.

Bryan: 42:49

No doubt. Of course, as a fighter pilot, you took part in several large exercises such as maple flag and red flag. Can you tell us any good stories from these experiences?

Dan: 43:01

They were both really eye opening exercises because all of a sudden, there are targets everywhere on the radar. You know that it's it's it's going to be very, very difficult to know who's a good guy, who's a bad guy. So in itself, when things are going smoothly, it's challenging. And that's why they hold these exercises. The whole point was if you can survive your 10 simulated combat missions in a flag exercise, your chances of surviving a real war go up exponentially.

Dan: 43:33

So here I am in Maple Flag. 1 of the fun things we decided our job was to go and shoot down the AWACS. Okay. So because the F-15s were on, they were protecting the AWACS and they were running a combat air patrol about thirty, forty miles between us and the AWACS. And their job was to shoot down anybody who got close to the AWACS.

Bryan: 43:59

Can you quickly just explain what an AWACS is?

Dan: 44:02

AWACS, airborne warning and control system. It is a big transport aircraft with a huge radar in the back. It's a huge force multiplier because it can detect low level, high level targets out for like two or 300 miles around it. And it's a really, really critical piece of the air picture. So if you can take out the AWACS, you've blinded the enemy.

Bryan: 44:26

Okay, great.

Dan: 44:27

So we decided we'd do this not quite kamikaze but almost a one way mission. What we did was we cleaned all the tanks and everything off the aircraft so we were as light as possible with very little fuel on board. We climbed out and we're in bad guy territory. We were the bad guys. Climb up as high as we can.

Dan: 44:51

We're about fifty, fifty five thousand feet. And we're headed east towards where the AWACS is. He's about a hundred miles away. So we find him on the radar, and we know the f fifteens are gonna be looking at us and that AWACS is telling him, hey, I've got hot targets high and fast. What did we do?

Dan: 45:10

Plug in the afterburners. We climbed up even higher to over 55,000 feet supersonic, and we went right over top of the Eagles. They couldn't shoot us because they weren't high enough or fast enough. Their missiles couldn't fly out towards us and then turn the corner and go up. They were out of range before we got past them.

Dan: 45:31

So we flew right over top of the Eagles and then a couple of us got down and I managed to get a couple of missile shots at the AWACS as did another guy. Meanwhile, two other ones who were targeted by the Eagles turned around and ran to keep them busy and think we were getting scared and running away. So we shot down the AWACS and then I look at my fuel quantity and go, uh-oh, this is really, really tight. So I just sucked the throttles back and climbed up as high as I could get and then did like a maximum glide profile all the way back home and I made it with just barely minimum fuel when I got there.

Bryan: 46:06

I might be misremembering, but didn't you say the f 18 is actually a decent glider?

Dan: 46:11

It's surprisingly good. It's it's not as bad as some other fighters. Not as good as the Tutor. The Tutor was an excellent glider.

Bryan: 46:21

But Or maybe it's the Tutor I was thinking of.

Dan: 46:23

Because I I was able to actually turn in thermals in the Tudor and climb up with a simulated zero thrust.

Bryan: 46:31

That's crazy. I

Dan: 46:32

was able to gain altitude below a cumulonimbus, which is kind of a dangerous cloud to be doing that under.

intro/outro: 46:38

Yeah.

Dan: 46:40

Red flag was another experience. It was super hot. August of eighty nine. Temperatures were like in the low forties Celsius. We had special techniques where we would turn on some of avionics like the radar and things that generated a lot of heat.

Dan: 46:58

We turned them on last minute before we took off and that kind of stuff. So off we go. And with the desert, the problem is there are no trees. There's very little vertical definition anywhere. So it's really hard to tell your altitude.

Dan: 47:13

And at one point, Jeff Boyd and I are flying. I'm his lead. He's my wingman. And we're at a hundred feet. I've got my radar altimeter set so it'll go off at 80 feet if I get below 80 feet.

Dan: 47:26

And I'm getting the occasional altitude altitude. So I pull it up a little bit, but it's really hard to judge how high you are. We're doing over 500 knots, almost 600 knots indicated. And I look over and I see a sand rooster tail behind Jeff. And he looked to me like he was less than a wingspan above the ground.

Dan: 47:46

So less than 25 or 30 feet above ground. Wow. Jeff pull up. And so he pulls up and he goes, Oh crap, sorry about that. I said, Set your rat out to about 80 feet.

Dan: 47:58

And he goes, Okay. Because he had it set really, really low.

Bryan: 48:01

Oh, wow. Yeah. That's close.

Dan: 48:03

That could have been bad.

Bryan: 48:05

Yeah. No kidding. In 1990, there were a spate of five crashes with three fatalities, including one where Kirk Ludi was killed in a training accident when two CF eighteens collided over Europe. You flew as the missing man in the missing man formation for the funeral. Can you explain what that is and why you wanted to do it?

Dan: 48:24

Kirk was a coursemate of ours on with the majority of pilots at form four thirty three on the f five. We we've worked together during training and he was such a super nice guy, got along really well with him. And then when when we went back to deploy to Germany, we would sometimes run into him and reminisce and he was a really great guy to be around. Then he had an air to air collision over top of Karlsruhe, which was a city about 50 kilometers north of Baden and extremely sad. In fact, the guy that he collided with who survived was another really good friend of mine, Reg Decost.

Dan: 49:09

So we heard about this and there had been so many bad things and it had gone, we'd gone for months and months and months with nothing. And then all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam. And they were all unrelated, isolated. There's no common thread. But because his funeral was in the roughly around Collingwood, I think somewhere in the Southwest Ontario area, Bagotville was tasked, four thirty three was tasked to do the fly pass, the missing man.

Dan: 49:40

Number three, as we approached the church, number three would pull up with afterburner to be out of the formation as if you were flying up to heaven sort of thing. So of course, being number three was a big honor. So we basically drew straws and I won. Because the four of us that were in that formation were all really good friends of his and we were fighting each other to see who would get in that formation and then who would be number three. So I was the lucky one to pull that.

Dan: 50:10

And I may have got something in my eye as I pulled up. It was quite an emotional moment.

Bryan: 50:16

Yeah. That must have been really, really hard.

Dan: 50:19

It was really, really hard, Brian.

Bryan: 50:21

Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan: 50:24

Did these several incidents cause you to second guess your career choice at all?

Dan: 50:30

Surprisingly not. And once again, it came down to the flight safety program in the military. Why did this happen? Okay. So that.

Dan: 50:38

Okay. Good. I understand that. This one other one, we all knew that it was possible, yet we all felt that we had the skills and the ability to avoid that situation. I don't know how much was wishful thinking, how much was bravado, but I never did question anything.

Dan: 50:58

I was sad for what happened

Bryan: 51:00

Of course.

Dan: 51:00

To other people, but I also had confidence in my own ability that I could avoid bad situations.

Bryan: 51:08

And I think that's a natural, hopefully, the way you're going to feel as a pilot, right? Confidence in your abilities, confidence that that's not going to happen. If you don't feel that way, frankly, you can't do the job.

Dan: 51:23

Precisely. The the only situation in which I would not be confident if there was something mysterious going on with the aircraft, some some mechanical or other fault that was unresolved and like, why is this happening? Nobody knows. But when you when you see the cause factors and you go, okay. Now I understand.

Dan: 51:43

Then you can put that into your toolkit of what am I going to do or not do to avoid this in the future. That's all you can do.

Bryan: 51:50

Yeah. A %. You were married in 1990, and the following week, you were sent to Europe for an exercise. The hits kept coming, and a few short months later, you were sent to the Gulf War for a joint headquarters staff appointment. I can relate to getting deployed to The Middle East shortly after getting married.

Bryan: 52:07

How was that for you and your wife?

Dan: 52:08

I was very rough. First of all, one of the one of the circumstances was that, just like everybody else, I was toying with the idea of flying for an airline. And this happened right around the time that I decided, okay, I'm gonna put in my request to leave the military. So I was on six months notice. Didn't happen.

Dan: 52:29

Airlines weren't hiring. I extended another six months. During this time we got married. No stress at all.

Bryan: 52:37

No kidding.

Dan: 52:37

I got married, potentially no job. And then finally I decided after I had an interview with an airline anti IMTAIR in Montreal, they said, Okay, if we have a course, we'll hire you. This was in August of ninety, like early August, just before Iraq was invading Kuwait. And I've read the financial papers, said, you know what? This doesn't look good.

Dan: 53:04

So I withdrew my release. My wife was working full time evenings as a nurse. So I'd be at the squadron during the day. I'd get home. She's already gone to work, she'd show up at like 1AM after a long shift, I'd be sleeping because I have a 6AM wake up for a 07:00 Met Brief.

Dan: 53:22

We didn't see each other for months at a time except for maybe once or twice every two weeks.

Bryan: 53:27

That's tough.

Dan: 53:28

So it was a really, really tough time for newlyweds to live through. So now I've withdrawn my release and they said, Okay, you're posted to wing operations in Baggettville, was a good thing. But then a couple weeks after that, got a phone call on a Wednesday night from my boss saying, hey, we need to send somebody to Bahrain to be in the Gulf of Gulf War, the not the Gulf War, but in the Gulf headquarters. And you're it. I said, really?

Dan: 53:58

You can't send anybody else? Because my wife and I discussed she was gonna quit her job and look for a position that was more during the day so we'd actually see each other. We were just about to do that when I got tagged to go to The Gulf. And I asked how long I'm going to be gone? It's like, we don't know.

Dan: 54:16

It was an indeterminate time. Instead of being like when the fighter squadrons rotated in and out, they were there for three months at a time. I was just sent with no end date in sight. And I ended up being there for five months. So it was not a lot of fun.

Bryan: 54:30

Yeah. So many similarities there to the experience I had. We'd been married for about a month and we also had no idea how long we were gonna be gone for when we left. It ended up being about four months, but for the first one and then back again for three months after a three months stint home. But when we left, we had no idea.

Bryan: 54:50

And and that's a crazy feeling, especially as newlyweds.

Dan: 54:54

Yeah. And that's that's what the military does. They they don't they don't consider that sort of thing because frankly to them, it's not important. Whereas to the individual person, it's like number one importance.

Bryan: 55:08

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how can I

Bryan: 55:11

put this? It would be difficult for them to do their business if they were constantly trying to consider everyone's personal circumstances. That's part of the nature of service is sacrifice. Right?

Dan: 55:23

That's exactly it. And and how then if you're going to be considering people's desires, constraints, everything else, how do you prevent abuse of that? How do you make sure that you don't get somebody who's just gonna whine and complain all the time when he's not pulling his weight? So this is the way they do it. And that's the sad reality of a fighting force.

Dan: 55:47

You have the exigencies of the service and you have no choice.

Bryan: 55:50

Sometimes you just gotta go.

Dan: 55:52

Yeah.

Bryan: 55:54

While you were deployed to Bahrain, there were threats that had to be endured. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

Dan: 56:01

It was odd because there were armed people everywhere. There was the Bahraini Defense Force was everywhere. Every street corner, there was a guy with a uniform and a submachine gun. And so I would walk through the the market called the Souk, and I feel relatively safe because there are all these armed guards everywhere. However, you never knew what was the threat, who was not a threat.

Dan: 56:25

And that's one of the problems because you know nothing about the culture and you can't tell if somebody's just being weird because you're a white guy in Western dress or if they're being weird because they want to slip a knife into your back. So there was always that concern. And then as tensions ramped up and the war was about to start, we had a pretty good feeling that things were going to escalate. Then we were concerned about chemical warfare attacks. And so we walked everywhere with a duffel bag and a little mask in another container.

Dan: 57:03

So you put your gas mask on first and then you pull your chemical suit out of the duffel bag and put that on and then try to seek shelter somewhere. So nerve gas, mustard gas, all this stuff, it was all a real threat. And to compound that, was somebody going to put a bomb underneath my vehicle? So every time we took a car, you take a mirror and you look around the undercarriage of the vehicle and make sure there were no strange wires or things attached somewhere that would blow up when you turn the ignition. So it was five months of stress and it took me months and months after I got home before I stopped worrying about threats that I couldn't see or control.

Bryan: 57:50

I can't imagine that feeling of coming home and still feeling like you're ramped up from that. I bet it felt weird to get into a car without checking it.

Dan: 57:58

It was. Also, of course, I wasn't seeing the same environment in Canada or The US that I was seeing in The Middle East. But at the same time, I'd been paranoid for so long that it was so hard to just go back to thinking I'm normal. Nobody's going to attack me and try and kill me right now. It took a long time.

Bryan: 58:20

Yeah. I bet. Towards the end

Bryan: 58:23

of your time in the air force, you started to specialize in simulation. How did simulators then differ from modern simulators we use today?

Dan: 58:30

When I first got onto the tutor, it was a simulator that was built in the sixties. Strangely enough by CAE Electronics where I ended up working after I got out of the military. But it was totally analog. It was so rudimentary that when we were able to practice at night, it had instruments, there was no visual system. And what I'd do is I'd set it up say at 20,000 feet in a cruising attitude doing a mild turn in a circle, I'd hop out of the simulator, go down the hall, get myself a can of pop, drink it.

Dan: 59:10

Ten minutes later, go back into the simulator and it's still at exactly the same altitude within a foot and turning around in little circles because you had to move it a certain number, like a half a degree or three quarters of a degree before the analog detectors would capture that movement. Right. So it was a little unnatural trying to fly instruments with this thing because you had to exaggerate the movements. Later on, on the F-eighteen, much more high fidelity but still a murky black and white visual system. There was one type of aircraft adversary.

Dan: 59:45

It was always a MiG 21. So if we saw anything like a ghostly white aircraft, didn't even have to identify it, you knew it was a MiG 21 because that's the only thing they had in the library. So but it was really, really good when it came to doing checks and the radar and everything else. So it was good for that. But it was terrible for doing traffic patterns or and we couldn't do decent air combat or anything like that, just basic intercepts.

Dan: 01:00:10

We upgraded the simulators to the latest version, and they're just awesome. They have satellite imagery everywhere, huge databases. You can pick up a map and fly at a hundred feet above ground at 600 knots in these things and use your map and fly just like you would in the real world.

Bryan: 01:00:28

Really?

Dan: 01:00:29

And they're all network too. I was able I had a student in Moose Jaw named Dave, Dave Stone. He went on to fly F-18s in Germany and then he became an instructor in Cold Lake. And then he got out and he worked for the same simulator company. And I was in a simulator in Baggottville.

Dan: 01:00:48

He was in a simulator in Cold Lake. I taxied out with him down the taxiway. We're talking on the radio between us. He lines up. I line up beside him.

Dan: 01:00:59

We do a formation afterburner takeoff using the radios. And I could stay right with him. And we climbed up. I saw his landing gear coming up, and then he he said, okay. Go route.

Dan: 01:01:11

And I flew out to route formation, and we did a tactical mission together, 1,800 nautical miles or about, 4,000 kilometers apart.

Bryan: 01:01:20

That is such a crazy evolution from those first simulators you were describing.

Dan: 01:01:25

It's I just couldn't get over it. But the the thing you have to do with simulation, use them for what they're good for, but use the aircraft for what it's good for.

Bryan: 01:01:35

Yep.

Dan: 01:01:36

So we could do things like shoot missiles, avoid missiles, practice with tactics and things like that in the aircraft. Sorry, in the simulator that you could not do in the aircraft.

Bryan: 01:01:49

Yep. And, emergencies are another good one in, the simulator. You can do everything with with good fidelity and there's no simulated I'm moving this switch or any of that. You're really doing it and building the muscle memory.

Dan: 01:02:01

Precisely.

Bryan: 01:02:03

Yep.

Bryan: 01:02:05

So next, you were trained as a forward air controller or FAC in preparation for a deployment to Bosnia. Can you explain what a FAC does?

Dan: 01:02:12

A FAC is the is the little guy dressed in green who carries a radio on his back. And he talks to incoming fighters and he tells them where the threats are and where he should drop his bombs. And sometimes he'll have a little laser projector and he'll point it at a target, turn on the laser with a certain code that the fighter can then detect with his pod, say, okay, that is the code from my forward air controller. That he can drop his bomb and is guided by the the laser projection from the fact on the ground.

Bryan: 01:02:50

Wow. So it's the laser has a code and his when you say pod, you're talking about the sniper pod, like the camera system on the f 18?

Dan: 01:02:58

Yes. At the time I took the training, it was actually a Nighthawk b pod, but it was in early generation, but similar to the sniper.

Bryan: 01:03:07

Wow. That's really, really cool. How did your wife feel about this development?

Dan: 01:03:12

Oh boy. Was a make or break moment for everything. And I was at just over nineteen years of service. I was told that I was actually sent on the course without my knowledge or like I was told when you come back from this deployment, I was moving. We're moving from Montreal back to Bagotville And I was told to go to Cold Lake for a month for an appointment during the move.

Dan: 01:03:43

My wife moved with the two babies up to Bagotville and lived in her parents basement for a month while I was in Cold Lake and our stuff was in storage. And then I got a phone call while we're moving out of the house in Montreal telling me, Oh, by the way, you're back up to go to Bosnia for six months, but you're going to be trained. And the guy that's going, if he gets injured, then you're it in July. And this was May. So that did not go over very well with either of us.

Dan: 01:04:15

And then I was told as a major on a fighter squadron within the next twelve to eighteen months, you are going to Bosnia for six months as a fact. So I said, Okay. I looked at the calendar, I went to wing operations and figured out our headquarters, how many days of leave do I have left? So I calculated what date I could leave and I left the military as soon as I could, because otherwise, it would have been divorce time.

Bryan: 01:04:43

Oh, wow. So that was like you said, it was make or break?

Dan: 01:04:46

Yes.

Bryan: 01:04:47

And, you know, that's the thing. Right? When they ask you to choose between your family or your career, hopefully well, your family or the air force, I should say. It's ultimately, for most of us, a pretty easy choice. We're gonna pick our family.

Dan: 01:05:00

First for most people, I agree. But for some, not so clear.

Bryan: 01:05:04

Yeah. Not for everybody.

Dan: 01:05:06

Yes.

Bryan: 01:05:07

While you did that fact training, what was the biggest thing you learned by reversing perspectives and being on the ground for bombing runs?

Dan: 01:05:14

I gained a lot of respect for the the ground pounders, the people in the ARNY. Have a rough life. They don't control some of the stuff. Their horizon, visual horizon is very short. They only see to the next tree or or to the next ridgeline.

Dan: 01:05:34

And it's very difficult for them. As a FAC, on the course we had two pilots, the guy who went to Bosnia and myself, and then there were four army officers who were being trained to be FACs as well. And we taught them a lot about what a fighter pilot sees and how to get his eyes onto the target and how to talk him onto it. So it was an eye opener for both the Army guys and us. We learned a lot from them about their procedures and everything.

Dan: 01:06:01

But just driving out to the area where we were practicing on the range in Belcarce near Quebec City, I was in a grizzly armored personnel carrier and the dirt is being kicked up by the wheels. It's hot. I'm sweaty. And I've got dust caked on my sweaty neck and everything else. And a tank is coming in the other direction on the same road.

Dan: 01:06:28

And there's no room for both of us to cross paths. So the grizzly driver heads down the shoulder of the road and I'm standing with my body sticking out of a turret and it's starting to lean way over to the right. I'm thinking, I told the driver, I said, Driver, stop. He's a corporal in the army. Sir?

Dan: 01:06:48

I say, Well, I'm just going to get out until you're past the tank and you get back upright. And then, Well, it's Okay, sir. And all I could think of was all these things I've seen about army exercises with armored vehicles rolling over and killing the two people who were sticking out.

Bryan: 01:07:03

Yeah. Yeah. That's the classic training exercise. Unfortunately, fatalities you hear about from the army, right, is those rollovers.

Dan: 01:07:13

Yeah. So it's a it's a different world and I'm very, very happy I didn't do that.

Bryan: 01:07:18

Yeah. I wasn't built for it myself. I can tell I can tell you that. I I have huge respect for the people who do it and for my buddies who've done It's, it's crazy. So as we've said, you transitioned to the civilian world.

Bryan: 01:07:30

What did you decide to do when you left the military?

Dan: 01:07:32

I considered flying for an airline, but our babies were basically two years old, one year old or 14 apart. I did not want to be away regularly for extended periods of time. And especially since I wasn't certain whether I could get the base that I wanted to. So I'd already made contacts in Mirabel near Montreal with the CAE simulator company. I'd worked with the people, the engineers there, and I just picked up the phone.

Dan: 01:08:05

I called the manager down there and I said, Danny, I'm thinking about getting a job. Do you have anything for me? And he said, Give me half an hour. He called me back and said, Okay, come on down next week. We'll have an interview and I'm sure we can find something for you.

Dan: 01:08:21

So it's all about contacts and networking. And I had a background RMC, my applied science degree, programmed in Fortran so I understood the process of software programming. Experience. So he put me in charge for a group of eight engineers who were programming f 18 software. And I'd already worked with people doing the aircraft and the simulator software.

Dan: 01:08:45

So it was a natural thing. I knew the people. I understood the operational requirements, I knew how they were doing it. I couldn't actually code in the assembler language they were using, but I could give them hints and troubleshoot and everything else. So it was a natural fit.

Bryan: 01:09:01

So it was a good fit in terms of not only were you kind of a subject matter expert for them on the aircraft and the needs of that aircraft, but also in terms of your leadership skills that you gained from the military?

Dan: 01:09:13

Yes. And there was actually the squadron maintenance officer, a major with me that was at the same squadron. We didn't know, but each of us applied for a job at the same place at the same time. And he and I both became group leaders at the same time. And then within a few months, he was actually promoted to a director or vice president position because of his leadership skills.

Dan: 01:09:37

So that was quite something.

Bryan: 01:09:37

Wow, that's awesome. That speaks highly for the leadership training we receive.

Dan: 01:09:43

Oh, definitely. It's I couldn't get over to how different the culture was between the military and civilian life. And the team spirit and the everybody is pulling in the same direction in the military is something that is very rare in civilian life.

Bryan: 01:10:00

Well, that's interesting. It kind of brings up my next question, which is that you had colleagues tell you that the grass was greener in the civilian world. Did you find that to be true?

Dan: 01:10:08

100%.

Bryan: 01:10:10

What was better and what was worse?

Dan: 01:10:14

Control of your own destiny in some ways where you you could you have way more control over where you lived, what kind of job you were doing. If you didn't like your job, you could quit or you could try and change your job somehow by negotiating with your super superiors. What if I did this instead? And quite often, they could actually find a way to make you happy. So it was much more human.

Dan: 01:10:40

The hours could be long sometimes in civilian world, but nowhere near like a military life where you belong to them 20 fourseven.

Bryan: 01:10:49

Was there anything you missed?

Dan: 01:10:50

I missed the flying. I missed some of the camaraderie with some of my friends. However, a lot of my friends in the military had left and they were doing other things in civilian life. So it's a continual turnover in the military as you know. But I'm extremely happy I did the military thing.

Dan: 01:11:11

I will never regret having been a fighter pilot. I'll always be super happy that I got to do it and I really enjoyed it. However, the time came when I had to prioritize my family and move on with my life.

Bryan: 01:11:24

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So you've had experience being part of bringing a new fighter online and the challenges and benefits that come with that. What do you think the biggest challenges will be as the RCAF brings in the f 35?

Bryan: 01:11:36

What will be the biggest opportunities?

Dan: 01:11:39

I'd say the biggest challenge is you you have to change your mindset. You can't treat it like the old aircraft and and use it in the same way. The f 35 especially is a complete revolution in the way fighters are employed. It's it's not at all the same thing. So what's good is getting a bunch of young, keen trainees.

Dan: 01:12:02

They won't be burdened with the, oh, this is how we did it with the old machine. They'll be ready to learn, and and that's that leads into the opportunity, which is they'll be able to develop ways of doing things that are in line with the capabilities of the aircraft. So our ability to defend Canada and to project power anywhere it needs to be is going to increase, by a whole bunch by having the new fighter.

Bryan: 01:12:33

Mhmm. And that's something that's interesting. You talk about kind of figuring out how to fight the new aircraft, how to what are its capabilities? How do we how do we use this in a different way than than the old aircraft? And there's so many fleets that are about to go through that in the in the RCAF.

Dan: 01:12:49

Oh, definitely. And what's what's been good with the f eighteen fleet, Baggottville has a very close relationship with the f thirty five unit in Burlington, Vermont. And we I've been speaking with the guys from there as well as people from Bagotville, and they're collaborating on various tactics, which may or may not be classified. I don't know. But with a fourth generation f 18 and an f 35, they can work together in certain ways.

Dan: 01:13:19

And now as they transition to the f 35, they'll have learned a lot from the Burlington guys how to employ the f 35. And if they have to work, say, with an f 15 unit or something, they'll understand how to do that because they've actually done it themselves.

Bryan: 01:13:33

That's awesome. So we're down

Bryan: 01:13:36

to our final three questions. We always ask these questions. What is the most important thing you do or did to keep yourself ready for the job?

Dan: 01:13:44

Always be learning. Never be complacent. Like, I if I wasn't always thinking, I'd I'd be cruising along at 35,000 feet, and I know I've got an hour before I start my descent. I'm not just in neutral. I'm thinking, okay, analyzing what's going on.

Dan: 01:14:03

Where am I going? What's going to happen? What if? What if? I never slow down and I'm always thinking what comes next and how am I going to react to it.

Bryan: 01:14:14

Yep. I like that. So I always ask what makes a good pilot, but what makes a great fighter pilot?

Dan: 01:14:21

A great fighter pilot is somebody who's skilled with the aircraft. He's got excellent leadership skills because as I transitioned onto instructing on the business jets, I was quite concerned because I'd never flown in a crew aircraft. I'd have been an instructor, but I'd never been a first officer captain relationship. And the guy who was in charge of it said, Dan, it's simple. When you're a formation lead and you have two or three or four wingman, you're the captain, and these are your crew.

Dan: 01:14:54

And you coordinate before and you work together. So you have to be a good leader and you have to understand tactics and be effective at them. And you also have to be open minded. If somebody comes up with a better tactic, don't just shoot them down figuratively, but listen and then either explain to them why it doesn't work or say, hey, that's a hell of a good idea. Give them credit and move on with a better tactic.

Bryan: 01:15:23

I think it's it's interesting and important that you mentioned leadership first. I think there's probably a subset of people out there who picture fighter pilots as, you know, lone wolves who don't need don't need any teamwork, don't need to you know, they can do it all on their own, but that's not at all the case.

Dan: 01:15:42

Back in in the day, Buzz Burling, Billy Bishop, they were actually sort of lone lone wolves.

Bryan: 01:15:48

Right.

Dan: 01:15:50

But they may have gotten a lot of kills, but they also kind of got their own wingman killed or something. And the more sophisticated the aircraft become, the less chance a lone wolf has of actually being effective. You have to work within the bigger picture.

Bryan: 01:16:06

Yep. What

Bryan: 01:16:09

advice would you give to someone today who wants to be a fighter pilot given the changes that are about to come to the fighter world in Canada?

Dan: 01:16:16

Never give up. Go after it. Work hard. Don't get discouraged, and be excited because this is an exciting time for the RCAF.

Bryan: 01:16:28

Yep. I I agree with that completely. So once again, we said it in the first podcast, but I'd like to remind our listeners where can they find your books?

Dan: 01:16:37

My books are available on Amazon. They're either in the Kindle version. They're print hardcover or softcover. You can search my name, Dan McWilliams on Amazon and, or Supersonic Stories. And it's a series of two books, Tutor Tales and Supersonic Stories are available under MyDave on Amazon.

Bryan: 01:16:57

All right. Awesome. Listeners can also find a link to Dan's books on the description of this episode. I highly recommend you check them out. I really enjoyed reading them, so please check out these books.

Bryan: 01:17:08

Again, you can find that link in the description of this episode. Well, Dan, that was such an interesting chat. I just wanna thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to, share your stories, share your career with us. I'm really grateful for that time and I'm, grateful for the stories you've shared with us. So thank you so much.

Dan: 01:17:26

This has been my pleasure, Brian. Great interview questions. I love the way you run this podcast. So thanks for having me on.

Bryan: 01:17:33

Thank you. Alright. That wraps up our series with Cold War fighter pilot, Dan McWilliams. For our next episode, we'll be sitting down with major general, Geno Boucher, to talk about culture in the Canadian forces. Geno is a CH one forty six Griffin pilot, and at the time of this recording, chief of staff, chief professional conduct and culture.

Bryan: 01:17:54

Do you have any questions or comments about anything you've heard in this show? Would you or someone you know make a great guest, or do you have a great idea for a show? You can reach out to us at the pilotprojectpodcast@Gmail.com or on all social media at at pod pilot project. And be sure to check out that social media for lots of great videos of our RCAF aircraft. As always, we'd like to thank you for tuning in and ask for your help with the big three.

Bryan: 01:18:17

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. Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up. See

intro/outro: 01:18:30

Engineer, shut down all four. Shutting down all four engines.