Fast Jet Performance

Fast Jet Performance

By Tim DaviesSociety & CultureBusinessEducation
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Fast Jet Performance episodes

  • Presentation Tips (Email Request)

    What top tips do I have for presenting to people?

    What is the 20/20/20 rule?

    Why should you try to introduce yourself whilst standing on tip toes?

    Why you should NEVER talk to the board!

    Why are TED talks all 20 minutes long?

    ...and more awesome advice!

     

     

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    25 min
  • Why Fighter Pilots Jettison the Baggage and Why You Should Too

    I have a question for you. If you had to go to lunch tomorrow with someone that you’d never met before, would you feel nervous? It’s just like a blind date, I guess. But wait - there’s probably something that I should tell you before you commit. You are going to meet ‘yourself’ and there’s a catch. ​ http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-to-be-the-best-version-of-you-jettison-the-baggage#

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    20 min
  • Why You Should Forget the Awesome, for Now
    Want to know a pretty good way of killing yourself? Fly an aircraft long enough that you get lazy, let your standards slip and do something stupid. Highly skilled jobs need razor-sharp concentration but sometimes people lose focus. Look at some sportsmen who got to the top of their game and then messed up, think Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong. It wasn’t their technical skill that let them down, it was their standards. I’m currently writing a book about decision-making and analysing how I have made decisions over the last 20 years of flying military fast jets. Some decisions have been intuitive, ‘do or die’ ones and others have been long, drawn out rational thought processes. In flying training, decision-making is not something you are ever formally taught and tends to be wrapped up in the catch-all of ‘airmanship’. ‘Airmanship covers a broad range of desirable behaviours and abilities in an aviator. It is not simply a measure of skill or technique, but also a measure of a pilot’s awareness of the aircraft, the environment in which it operates, and of his own capabilities.’ ​Although I might have hinted at ‘skill-fade’ as a precursor to a pilot’s untimely demise, awareness, environment and capability also play a part. I tend to fly less than I used to as now my primary role is office based. I make sure that contractors give the RAF the aircraft they’ve promised to deliver, on time and to the required specifications. What this means, however, is that when I do fly, I tend to see a ‘snapshot’ of flying that was previously not available to me when I was doing it full-time. And this interests me a lot.   http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/why-you-should-forget-the-awesome-for-now

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    26 min
  • INTERVIEW: Psychiatrist on why the wrong food and environment leads to poor mental health and performance

    Today I get together with Theresa who is a Psychiatrist and mental health practitioner to talk at length on diet and nutrition and how to increase performance.

    Also covered are the problems with priorities, why we feed pilots poor food, alcohol (good and bad), clinical depression, the power of small changes, the detrimental effect of mass media, why a lack of mentors is creating a depressed workforce, suicide, PTSD and much more...

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    1 hr 5 min
  • When Good Pilots Go Bad - Mental Health Issues in the Air
    It was all going horribly wrong. I was a military fast jet pilot and I was in a spin, things were coming apart and I didn't know what to do. I was losing control and all I could think about was the end. But, as I sat in my office looking out over the airfield, I wished that I was having a real emergency in my aircraft because the one I kept having... ...was in my head.   Imagine that there's an illness in the UK that the government doesn't fully understand. If you are a man, and you catch the disease, it will kill you faster than road accidents, murder and HIV/Aids combined.  http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/when-good-pilots-go-bad

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    26 min
  • Why Pilots Think ‘BIG’ and Why You Should Too

    ‘EJECT, EJECT!’ screamed my student from the front seat of our military training jet. That got my attention. Now, there’s probably not a situation that requires more of an immediate ‘ownership’ of a problem, than in the precise moment when a pilot calls for an ejection to be initiated from an aircraft they are flying. If we were to break down exactly what would happen in the next few seconds, it might help us to understand the magnitude of my student’s decision. Initiating the ejection sequence is done by an aggressive pull of the ejection seat firing handle which detonates explosive miniature cord that is embedded in the canopy above your head. This canopy now explodes into millions of razor sharp fragments only a few inches from your face. Simultaneously, a telescopic tube with two explosive charges is fired at the rear of the seat which starts to move it up the guide rails activating an emergency oxygen supply. Personal equipment and communication leads are automatically severed. Leg and arm restraints rapidly draw your limbs in towards your body to minimise injuries that will be caused by your sudden projection into a exceptionally violent airflow. As the seat moves up and out of the cockpit, a rocket pack is fired by a lanyard attached to the cockpit floor. You are now subjected to 25 times the force of gravity which is so brutal that often your head will impact your knees should you not have time to adopt a proper ejection posture.

    Continue...

    http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/why-you-are-still-acting-small-and-what-you-can-do-about-it

     

     

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    22 min
  • Why Fighter Pilots Keep the Maths Simple and Why You Should Too
    I decided that I was not going to die today.   And with that I closed the throttle and, as the nose of my fighter jet lazily dropped below the horizon, I rolled out on a rough heading for home.   'Jester 3 is bingo, RTB.' I called over the radio, letting the other two aircraft that I was with know that I was heading home and on minimum fuel.   I was on fumes.   It's a daily occurrence when you are flying to one of the most tightly packed flying schedules in the world. In order to maximise the training value for the student pilots you have to stay in the air for as long as possible and that often means running your fuel down to frighteningly low levels. Think of it as driving past a fuel stop in the hope of reaching another one even though your car's fuel light has been on for the last 10 miles.   Except there is no hard-shoulder to park in should you get it wrong.   And the penalties for making mistakes become harsher depending on the discipline being flown. If you are flying a low-level navigation sortie, intending to pull up and fly home some 100-odd miles away from your base airfield, you calculate your required fuel to get home on the ground before you even get airborne. This way you can check that your fuel airborne matches the fuel you calculated in the planning phase when you were on the ground and your head wasn't trying to do a million other things. http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/-why-fighter-pilots-keep-the-maths-simple-and-why-you-should-too

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    54 min
  • It's all my Fault and I'm Going to Make it Right

    It was the sort of thing that only happened to other people but now it had happened to me. 'That's so wrong mate, I'd put a complaint in for sure - how dare he!' cried my friend down the phone when I told him my bad news. I'd been 'grounded' which, as a pilot, meant that I wasn't allowed to fly again until I'd been further assessed by a doctor.  I'd just had my annual aircrew medical and there had been a problem; I was over the maximum boarding weight for the aircraft by a few pounds. The doc said that he would have to inform the Squadron Boss and I knew what that meant.  But unlike my angry friend, I wasn't mad.  I was actually quite calm. CLICK HERE FOR FULL POST

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    23 min
  • Well, You Got that Wrong - Let's Talk about ‘Military' Courage

    His fist connected with my lower jaw, throwing my head back several feet from the impact.​ I didn’t feel pain as such but more of a huge disturbance, a very sudden and very real shock. I could feel something in my mouth, a tooth maybe, or part of one; I spat it out, I wasn’t going to need that anymore. My assailant stood in front of me, his hands by his side and a look of disbelief on his face. He had just thrown the hardest punch he had and, for some unknown reason, I was still standing. I’m sure that neither of us expected that. I’d been hit before but never with so much force and never with so little warning; I didn’t know why I hadn't fallen. If I’d had my mouth open it would have broken my jaw for sure; I wasn’t sure that my jaw wasn't broken, the adrenaline that results from such trauma doesn’t always allow the damage to be revealed for some time. He was stood there, looking at me. The colour was starting to drain from his face and the voices of his friends that had, until a few seconds ago been loud and eager, were now hesitant and hushed. I looked over to them; I was outnumbered 3 to 1. I knew that there was only one thing that I could do that was going to stop me getting a severe beating and it was something that I really didn’t want to happen. ‘This is not a good day for you.’ I said.  And with that, I swallowed hard and took a step forwards.

    http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/well-cameron-you-got-that-wrong-lets-talk-about-military-courage

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    31 min
  • Why You Self-Sabotage - How Planning for Failure is Giving You Permission to Fail

    My team of instructors had just told me that they were never going to fly with him again and here he was, sat right in front of me.  He had no idea.  If you are a student going through military fast jet flying training and the instructors won’t fly with you then that’s it, you fail - it really is that simple.  ‘I’m not going to fly the test for you, you are good enough to pass this course but you just need to believe that you are!’ I shouted at him.  It was the first time I had raised my voice in over 5 years of teaching fast jet pilots.  ‘I don’t want to see you for the rest of the day. Don’t go to the gym, don’t go home and play Xbox - I want you to go and think of 5 honest reasons why you shouldn’t fly a front-line military aircraft. Tomorrow we’ll fly the trip again. You will pass it when you finally believe in yourself and not a second before.’  He wasn’t a bad student and he’d had a good flying course. He’d made some early mistakes and had flown a few trips again but his performance wasn’t out of the ordinary. He was just having trouble completing the last couple of sorties - it was quite common.  But often an instructor will get upset with a student. Sometimes a student will be uncharacteristically underperforming and this can be due to problems at home, a bad nights sleep or an indifferent approach to their training.  The first two we can deal with but the third just gets us irritated and instructors don’t get upset easily, we are some chilled out dudes.  http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/why-you-self-sabotage-how-planning-for-failure-is-giving-you-permission-to-fail

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    24 min

About Fast Jet Performance

From the publisher's feed

Former Royal Air Force fighter pilot and fast jet tactical weapons flying instructor talks about performance psychology and overcoming struggle to accelerate your life.

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