FPP225 - In the Skies Over Iraq

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1:07Welcome back to the Fighter Pilot Podcast. Today's guest spent 35 years in Navy strike fighters and attack aircraft, 13 on active duty, 22 more on the reserves, flying intruders and hornets from would-be island to China Lake to the skies over Iraq. He commanded the last squadron before it was disestablished, rose to flag officer and served as vice commander of Navasent Fifth Fleet during the 10th standoff with Iran in 2019. Somewhere in there, he has become an Airbus Captain for American Airlines. Please welcome rear admiral Doug Woody Beal to the Fighter Pilot Podcast. Turn in, fights on. Woody, welcome to the show. Thanks, Cinco. Left to left. Let's go. Let's get some. Fantastic. Hey, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Hey brother, you just said it all really. It started out in the Navy in 1987 on active duty, 13 years spent some time at a kind of diverse active duty career. Spent some time as a intruder pilot and then went to the test community for a little bit where I was dual-called the F-18 and the A-6 and then moved on from there to being a

2:10strike ops officer in their way. And then after that, 22-year career in the reserves, where I flew Hornets with VFA-201 out of Fort Worth, Texas, like you said, I was the last commanding officer. That's watering and then moved on to be a flight instructor at Whiting and a couple of staff jobs and then next thing you know, Woody's in Atville and doing good work for the United States Navy doing God's work at the executive level. Nice. Hey, when were you at Whiting? I went through Whiting in 2003, VT3, the Red Knights. Well, you got there before I did. I was there after my command tour at 201 from 2007 to 2009. Interesting thing yet enough, a lot of the first officers that I have at my airline job were my students back then. So I tell myself if they're a bad first officer, part of that's probably my fault. Yeah, it's in May of Copa, man, that's too bad. That's funny. Well, love to get into the career. Let's start with some things at the beginning. You were medically disqualified from the United States Air Force Academy and turned down in ROTC scholarship because they wanted you, I guess, flying a desk. I hear not a jet. So walk us through how you found your way

3:14to naval aviation instead. Yeah, it's kind of, I don't know why an eight-year-old boy standing in the backyard seeing a DC-3 with an engine fire thought that's what I want to do for the rest of my life, but that's where it started. And these days I want the fire to stay inside the engine where it belongs, but quite frankly, that's what started it. When the testosterone kicked in at around age 14, all I wanted to be was an Air Force fighter pilot. My folks took me on or took all of this, actually on a family vacation to the West to Montana. On the way, we stopped at Colorado Springs and visited the Air Force Academy. And I knew for a fact, once I saw that place, that that's where I was going to go to college. I knew that that's what I was going to do. And I geared my entire high school experience toward that goal. Turned me into a goal and oriented person. I went from the laziest kid in the family to being the most motivated kid in the family just to be a fighter pilot. So bottom line was when it came down to it, I had all the qualifications, a couple of congressional

4:16nominations. And then yes, medically disqualified because I was a little too honest on the questionnaire. And I don't mind saying this, but the questionnaire said, do you now or have you ever wet the bed after age 13? Well, as a kid, I had wet the bed a few times. And at age 14, it stopped. So I said, yes, on the questionnaire, and they said, disqualified. Congratulations, you're out. And that was it. So I executed my backup plan, which was to go to Purdue University. And a kid that likes airplanes and is good at physics and math gets to go to a BN aerospace engineer. And while I was there, the Air Force came back and said, how about an ROTC scholarship? I said, sure. So when I went to sign the scholarship, the recruiter, as we had the conversation, I said, this is great four years of Purdue. And I'm off to UBT. And the recruiter said, what are you talking about? I said, UBT, undergraduate pilot training. That's what you guys call it, right? And he said, that's what we call it, but you're not going there. You're going to be an Air Force engineer because we need engineers in the Air Force. And I walked away from that at that point. It's not that I have a hatred for

5:19the Air Force. I think the Air Force is a great service. I don't want to bash on them, but they have inherited a culture from the Army, which includes a lot of bureaucracy sometimes. And that's what I saw that day. But at that point, I was pretty much done with the United States Air Force. Man, I, of course, love the Air Force, but I will tell you, from so many stories, people want to become pilots. And they get disqualified for some ridiculous reason in the Air Force. And then they go to the Navy and the Marines and the Marines and they're like, will take you. And guess what? They turn into fantastic, extremely successful pilots. And the Air Force is just like, what are they doing? Why are they stopping people? And I think it is some of the bureaucracy. And it's a disempowerment. There's just so many examples. I don't want to bash the Air Force either, but so many examples of young professionals, students that could do so much for the Air Force and the Air Force turns them down. And then they go be successful with the Navy. And it's fine. It's like good for America,

6:22but bad for the Air Force. You will never run into a happier Air Force reject than me. That said, like you, I could say some good things about the Air Force. The equipment in the Air Force is top notch. The Navy has nothing that even comes close to the F-22 Raptor. The F-15, the new version coming out is a slian machine. There's some really good stuff that the Air Force does. So again, I don't want to bash them at all. They lead us in air dominance. And that's a great thing. The only thing they can't do is device airfields that can drive 700 miles in a day. And that's the one thing the Navy brings to the flight that the Air Force doesn't. So how did you get into the Naval Aviation then? So you're a Purdue. You turned down this ROTC scholarship. You know, what was next for you? So at Purdue, by the way, loved the school, didn't love the major. And ironically, later on, they gave me a distinguished alumni award. And I literally called the back and said, you might want to rethink that. You go back and look at my transcripts.

7:24I really wasn't that good. And they said, no, no, no, this is about what you did after, not what you did during. So the summer before my senior year literally starts with me watching a couple of Air National Guard F-4s do low passes in an air show nearby our home. And as I was watching those guys fly around, my dad came out and stepped up next to me and said, you know, son, you may have given up too easy. Well, you think about the United States Navy. And I said, pop, the Navy does it fly, jets. They fly helicopters off of destroyers and stuff. And he goes, what are you an idiot? Of course, they fly jets off of aircraft carriers. Well, landlocked Indiana boy in the mid 1980s had no idea. And you know, there was no such thing as an internet. You couldn't just look this stuff up. So yeah, and top gun didn't come out until the next summer. I was unaware of the movie. So in the end, there was a recruiter on the mall at Purdue who was given out aviation contracts and writing. And the funny thing about recruiting at that time and this coming from the former deputy commander of Navy recruiting was that when you passed the AFO QT or the what we call the faux far pea far

8:30testing, they would give you an airplane ride. Each recruiting district, there were 41 of them at the time had a T 34 bravo or two and aviators on short duty as recruiters were tasked with putting the young recruit in the back seat and seeing if he was erinotically adaptable. And so this guy put me in the back seat of this T 34 and to be fair, I had about 15 hours toward my private pilot license at this point. So I'm sitting in the back of this thing and he squirrel caged the shish on that thing. I mean, it was loops, rolls, half cubins, emulments, you name it, we did it, spins, we did everything. And when we landed, I pulled out my checkbook and said, I'll ride you the check for the next tank of gas if we can just go up and do that again. And of course, the recruiter was like, you it doesn't work that way. You can't do that. But at that point, he had me hook line and sinker. I was ready to join. I was I knew that this was for me. And that's how we got it. Oh, man, I love that story. There is something to be said about a recruit being interested

9:31in flying and then putting them through the ringer to see if they actually are any good at it or if they even like it. Because there are plenty of people that end up flying. They're like, I don't want to do this for my full-time job. And so I think that that's really fascinating that they used to throw recruits in the back seat and go do that. What a fantastic opportunity for both parties, right, for the military to do some type of small evaluation and for the candidate to also, and you know, evaluate if they enjoyed it that much. And for those listeners, the AFOQT is the Air Force officer qualification test. And there's different sections of the test. And there's like a pilot and there's a nav section. And you have to actually score fairly well on different sections of the test to end up being qualified to compete for a pilot training slot. I'm guessing it's very similar to that Navy test. You mentioned it. Yeah, the Navy test were the I may have the acronym wrong, but the flight officer flight aptitude, I can't remember where the R stands for. And the PFR was, you know, pilot, of course, flight aptitude requirements, I think is what it is. So that was our version of that test, but I was trying to be bilingual there for my Air Force brother.

10:34Yeah. Well, thank you. And they also used to have a test for us where you'd go onto a computer and you'd have to like follow, you'd like have a track ball and you'd follow a target with the track ball and have to, I don't know, it was a part, I forget what it was called, but it was also a very important part of the score that you would receive to kind of rack and stack you compared to other candidates. So you could try to, you know, snag one of those pilot slots. No, to be fair, and we can just sort of go through flight school. I was not when my dad was teaching me how to drive a car. I was a terrible driver. I was awesome. And nearly tossed his Mercedes into a ditch at one point. It was a, don't think that we were rich. We weren't. He had a 1968 Mercedes 220 diesel 0 to 60 on that thing was measured with a calendar. It was just a slow, slow car, but I was a terrible driver. But for whatever reason, flight school took to me and I did well there. I never failed a flight. I never hooked anything. And I had a couple of really good grades in flight school and I realized it was all about aptitude. And if I would have studied as hard in college as I studied in flight

11:36school, I would have been a straight A student. Quite frankly, it was all about aptitude. It was all about really trying hard. And that's the way that works. Yeah. I think in general, attitude is so important. You know, we all struggle through training, through academics in general, you know, students struggle. Like that's the whole idea is you've learned to struggle. And I feel like the ones that are successful and for you young folks listening out there to be successful, you need to struggle and you need to have a good attitude with it. When someone corrects you, you need to be willing to quickly adapt and learn from that correction, not be defensive from that correction. And that is so true in the cockpit too. Going through, you mean, you're just going to make mistake after mistake and being okay with like, I'm learning, I'm going to show grace to myself, I'm going to show humility and gratitude towards the instructor and an effort, like this attitude of effort that really reflects in a way that allows you to best learn in the situation. And instructors want to see that, right? They will reward a student that is doing that

12:41that may not be as good as stick as another one who has a bad attitude. And the quickest way out of pilot training or any of those trainings is having a bad attitude and unwillingness to learn and be humble with that experience. Absolutely. Quite frankly, some of the folks that struggled in flight school, at least for a little while were folks that showed up with 1,500 hours of flying time. And this is a, by the way, this is an axiom. It's something that happens all the time, not just back in my day, but even currently. And it boils down to how much are you willing to study and how much correction are you willing to take. I've heard it said that there's a right way, the wrong way in the navy way when it comes to flying airplanes. And the navy doesn't care about right and wrong. They care about you learning it the way they want you to learn it. Now, when you're a student, you really don't have a choice. You show up and you fly the flight the way the navy teaches you to fly that flight. You make the radio calls that way. You maneuver the aircraft the way they ask you to. That's the way it works. What's interesting is, later on in your career, when you get a chance to go to an advanced school, like a weapon school, now you might be an expert in your aircraft,

13:45but you still have to maintain that humility as you show up. And folks that are really honed in on tactics teach you what you need to learn to be better at your craft. Fantastic. So you go through navy pilot training. Sure. You end up getting a six intruders and heading up to Woodby Island. And then out of Woodby reading your bio, you end up in Somalia, Iraq, Southern Watch, and then went on to fly strike ops with CVW nine during more Iraq combat operations. How did the mission and the aircraft evolved between these two chapters of your life? Yeah. Well, it's very different flying a mostly analog airplane with a guy said next to you than it is flying a single seat digital airplane. But to go back to the intruder, when we arrived at Woodby Island, it was just a fantastic community. Those folks were warriors. They were out there knowing that they flew the ugliest airplane in the United States Navy, maybe the second ugliest, that was underpowered,

14:46but hauled a ton of bombs and did it well. And by the way, at the time was the only aircraft in the navy that had precision weapons capability because it could drop a laser guided bomb with a laser that was kept in a well not a pod, but a turret that sat underneath the nose. At the time, the hornet didn't have that capability and neither did the Tomcat. And so the only strike aircraft with precision weapons ability on the ship was the intruder. And we took that very seriously. There was a movie fly to the intruder based on a very good book. And that made me really respect the platform. I loved flying the missions over Somalia. There were no air-to-air threats. So we flew them down low. And then we were called away as Iraq started to heat up. And we took the kittyawk through the Straits of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf and supported joint operations over Iraq as part of Operation Southern Watch, which was the no fly zone, which was later expanded during the push-up administration. But we were out there to fly what turned out to be what I called my first

15:50combat mission. Even though I was flying Operation Southern Watch and those were considered to be combat missions, the first one way actually dropped bombs was on January 13th of 1993, two years after Desert storm. And it was just one of those things where at the end of the push administration, Bush 41 said, hey, I'm tired of my guys getting shot at during these OSW missions. It's time to beat back the defenses a little bit. So that's what we ended up doing. That I would call the combat mission. I have a little bit of a different view of combat than the United States. If you drop in weapons or somebody's actually shooting at you, that's combat. If you're just flying over someplace where they're not going to buy you a bus ticket, if you get shot down or if you're airplane loses both engines, they're not going to buy you a bus ticket to the border. I don't consider that to be combat personal. But it's not the way it appears in my logbook. That's just Woody's view. So you're flying basically these missions over Somalia and then Iraq and that's a Desert Storm one war. After Desert Storm one, yes, two years after. Desert Storm was in 1991. Two years later,

16:53we did a contingency strike in 1993. Sort of lost in the history books. You won't see it because there were only about three days of strikes, but it was there. Okay. And then you support a southern watch. Correct. Was that different than flying strike ops? I just want to get the vernacular right in the way that we need to talk about aviation. What does that in the Navy mean? Then you started flying strike ops. Yeah. Strike ops was a title. You're technically the Airwing Strike Operations Officer. And what that means is I worked for the Airwing Commander. So this is I'm a brand new 04 at this time. The A6 had been retired. I'm flying F18s as part of the Airwing staff. By the way, flying with all three of the Hornets squadrons in the airwing. But my job is to be the strike warfare advocate for the Airwing Commander. So the things that I did were to help define to staff out, for instance, the tailored fleet introductory load, which is the carrier's bomb loadout for the airwing. We would sit down and look at the threats that we would anticipate throughout

17:55the deployment. And then the Airwing Commander had some decisions to make. How many bomb bodies, how many fuses, what kinds of weapons. At the time, it was something where the Airwing Commander had some latitude as we approached that deployment. And he didn't do this in a vacuum. But I was the guy that staffed that out for him and helped make recommendations so that he could kind of talk it over with the admiral and then the admiral and the Airwing Commander would agree on the load. That's what we'd get put on the ship for us. So that was a lot of my job. Also target selection was kind of in my wheelhouse. At least I was part of that target selection process for deliberate strikes. So for instance, on my 1997-98 around the world proves on Nimitz, we approached the Persian Gulf. I spent quite a bit of time in a cold dark room in the middle of the carrier Intel Center with a squadron CO. And we selected a bunch of targets that we thought would be the right targets in case war ever returned to Iraq. And then when Operation Desert Fox happened, with the ship behind us, they used our target set to do that mission. I dug pretty deep there, Senko.

19:00Yeah, no, that's really helpful. And by the way, it turns out our listeners love diving deep into aviation stories. So no, you're in good company. Okay, so let's talk about some of those missions. Like, did you have a one that stood out? Maybe that 93 mission when you first dropped weapons? Like, what was that like? What was going on? What were you striking that type of thing? Yeah, there were two missions on that deployment that stood out to me. One was over Somalia in support of Restore Hope, which was the famine in Somalia at the time. The United Nations was there. We had Marines on the ground that were riding with relief convoys. And they were trying to keep the relief supplies from being raided by Muhammad Farah Idd's thugs, essentially, in country. At one point, I was talking to a forward air controller on the ground. Happened to be a guy who was a rag instructor of mine when I learned to fly the A6. We recognized each other on the radio and he said, Hey, can you just fly maybe 35 miles north? Can you take a look? We think there's a technical, essentially like in a Zuzu, you know,

20:03white Zuzu pickup with a 50-cal in the back. And we think it's coming our direction, but we need some confirmation. Will you go up there and just take a look? So, sure, my bombardier and navigator, Ozzy, flew up north. We spot the truck coming southbound on the road toward the relief convoys that's going northbound there about 35 miles out. And I said, well, we probably ought to get some video with these guys. Now, keep in mind, the airplane's got three marked 20 rock eyes and a 1,000 pound laser-guided bomb hanging on the wings. So I said, Hey, Oz, just to get my nose on this guy, I'm going to do a standard 30-30 pop. So we had no minimum altitude restrictions. And I flew outbound about eight miles, got the airplane going about 500 knots, turned it around. So I perpendicular to the road and just did a 30 degree right, 30 degree nose up, pop up attack, overbanked over the top, doing about 3,000 feet rolled in with about a 10 degree dive and put my nose on this guy and then designated the target with a trigger. There was no intent on our part to drop weapons. We were not clear to release on this thing. All I'm doing is getting my nose on

21:10the guy so I can point to that and so I can hand him off on the flair so that Ozzy can take a look at him and then start the recorder. So we picked up some recording. What I didn't factor into that as a young Lieutenant was what does this look like to the guys on the ground who have just seen CNN, they've seen Desert Storm. They know what airplanes look like when they're in attack. And that's what we looked like to them. We looked like a threat. The 50 cowl went out the right side of the truck. All the dudes went out the left side of the truck. There were about 15 of them stacked on this thing. And the truck took a hard right 90 into the dirt and got stuck in the dirt. Everybody got their heads down. They were thinking that we were bombing them. We were not. But it scared the heck out of those poor guys. So now a couple of young mutants. We thought it was one of the funniest things we'd ever seen. And quite frankly, we'd taken care of the threat for our buddy Beagle who was the Ford Air Controller. So mission accomplished without firing a shot. That said, that was one of my more memorable missions. The Iraq mission was a little bit different in that it was a medium

22:10altitude strike with two two thousand pound bombs on a data link facility that was in Iraq, part of their integrated their defense system. And for that mission, we were getting shot at quite a bit. A lot of AAA coming up. None of it was really a factor because as we've discovered during Desert Storm, the big threat with AAA was when you were down low and anybody could shoot at you. But if you're up high, you have some opportunity to just not be near it. And I happened to be on night vision goggles that evening. One of four airplanes in the strike that was in the intruders strike that was we had 14 intruders. Four of them had night vision goggles. So it was easy to see the AAA and it was quite frankly easy to avoid it. But that was the combat mission of Iraq. And yeah, that was memorable. Forty degree dive from medium altitude, getting the bombs off, hitting the target, and then coming back home. And then I learned what every other naval aviation learns, which was the real threat was not a target, but the real threat was the back of the ship, which I almost met head on because I sort of dropped my guard and relaxed when I came back to land on the carrier

23:13at night. The paddles was more than generous and gave me a nice, okay, pass even though I taxied right into the one wire like a fool. So that was my one strike in Iraq. And yeah, again, not so bad didn't shot at but coming back to the ship and dropping the pack. That's not a good idea. Yeah, you know, that is actually a really good point with regard to test missions. The most dangerous aspect of test missions is usually like the goings and comings, right? So getting out to the test, getting back, of course, also getting gas during test missions. And I think this is true for operations in general, like we're all keyed in when we're really engaged with that tactic, that moment, that test point, whatever it may be. And then yeah, there's something that you got to fight to stay really focused. And I can only imagine, you know, I'm coming back to runways that aren't moving, right? I can only imagine having to really stay focused and keep that up when you have such a enormous challenge in front of you of catching that wire.

24:16Well, expand on that, Sinko, because and you and I can analyze this together. But think about what's your awareness? What have you studied the most as you're getting rid of you out on that test mission? You're looking at those cards, you're getting ready to fly those profiles, you're going to turn on the telemetry for the engineers on the ground. Where's your awareness? Where's your focus? It's on the mission itself, right? The rest of it, we tend to call, you know, administration or tactical administration. So we tend to minimize that even in the brief, right? Yeah, it's standard. Hey, any questions, uh, ground-op standard, we're going out to the airspace standard. And you're like, well, wait a second. There's like 18 of us going out to the airspace. How we get out there safe? And that's common to test, let's common to tactical missions. We tend to always brief it that way, which is sort of interesting. Well, it's like Red Flag or Northern Edge. The mission itself is a hoot. It's a blast and you're ready for it. It is actually getting like the fights on, getting to the fights on, and then getting home from those missions that are really intense. I mean, some of the closest calls I've had are

25:18just in a stack out in the skies in Nevada. Yeah, I will tell you, I did a Red Flag in the mid-90s, just around the time that Desert Storm was going on. We were still back in the states during that conflict. And when we were in Nellis, the recoveries were, like you said, they were sporting. Lots of airplanes in not much sky. And so that was, yeah, that was sporty stuff. Yeah, you got to be on it. All right, well, cool. So you kind of evolved through the 90s. And you find yourself joining the reserves at this time. I do. And now you're a part of the No Fly Zone over DFW in the days right after 9-11. What was that like, you know, flying combat air patrol over American soil? Yeah, that was an interesting time. Of course, it's 9-11. And we're approaching the 25th anniversary of that in just a few days, right? Yeah. So 9-11 is etched on, for anybody who was around that time, 9-11 is etched on your mind. The personal parts of it for me was number one,

26:20I was a 767 pilot at the time. And the 767 that was flown into the tower, the American Airlines aircraft, was the first 767 I ever flew. Wow. So does that mean, oh, my goodness, so that was a year and a half before it became American 11. That said, it just has a personal connection with me. The aircraft that flew into the Pentagon, two of the victims were rear admiral Bud Flag and his wife D. They were passengers on that aircraft. Bud Flag had been a VF202 skipper at Naval Air Station Dallas in the reserves. He had retired from the reserves as a two-star admiral and he had been an American Airlines pilot. So Bud, and I didn't know this at the time when I was in 04 and 9-11 but as I've gone through life and looked at the anniversary of 9-11 every year, it strikes me the similarities that Bud's career had with mine. It really kind of takes one back.

27:22On that day, the moment the second aircraft hit the towers, which was united 175, everybody recognized that it was terrorism. My three-year-old daughter said, why did the bad men fly airplanes into the castles? Even a three-year-old could figure out that those were bad men flying airplanes into a building that shouldn't have happened. So I called the squadron and the squadron said, we don't know if we even need you or what you're going to be doing, so stay home. And then when the towers collapsed, the squadron called back, VF201 called back and said, we don't know what you're going to be doing but pack a bag and get onto the base. So I drove from my home in Fort Worth to Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, what used to be cars while Air Force Base and came into the squadron and it turned out that 10th Air Force, the general of 10th Air Force, had been assigned to establish a no-fly zone over Dallas Fort Worth and to support that, not with airborne combat air patrol but with alerts.

28:26So he was looking for anybody you could get to fly the alert. The three-year-old first fighter wing and the 457th fighter squadron were F-16s, the Marines had Hornets and the Navy had Hornets, and the Navy, we had an 0-4 and an 0-3, go to the meeting with the general and accept the responsibility just based on the fact that this was combat and we understood that that was a threat. The weirdest part about it was trying to figure out, can we really hang Air Force AIM-9s and put Air Force 20 millimeter into our jets and it turned out we could. We had to look it up but we figured it out. So next thing you know we've got live jets with live ammo on the ramp and we're sitting ready-room alert in our flight gear, eight hour shifts, augmenting the folks at the 457th. So it was F-16s and F-18s. I think they had one or two launches, we had one launch during that time and it was mostly with General Aviation pilots who hadn't read their notes and launched. One guy was flying over the Crawford, Texas, Bush 43s ranch, the Texas White House

29:32and our guys intercepted him and convinced him that it was a good idea to land. I have convinced several people over Crawford Ranch that it was a good idea to land. So you've got personal experience with that. I do. We would always sit alert there when Bush went to his ranch which was quite often so we would be flying over him or we'd be close and yes, several intercepts in the middle of the night we'd have to go find some doctor who forgot to look at flight restrictions, nonsense stuff and it was dangerous not only for them but flying at 500 feet trying to intercept something going a hundred miles an hour when you're flying 200 plus miles an hour is not an easy challenge. Yeah, I assume you did that in an eagle. That would have been a very challenging thing. When I was an instructor at Whiting, this was kind of a sidebar but there was a man in Indianapolis, Indiana who had essentially bamboozled folks out of their money and he was convicted later but he decided that what he would do was take his twin engineer

30:38and fly it to the Gulf of Mexico and jump out of the back of the airplane wearing a parachute somewhere over Alabama while leaving the airplane on autopilot where it would harmlessly crash into the Gulf and that was his plan. Well, what really happened was he did jump out and he did survive the parachute fall set up a campsite in Alabama. The airplane continued south but I think it ran out a few or it got lower and one evening after returning from a cross-country training flight on a Sunday evening at Whiting Field at about 2008, two F-15s flew over the base at about a thousand feet doing about 400 knots trying to chase this guy down and of course they I'm sure they were wearing goggles but I looked at that and went way to second that's probably two guys losing their wings not realizing they were on a valid intercept trying to get this guy. It looked really cool. It also looked like something that was quite hazardous because you're down low going fast at night

31:39you got to worry about obstacles and things like that even over a flat cartesian coordinate system like Florida. So hats off to those guys that must have been a hell of an intercept but eventually they did catch up with the aircraft and it did run out of fuel and crash in the Gulf. Later on that guy was again found apprehended and taken it. Yeah what a moron. That's horrible. Yeah I put a lot of people at risk. Yeah for real. I will say like the biggest challenge for operational illegal were the missions where the president would go like give a speech somewhere that was like never usually TFR so that is flight restriction and it's temporary so TFR but it's like no one unless you were really looking what you are supposed to do every single time make sure there's no TFR but Crawford Ranch is kind of always a TFR for the most part because the president was in and out and so it's kind of a known thing but it was when he would pop up in Orlando or Omaha or somewhere else and you really had to be doing your job by checking TFRs and people wouldn't and you would

32:41just be intercepting one individual after another that failed to do that. Helicopters and single engine planes and two engine planes and business jets and while the business jets were actually usually a problem unless they had a comm issue because they had professionals airline pilots flying them. St. Go do you fly general aviation now? No I do not. Okay so I do I am a flying addict I love to fly I will fly anything for free or for money or I just love to fly airplanes that's just my thing but I do fly general aviation and there's an application out there called for flight and if you're using for flight or any of the other software out there this is not an endorsement necessarily but it's very easy to check notes why because the TFRs the temporary flight restrictions are graphically depicted right there on the map so if you're using that moving map on your iPad you're going to see that TFR out in front of you now you have to physically ignore the thing where I'm going with that is if you're a general aviation pilot these days just look at the map now it's got

33:43these circles on it no circles you just tap it and it goes hey it's a TFR up to 400 feet. Piece of cake man you got this thing suitcase it's much easier now than it used to be probably when you were flying double equal yeah indeed all right everyone go out and buy for flight. Just know it is brought to you by Garmin I don't know whoever makes one I don't even know who produces it it's for flights great but we would use it we start bringing it into the cockpit of fighter aircraft on our electronic keyboards okay so you do this no fly zone work and you end up as a last commanding officer of your hunter squadron before it stood down what was it like having an inside view of the decision to like disestablish I guess a reserve VFA squadron one of the most heartbreaking leadership challenges I ever had the hunters had been around for 34 years they'd started out in F8s we had folks in the squadron who had been in the squadron for greater than 20 years not pilots but maintainers one officers folks like that so the squadron had a rich history of personnel by

34:45the way that squadron in 2003 was activated mobilized and sent to see with carrier air wing eight on USS Theodore Roosevelt for the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom the shock and all campaign one of the best deployments actually the best deployment I have ever seen just because the squadron was so good you have to keep in mind that these are reservists so the most junior guy in the squadron is an oh four and we have 505s and 1304s in this squadron and all of them are immaculately qualified many of them are former keg landing signal officers so they were air wing LSOs many of them are top gun graduates like six or seven of them top gun graduates most squadrons have one maybe two the average flight time of our guys in that squadron in the foreign it was 2300 hours the average fleet squadron flight time is 800 so that will tell you right there just the experience level of the squadron was incredible and the same thing was reflected on our maintenance side when we looked at

35:51our maintainers we had a couple of guys that were engineers across the runway at Lockheed work on f16s and f35s and then they would come over and wrench on f18s we had folks who worked for AT&T we were immaculately qualified oldest airplanes in the fleet and our readiness rates were higher than the active duty guys just because our guys were so good at maintaining the aircraft so keep in mind that's the legacy that I inherited when I took over command of the squadron in 2005 and then shortly after taking command I learned that the squadron was being considered for shutdown it was a punch of the gut there were three reserve squadrons at the time f18 reserve squadrons vfc12 in oceana vf204 new orlands and vf201 the hunters in fort worth texas from a business case standpoint the hunters made sense to keep around we had the easiest demographics was so easy to recruit you had an american airlines hub a southwest airlines hub fed x pilots you had it was

36:54centrally located very easy to get pilots to that squadron and the same thing worked with our maintenance folks so when the decision was made to shut down 201 I kind of looked and said well wait why not shut down 204 in new orlands the problem was that hurricane Katrina had just hit new and the navy and the federal government for that matter didn't want the optics of while we just had a hurricane to come through so we're pulling out we're leaving in the orlands high and dry and that was the gist of most of the decision-making now that comes from my lens I get that but quite frankly if you looked at the business case we were overmaned and under budget and it made sense to keep us around and instead we were the squadron chosen for shutdown and the other two squadrons the one that went to combat was chosen the other two squadrons not so much I learned right there that politics overrides business case in most situations so I know that sounds terrible it sounds

37:57so defeatist but it just happens to be part of reality yeah I think that we have to acknowledge that there are things that play and sometimes they are political and it frustrates me because we want clarity we want transparency we want meritocracy and political decisions don't always seem to us to reflect that but there is another side of it which is like that is kind of our democracy right like there's an aspect of just politics in general that are a part of who we are as a country and we have to be willing I guess to accept some of those challenges though try to mitigate the downside celebrate the upside of you know democracy and politics in general but it does seem like often too often there are decisions where it's not clear because the politicians themselves are not transparent with regard to why a decision is happening because I feel like nowadays people can't

38:59actually share how they really feel about anything because of the polarization and the challenges with you know miss and disinformation and social media and all of this I feel like it's getting harder and harder for truthtellers I would say that's very true I like to think that I surrounded myself with people who tell the truth and that I am a person who tells the truth I get that opinions vary and that many of the things that I would consider to be truth are opinions but I also very much believe that there is an objective truth and in this case the objective business decision would be let's keep 201 around the political decision and there are some behind the scene stories that I won't share today but there are some behind the scene stories that allowed VFA 204 to stick around now don't get me wrong VFA 204 is a good squad and they still are they have been put into the adversary role because that's where the navy needs them now frankly that was something that

40:00the reserves did quite a bit of in the strike fighter communities so a lot of adversary stuff that's why I went to the top gun adversary course in the 2000s where I first met Jellah the previous host of this podcast he was a top gun instructor when I was going through the adversary course by the way really interesting course because it's symbiotic the folks who are getting their strike fighter tactics instructor qualification need bad guys right what better way to give them bad guys to shoot at than to put other guys through an adversary course and teach them how to be professional bad guys so you had top gun instructors teaching the new SFTIs and you had top gun instructors teaching the new adversary experts and we would go through and learn adversary and by the way there was also one for controllers so the guy sitting in the E2 controlling the fight also gets to hone his skills at the controller schools so all three of those things go on at the same time at the navy fighter weapon school what came first was it the Air Force aggressors or the navy or did one of the

41:03services lead with this idea of professionalizing red air yeah I wish I knew that would be something I'd have to look up quite frankly it's interesting that the Air Force calls them aggressors and the navy calls them adversaries I don't care it's kind of like back in the old days when we couldn't agree how to pronounce S E A D you remember the Air Force called it seed and the navy called it C add and I think we eventually said okay well we'll start calling it seed as well we just couldn't forget how to pronounce it right yeah it's like saying boat and boat right that's right somebody asked me about boat the other day what is a boat I don't get that like it's it's a ridiculous way to pronounce the word boat that's buddy we know it also it reminds me of the endgad is the next generation air dominance fighter and gad right the navy calls it njad and it's the same acronym NG A D the Air Force NG A D but so it's NGAD versus NJAD don't worry I think you guys are going to win that fight yeah I feel like we probably will the navy probably cares more about getting more hornets

42:09and thank you air dominance probably so well hey listeners we will be right back and talk to the admiral a little bit about his experience is a nav scent vice commander fighter pilot podcast listeners a quick sidebar the future belongs to those who prepare for it and nobody gets her alone grab the national bestseller unlocking the last 20 percent the playbook for becoming the discipline resilient purpose driven leader your wingman are counted by sharpen your edge build your tribe and show up ready for each other that's the fighter pilot way get your copy now at fighterpilotpodcast.com wherever you get your books and audiobooks now back to the show this episode is brought to you by google chrome you think you know a browser but jim and i and chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks jimin i and chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no

43:14place like chrome check responses set up require compatibility and availability very s18 plus all right welcome back everyone as a vice commander of nav scent fifth fleet you were there in June 2019 right I believe yep and you were close to a real shooting war with Iran at that time what was that like yeah we were very close to that the commander at the time was uh vice admiral jim maloy a great american who happened to be uh he went from there to be the deputy commander central command and then retired just a superb leader and we've seen nothing but superb leaders out at fifth fleet the best of the navy's flag officers typically go there because you're going to see some combat the current commander at nav scent the fifth fleet commander is a vice admiral kirt rendshaw and uh he was the deputy commander at nav scent when i was the vice commander his first flag job was to be the deputy commander out there as a brand new baby one star so the two of us were there together and the commander was on a trip so we were acting the two

44:21of us and uh all of a sudden Iran starts hanging lipid mines on ships of merchant ships that are going through the area again this is something that sort of gets lost to history unless you're personally there involved in it and i will tell you that kirt rendshaw was a superb leader as a baby one star took control of the surface picture like it just immediately and the two of us kind of triage the situation until we could get the commander back but it was part of several weeks of misbehavior by a ran which culminated in the shoot down of an rq four drone over the streets of hormones in june of 2019 this all happened within about a four week period the drone was over international waters as you know the rq four is about the size of a seven thirty seven and it got shot down uh we won't go into the reasons why or how but it did get shot down and it was Iran's fault

45:21and at that point president trump in his first term had had enough of that and uh we started planning for strikes against Iran this is common knowledge by the way none of this is classified but the bottom line was uh my two week trip to facilitate a turnover between the deputy commanders turned into a i think it was a seven week trip by the time the whole thing was over and i'm finding myself out there going huh how did i get here how did this happen so help supervise the plan of the strikes and helped with the uh you know of course we closely coordinated with uh afscent air force central command down in uh cutter and the strikes were almost a go and then at some point and general mckenzie who was the sent comp commander talks about this in his book at some point somebody makes the decision that maybe this isn't the right time to do this maybe we're going to hit Iran but Iran might hit back and it might be more lethal than we'd want to see so the strikes

46:23were called off pretty much at the last minute and things tend to cool down again quite frankly i think it was the right decision and that was not my decision to make it the time but i think that calling the strikes off at that point made sense and it got us to start to think about how to better defend against an attack from Iran and keep in mind how their offences or their offensive weapons have evolved over time when we first started desert storm we had three carriers in the Persian Gulf we could do that because there were very few missiles that could get out there and touch a carrier and in fact irons missile technology since then has evolved they've had plenty of help but they're also very good at missiles and they've got drones now they've got missiles and all those missiles can range the southern part of the Persian Gulf all the way into Saudi Arabia if they want to and we've seen them demonstrate that capability in fact we saw them demonstrate capability where a two-stage missile left Iran and went out towards what was

47:28it Diego Garcia wasn't it very early in the conflict so again their technology has increased immensely and i don't know that we fully took that into account until June of 2019 and partly the reason that casualties have been low even though the Bahrain base has taken some hits has been because we prepared this time out so for right now during the current conflict we are much more prepared tactically to respond to irons aggression so that's what i would say yeah that's really interesting because you don't really think about well people should but how things are playing out now have actually been you know kind of in motion for years of course our relationship with Iran is just so complex you know starting from 79 revolution and everything and there's just so much history there but the reality is like the current war that we're fighting yeah i mean said in motion as tactics are developing but as technology is proliferating as autonomy becomes more of a

48:33reality as missiles are more easily manufactured as logistics make it easier to transport from one adversary selling to another adversary put it that way and you know i think that we need to appreciate that not only is it clearly a challenge that we're seeing play out right now but my mind goes to okay well how do we account for the next challenge how is this going to continue to accelerate how do we prepare now for what will be in a few years and trying to account for the rapid acceleration in this technology and i think that it does take a lot of foresight and i think it takes investment and we're trying to catch up with some of that now but it is a very complicated and complex problem that we face i think as a nation as a free world really to kind of account for the way that adversaries are able to more easily adapt and adapt because of the advancements that have been made in technology

49:37so synco if you're thinking about that do you think china's thinking about that do you think iran is thinking about that what about russia are they thinking about that i think everybody is watching both the russia you crank conflict and quite frankly the us in a wrong conflict right now and having those same questions are coming up in everybody's minds and the conflict in iran again it's not new when i was out there and again i was a reserved so i showed up part time i made 19 trips to the middle east over two years and spent 200 days a year doing that while also being an airline pilot with american so when i would come back to the states i'd fly as an airline pilot and then proof i would get back on an airplane and travel to the middle east and be out there for several weeks as the vice commander in the fifth week by the way one of the best leadership jobs i ever had i loved the team out there we had a staff of about 550 in the headquarters building one of my favorite things about that job was being kind of the morale police i had noticed that people worked very hard

50:40out there long days long hours stressful work as you're constantly trying to assess the threat and make sure that we're reacting properly to it and that we're ready to respond to it in case it becomes kinetic but the things that happened around that region were also important for instance Yemen had a civil war going on at the time the hoothies versus the Yemeni government and it was a proxy war because the Saudis lined up with the Yemeni government and so did the Emirates and the hoothies were being supplied missiles and missile technology and technical advisors by iran so the war was already going on in the middle east even at that time the hoothies like to take pot shots at Saudi merchant ships that would come through the straits of al-Bam and dep the entrance to the southern end of the red sea and that happened quite a bit so we would watch these things go on by the way you can see youtube videos of iranian designed missiles like the r27 which is a long-burn alamo

51:42that was turned into a surface to air missile so the alamo of course being an advanced Russian air to air missile but somehow it was turned into a surface to air missile with an optical sensor and you can see a youtube video of an f15 Saudi f15 taken a hit from an r27 the r27 gets launched the f15 knows that he's being targeted plugs in after burnabit stays straight level and then it pops one of his horizontal stabilizers off by the way not the best missile defense I've ever seen just plug it in the blowers that's probably not work that's not going to do it y'all you got to do something yeah you got to move you got to use some expendables and he did none of those things so you're clearly an advocate of what's going on with naval aviation and carry strike group and all that I know the jr.lr Ford recently you know came back and they have the emails I believe in the age on that like is there any myth busting or things you want to talk to regarding takeaways from those systems or your perspective so to your point I am an advocate and I'm an

52:47observer and I think we all see the same data everybody who's out there sees the same data lately I watched another podcast where an aviator said hey I had an uncle who was a really smart guy and he said that if anybody tries to hook up to a magnet and launch off a ship don't do it you know and I went well that's an interesting analysis but it's not exactly what I would call data informed so let's talk about the jr.lr Ford very quickly the leadership of the Ford great folks those guys came back from a 324 day deployment 11 months kind of setting records remember when the ship rolled out of the yards in 2017 people were really worried about the advanced technology on that ship one of them being the emails which is the electromagnetic aircraft launch system the a g which is the advanced arresting gear system also electromagnetic and the last one is the advanced weapons elevators the a w e so those three systems are all new to that ship it's an electric ship it has two I think 600 kilowatt generators in the belly that are powered by

53:50nuclear reactors of course and it is an electric ship versus a steam hydraulic ship like nimitz class carriers and then the conventional carriers before when the ship came out it had reliability issues with the catapults but then so does every new technology if you remember the v22 when it was first flying we were killing people on test flights and there was a lot of stress and a lot of ringing of hands do we cancel this program well here's what happened with v22 right the v22 goes to combat and what do we find it's saving lives because it can get soldiers wounded soldiers off the battlefield quicker and get them back to those natal medical facilities and get them patched up many lives have been saved because of the osprey there's still plenty helicopter pilots out there that are suspicious of the osprey but quite frankly I think it's a proven technology I think emails has gone down this same path and a 324 day combat deployment with combat in Venezuela and Iran

54:50proves that no significant issues with the catapults or the arresting gear and by the way the aircraft carrier can generate more sustained sorties than any other carrier when I was a strike operations officer in you know airwing nine back in the day we did a thing called surgex it was a 98 hour well I think it was a hundred hour actually we wanted the ground it up but it was a hundred hours of surging aircraft carrier flight ups and our goal was to get 240 sorties a day for four days that was what we were trying to do now in order to make that happen we had to heavily script this thing and one of the hardest parts about it is getting weapons from the basement of the aircraft carrier getting them built up and getting them to the flight deck and by the way that's a single file line so if you screw that up if you don't have that plan correctly on your load plan or on your airplane as you get the day going or when airplanes start to break or if things start to go right you cause what we call a train wreck the train wreck with weapons means hey you don't have

55:52the right weapons on the right airplanes and you might sand airplanes on a strike with the wrong weapons to do the mission that they're supposed to be doing so this all becomes a bit of a problem can I tell you Ford doesn't have those problems number one they don't push weapons through the mast decks they have weapons that go on an elevator straight from the weapons deck all the way up to the flight deck and so the possibility of a train wreck is completely mitigated it's incredible how much that gets done and just because of the emuls just because of the way the carrier is designed that thing can produce 270 sorties in a surge in a 24 hour period versus 240 on a sustain basis instead of 120 sorties a day like an immense class carrier it can do 160 so the numbers because of the design of the ship and because of the electromagnet catapults make it a better platform my advice to naval aviation to the president and I get an animal retired two star

56:54reservists what do they care but my educated advice as a dative observer would be mr. president take the win this thing went out into performed great bring it back and take the win that said there may be other things going on we may be concerned about high EMP I would imagine and we're going to get into classified territory some middle of void any specifics but I would imagine the ship is shielded against that so anyway I just think the mere numbers of in the operations world from a guy who used to be a strike ops officer show that the the Ford class carrier better ship nice and you're talking to someone who doesn't know the difference between any of them so I agree with you completely and you say emails I say emails emails emails emails I don't even know and get in jad emails nice try you don't get a vote on this one sinko okay all right fine but you know that's no really interesting I don't think I have been tracking kind of the drama behind

57:59this whole electromagnetic interference or you know protection challenge with this magnetic catapult but that's fascinating I just knew it's going to be more efficient and have less mechanical challenges so yeah it's really good to hear that perspective it's like anything else though I mean so you flew in F15 F15s got electronics right just like everything else did you guys worry about EMP yeah yeah I mean we tested for it we just made sure that it was accounted for through our flight test effort so you made sure the aircraft was shielded I have to believe that even if people are worried about EMP on a carrier that it's been tested that it's probably I mean I don't have any data but I think it's been tested me neither but I can only imagine I mean people know how we've been testing things for decades and yes we make mistakes every once in a while but yeah I can only imagine that someone accounted for some of the challenges that let me repeat something that Yanke Cummings said when he was on this podcast and he's a former commanding officer of the

59:00Ford by the way my favorite joke in the United States Navy perhaps is Yanke Cummings of Southy from Boston saying that in the Navy's infinite wisdom they put me in command of a ship with three eyes in the name jailed a Ford that's about my best Yanke Cummings impression I can't do it any better than that but Yanke is a super smart guy and I knew him when he was an 04 when we were in air wing nine together and Yanke talked about acceleration on the catapults because it's an electromagnetic catapult and it's not just steam you're not just opening a valve and shove an piston because it's electromagnetic you can modulate the acceleration which means and by the way just like for those of you that drive Tesla automobiles you have instantaneous torque when you press the accelerator on a Tesla right but you can modulate that acceleration so it's easier on the aircraft and oh by the way it's instantaneously available when you go from say a very heavy manned fighter aircraft to a light unmanned autonomous aircraft that doesn't need that kind of acceleration

1:00:05so you can get more airplanes off the ship because you don't have to wait for the steam pressure to build if you're going from light airplane to heavy airplane or vice versa it's a better system from an operator standpoint that alone is something we have to think about when it comes to appear to appear fight yeah no indeed so really good thoughts on that you know as you're going through all your aviation experience you know I'm curious you were involved in test class school a little bit I'd love your perspective on flight tests and you ended up not becoming a patch wearing test pilot but how did that unfold yeah that's an interesting time of life for me it was very uncertain so to be clear I went to channel eight following my first C-tour and try to lay California is near the town of rich crest it's a beautiful place it's out in the middle of the high desert nestled in the coastal mountain range on the eastern side of the Sierra's so it's bordered by the Owens Valley and the saline valley and the pamphlet valley all these dry lake beds really interesting place and

1:01:06I think you were an Edwards guy weren't you I was yeah so yeah so you're familiar with all that geography and I actually flew a couple of test flights out of Edwards as a China Lake guy we had an A6 test that we ran out of Edwards Air Force Base due to its high classification one of the interesting things though was that I showed up at China Lake as what we call the blue collar test pilot and so in other words I'm flying test and I'm doing developmental work but I'm not a test pilot school trained guy now that wasn't really a problem because most of what we ended up doing was operational flight program regression testing and I did that in both the A6 and Trudor and again I was dual qualified in the F-18 Hornet so let's say in the morning I'd fly an A6 and the afternoon I'll fly a Hornet but I had this itching feeling probably because of my engineering background that I needed to apply to test pilot school so I applied before I got the China Lake and then I applied after I got the China Lake and every six months I put in a new application so that after three years I had applied to test pilot school and been turned down six times so a lot of notes

1:02:08but I'd been turned down for different reasons at first it was your academic performance code is too low in other words you got crappy grades in college my fault I should have tried order that's number one number two you're an A6 pilot the A6 is being retired we don't need A6 test pilots both are legitimate reasons by the way to not send me to test pilot school and by the way they didn't say you're not qualified they just said you're not competitive but after three years at China Lake where I was doing all sorts of tests in in both aircraft and by the way after a while they gave me great responsibility in the F18 where I was the primary shooter on some radar operational flight program testing so I actually got the fly the shooter aircraft and flip the radar switches and test the modes that we were testing throughout the hop and the chief test pilot came to me as my tour ended as the admels aid at the lake and he said hey you're flying two airplanes you're doing great work all the engineers like you you take good notes you're a good debriefer I guarantee you that if you

1:03:10apply for test pilot school just one more time the seventh time seven times then I guarantee you we can get you picked you'll get test pilot school but you have to be an aviation engineering duty officer when you graduate in other words you'll be in the test community for the rest of your career and as much as I liked test flying I realized it wasn't really my home what I really liked was the tactical world I liked tactical aviation I liked going to sea I liked getting cats and traps so that became kind of my that was my point and I had to thank him profusely because I was captain dog lips and a great guy but I said you know sir as much as I really appreciate the photo confidence I think my home is the fleet you know I think that's such a powerful lesson for our listeners and you know for me and for you you know as we continue on our journey at times we just we romanticize or we think that something is supposed to happen a certain way and we push for it and we fight for

1:04:11it and we fight for it and we and sometimes it does require that fight to get to the other end and be like yeah this is exactly what I wanted and you're exactly where you need to be and at other times you're fighting for it but you get to a point where you're like you know I actually don't know if that's what I want to do anymore and being open to that pivot I think is essential because regardless we need to appreciate how we're drawn to a certain moment in our life where we can make that decision and had we not been drawn to that one moment at that time we probably would have made a different decision but you know being clear eyed listening to the right voices in our life and just appreciating in that instance like what is the best choice for me and being once again just able to say okay you know that's not for me that is something that I'd be pursuing for maybe for the wrong reasons and there's this other thing that I want to continue to go after and I just love it because we don't know necessarily where we are in that story but we know that like we have a

1:05:12responsibility to show up and to listen to the right people and then to be willing to go and possibly a different direction than we initially thought and it's okay it's okay because it's a rewarding journey nonetheless and I think the discerning is the hard part but I'd love kind of how you were brought to this moment and you discerned in that moment that it wasn't for you and I'm not sure your thoughts on that but I feel like we're always struggling with that and it's a good struggle to have and it's a challenge but important nonetheless so in if I may underscore your point in my way I'm sort of a forest gump of naval aviation and maybe a better call sign for me would have been gump or forest but if I would have had my way at the start of my life I would have been in F-15 or an F-16 pilot in the United States Air Force God had better plan for me next thing I know I'm in the Navy if I would have had my way I would have started out as a Hornet pilot in the United States

1:06:14maybe out of Jacksonville Florida that didn't happen instead I went to Woodby Island Washington where I flew this ugly drumstick of an airplane called the A-6 intruder but I learned so much in that and if I would have had my way I would have been a rag instructor but I didn't get that job I became a test pilot and if I would have had my way I would have gone to test pilot school but I didn't go to test pilot school I found out that maybe that's not the best path and if I would have had my way I would have been a Hornet department head and stayed on active duty and been a Hornet pilot as long as I could have but I didn't get to do that so I ended up going to the reserves and shockingly going to the reserves and by the way I never started out wanting to be an airline pilot but my plan was sub-optimal my plan was not good the path that my life has gone on between meeting my wife and having a family and then I never planned on retiring as an admiral are you kidding me

1:07:17who plans on that that was never going to happen but I kept sticking around and I kept leading and next thing you know I'm retiring as a two-star how the heck did that happen I am literally the most unlikely admiral you will ever meet if you were to look at my service record and see the record of failure in my career as it appears on paper you'd go how the heck did this guy even get promoted the O5 much less O8 so my plan is not nearly as good as God's plan has been for my life and I'm not a prosperity guy I'm not saying there haven't been struggles what I am saying is that as a decision maker I'm blown away at how bad some of my decisions are but how good things have worked out for me but they mostly work out well because I just kept my head down and worked hard and tried to do the right thing for folks around me not necessarily for me yeah no I love it and it's the people that we surround ourselves with the community that we build hey man brother I think it's

1:08:19the voices that we listen to because it's hard to once again discern it's easy to appreciate with gratitude that we have been given so much and our response to that and I don't mean like yeah you could think of it spiritually like we've been blessed in our lives but I know I mean like we've been given so much as a nation we've been given so much for the people that have sacrificed before us from people that we didn't know that fought in different wars to our parents and our loved ones that sacrificed for us to be able to go to school and to pursue sports or to pursue the academy or to pursue whatever it was in our life right we've been so fortunate and having gratitude and just showing up and then also just appreciating that it's gonna unfold a way that you didn't expect it's fine right like the next step is just to show up again be present that next day and try to be that voice for someone else when they need discernment or help with their discernment so that's it's a beautiful expression the way that you talked about it you know if I had my way you know dot dot dot I feel the same way and I think so many people are in that moment right they're like

1:09:25in the dot dot dot they don't know how it's gonna end up but I want to give them encouragement that they have a responsibility just to show up and that's how we kind of earn the sacrifice of so many that have gone before amen to that and speaking of those who have gone before I mean that's I've been blessed to have met so many superstars of naval aviation when I was a young grandson and a stash I get to meet bug roach I don't know if you know who that is I've heard of him yeah bug roach was probably the navy's most celebrated and just amazing landing signal officer absolutely amazing in fact at hook every year at the tail of convention they do a bug roach mixer he was beloved extraordinarily talented landing signal officer and it had this giant kind of reminds me a little bit of Robin old but bug roach had this giant Vietnam veteran giant handlebar mustache completely out of her eggs war as flight suit you know with the zipper all the way done down to his naval and just talk like he was your bro no matter how junior you were and I met this guy

1:10:28and it was like meeting a Hollywood movie star and I didn't even have a full appreciation of who he was when I was an answer and just happened to run into him at the halls of commander naval air forces specific where he was on staff and he knew the guy I was with the commander I was with but I didn't know him and I just remember you know I look back on that I met Doug Heng doll at sear he was my interrogator Doug Heng doll was a young seamen that was blown over the side of the ship that memorized all the when he went to the Hanoha hill memorized all the names of all of the prisoners of Hanoha Hilton and brought those names back to the tune of Old MacDonald had a farm to get a full accounting of the prisoners of war so got to meet him ambassador Chris Stevens who was killed in 2012 on 9-11 Benghazi Libya was a classmate of mine at the national war college he and I were buddies and hung out he and another officer and I called ourselves the losers club because we were the only guys taking the China class in the afternoon on a Wednesday where everybody else at the school had gone home but we were taking that class but Chris Stevens an incredible diplomat and incredible statesman

1:11:33who sadly again perished on 9-11 that's a whole different conversation but I've been blessed by the associations and then by the folks that I haven't met whose shoulders we do stand on just to do this job so yeah love it amen amen fantastic all right well I'd like to transition real quick to patreon so we have remarkable patreon subscribers if you're interested in becoming one go to fighterpilotpodcast.com and you can sign up those subscribers and their support allow us to be a show they also get extra footage bonus material they have an opportunity to ask our guests questions and then in general they're just an interaction that we really celebrate so if you want to learn more go back to fighterpilotpodcast.com and look into becoming a patreon subscriber we'd love to connect with you in that fashion so with that here's a question from one of our subscribers Michael Tennis asked you spent 13 years on active duty and 22 years in reserves what did the reserves give you

1:12:35that a purely active duty career could not have that's a great question where you guys get these questions that's awesome yeah great question so there's a big difference one of the differences is that as a reservist especially as an aviator I started gaining experiences in airline pilot right so I am gaining flight experience flying transport category aircraft that I had never flown until I was taught to do that by my airline now it was something that shares the basic tenets of flying but it was good so I learned things about how the air traffic control system operates how airplanes fly even that I didn't know as a fighter pilot that's one of the things the other thing is that because I'm a part-time guy and I would see this in Bahrain if you're in the pot and the heat on the water gets turned up gradually then eventually you become the boiled frog right but if you're the guy who comes out who leaves for four weeks and then comes back for another four weeks you see a

1:13:35different snapshot than the one that you saw when you left so when it came to evaluating command climate seeing what the morale of the people was like as a reservist that was interesting for me it's fun that I've read Jimmy Doe Little's autobiography and if anybody out there has not read this the title of it is I could never be so lucky again and Doe Little another MIT guy Sinko was a guy who was a reservist and yet this incredible leader and you could argue that the Doe Little Rays maybe our first aviation special operations mission right it meets all the qualifications its joint it's using aircraft in ways that they don't normally get used you know that's good but what's interesting about being a reservist is that you bring experience from outside of the military into the military and I'm not sure the active component always appreciates that I get it I'm not the guy who's there all the time so I'm probably not as smart as some of my active duty counterparts

1:14:39but I do bring a unique perspective that probably needs to be listened to and I don't mean to say that I wasn't listened to that's certainly not the case I had great relationships with all the leaders that I worked for but it is one of those things that I did bring that was different than my active component counterparts I have got to jump on a soapbox real quick if you'll allow me so I think that an active duty force is vital you absolutely need the professional full time airman soldier marine what have you sailor spaceman guardian kidding space man but you need them essential in the same breath I think we have got to lean more on a reserve in guard individuals because they're the ones especially with emerging technology they're the ones that on the outside are working with technology unencumbered by the military bureaucracy so they're the ones coding more freely they're the ones using a drone more effectively without

1:15:41having to go through you know all these wickets of approval because it's commercial right it's just something that as a society it's easier to deal with that type of technology on the outside while the military of course has to be concerned about how to adopt it ethically responsibly for missions that are much more serious than you know maybe a commercial exercise of that same type of technology but in general I think that an absolute key for our success moving forward is leaning more into our reservists and guardsmen because they are the ones that actually have these experiences that they can then when they're in uniform really accelerate the adoption and know who to contact on the based on the outside on the industry side to make things happen more seamlessly and so I think it is just so essential I think we need to lean into it more and I am really keen on us trying to figure out a way to allow people to go in and out of uniform more easily and bring in those experiences which are going to be essential in a war that just you know is going to require

1:16:46more agility rant over sinko I'm going to give you a hallelujah and a man on that one so if I can say it may be in a little bit of a different way but I agree with you 100% this is a yes and kind of a point the reserve component it brings experience so consider the Navy reserves is a navigator you can't get into the Navy reserves and fly on a reserve aircraft until you're somewhere between the 11 and 13 year mark in your activity career so everybody in that reserve squadron is incredibly experienced and that's a good thing but to your point also many of us have civilian jobs that then add to the capabilities of the reserves and I'm thinking right now in terms of cyber when it comes to cyber that's a symbiotic relationship some of the offensive cyber stuff that we can do with a reservist on the military side also help them on the defensive way on the civilian side so there are some things that the military benefits from but also the civilian sector benefits from and like you said when you talk about using drones when you start using technology absolutely the

1:17:51reserve component we need to lean on heavy now here's the difference with the active duty force you have a presence option if you need to deploy them overseas that's very easy to do with the reserve component you have more of a response option in other words you can't overuse them you have to respect the fact that they have a civilian job but when you need them you need to activate them and send them down range and so that is I would say one of the on a macro level the big difference its presence versus response yeah I really like that framing thanks for spawning that out I appreciate that so I'm curious like what do you have going on right now what's next for you well I wish like many of your guests and I see his guests on podcasts and they have all these great things that write books and they're I'm none of those things I'm a guy that now keep in mind for the last six to eight years of my Navy career where I was a Navy officer and an airline pilot I essentially had no days off that was kind of the way it worked because the flag officer world is

1:18:53very work intensive and by the way you want to see some of the hardest work in people I've ever met in my life its flag officers on active duty those guys are just incredible hard workers they really are but when I jettisoned and retired from the Navy I was just ready to okay return to my love of flying airplanes and I almost said my first love but that's not my first love my first love is my wife my first love is my faith my god but airplanes is a close second and my wife knows that airplanes are my mistress so I am building an RV 8 built by vans aircraft I'm building it way slower than I would like I wish it built itself but it doesn't so I'm doing that and I'm learning a ton and I own a vintage 1974 to catholon which lately had a landing light issue that I had to get into and troubleshoot and I chased all the wires down only to realize that the reason the fuse kept blowing was because I had the wrong wattage or fault in the replacement landing light

1:19:55so anyway even the guy who's a recovering engineer recovering fighter pilot archives in VFA 2-1 used to say the most dangerous thing in the world is a pilot with a tool in his hand and their absolutely right about that so anyway I'm flying airplanes I operate out of a little airport called Arrow Country and McKinney Texas and I've got a bunch of great buddies out there they fly T6 Texans they fly Steerman and one of those guys is a newer Steerman pilot we're teaching him we're putting him through a no kidding formation course so for the last week or so I've been sitting in his cockpit and teaching him how to do a breakups and rejoins and fly the proper parade formation and fingertip and all of the things that we learned you and I learned at flight school and I'm giving him the benefit of that and teaching him how to do it safely the scariest thing to me about general aviation is when two airplanes start getting together and we don't know how those folks are trained now for the most part general aviation does a good job offering up clinics and seminars where you

1:20:56can get together with folks that have experience to teach that but it's been a pleasure for me to pass that along with the help of course of some really good guys Carl Best and Renee Dugai and of course Craig Bradshaw is the Steerman owner that we're putting through the paces there but those guys are just wonderful human beings and it's fun to get to hang out with them and just be a pilot love it that's great faith family flying there you go yeah those are the three F's I hadn't even thought about that that's you got to put that on a buffer sticker sink oh three F's man I'm with you on that well it's wonderful having you rear admiral retired dug beel woody 35 years of navy aviation two wars a flag officer career in a front row seat to some of the most consequential moments in recent navy history thank you so much for being on the fighter pilot podcast think of it was a pleasure thanks for having me and I guess this is a terminate huh this is it that's it for this episode of the fighter pilot podcast these conversations matter because the future of air power autonomy and warfare is being shaped right now by people who understand

1:22:00both the technology and the responsibility that comes with it this episode was produced by Jake Wilford and Tara Gasky sound edited by the amazing Darryl Smith with artwork and YouTube production by Benjamin Todd goes by stiller if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe leave a review or support us on patreon.com patreon subscribers get an extended edition of each and every episode along with full exclusive episodes really access to all fighter pilot podcast material and an opportunity to ask our guests featured questions as always fly smart take care of your people deliver the future sinko out you your heart can tell you a lot about your health apple watch series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and awareable so your vitals app now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off and your readiness score can let

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