Fast Jet Performance

She was crying. It happens, and I knew that the best thing to say was nothing at all. 'Fuck! My eyes just leak, I don't know why they do it, I'm so sorry!' she stuttered. Women always apologise and female pilots are no different. It’s a flaw they have that I suspect is borne out of living in a male dominated and patriarchal society that has yet to recognise them as equal. She was crying because I had failed her flight.  I’d failed her flight because she was unsafe. But, as I told her, 'We've all been unsafe at some point in our training, we just needed further guidance.’ A simple re-fly would do it.

http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/when-fighter-pilots-cry-women-and-the-end-of-vertical-ambition

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Something was very wrong in my aeroplane. My student had locked the missile onto the heat plume of the hostile aircraft and I could hear the familiar 'growl' signalling it's imminent departure. But nothing happened. We'd been flying for over 40 minutes and my trainee pilot had gradually become less talkative and less animated and, for someone who was heavily engaged in air combat with two other fast jets, this was a problem.  'You OK there, buddy?' I asked, as my student disengaged from the hostile aircraft and climbed skywards, out of the fight. 'I just think I could do it better, it didn't look right.' came the reply. But I'd seen this before and I knew it wasn't good. 

The Passionless Pilot - Why the Advice to ‘Follow Your Passion’ is Inherently Flawed 

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I am expensive. Not that I have an apartment in Knightsbridge and wear Louis Vuitton shoes, no, but to the taxpayer, I am worth a lot of money. ​ Every trainee fast jet pilot in the last 7 years has come through a school that I have been an instructor on. Training each pilot has cost the taxpayer £4 million and there has been about 30 of them per year. Quick maths says that I’ve been involved in £840 million worth of training. And my own training costs, well I could only hazard a guess. There aren’t many instructors who train instructors (how to teach other instructors) how to teach the students. It gets complicated after that but, because I commanded the team that did just this, I know there’s not many. But ‘illusions of grandeur’ and humour aside, I turn 42 this year and I really need to start thinking about finding another job. Years of teaching air combat have convinced my neck and back that they would prefer to become mattress testers but I reckon they could still be involved in some pretty fierce typing if the right consultancy firm came along. My desire to stay in the cockpit meant that further promotion passed me by like a ship in the night but I am not bitter. As I approach 18 years of service I have only worn the shackles of a desk job once - in the job I am currently in and even now I still hold a cockpit for a couple of weeks of the month.

http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/when-pilots-quit-why-we-must-stop-telling-people-they-are-valued-unless-we-truly-value-them

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Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/fast-jet-performance.

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A quote that is often attributed to John Lennon was actually first used in 1957 in an issue of Reader’s Digest by a man named Allen Saunders. …and Mr Saunders was absolutely right.But he wasn’t the only person who knew what the quote meant.When I was young, my father was a Police Traffic Officer and an Accident Investigator. In-between catching speeding motorists or breathalysing drink drivers, he would sketch intricate portrayals of vehicle accident scenes using very fine pens and on tracing paper that was admissible in court. Investigating accident sites, especially where there had been a fatality, was never an easy task and some nights, after arriving home from work, he would take a whisky up to his office where he would set about drawing his day’s work.Often I would have a sneaky look at the plans that he would create. I would wonder at how a car’s skid marks would finish where my father had drawn a tree or how neatly he had sketched the outline of a motorcyclist but had somehow forgotten to draw some of the limbs.

http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/life-is-what-happens-to-you-while-youre-busy-making-other-plans-death-on-the-roads

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Yep, my instructor had made it pretty clear that I had a choice to make and I was going to have to make it fast. Ahead of me was a valley full of low stratus and, above me, solid weather that extended up to 20,000 feet. The tops of the cavernous walls faded into grey as they were consumed by the low cloud and there was no way that I could be sure that we would make it through. The alternative was to climb out of low-level now but then the sortie would have to be repeated as I wouldn't be able to get back down to hit my target. I didn't know what to do. I was a student pilot flying a military fast jet at a height of 250 ft and covering 7 miles every minute - I had to think fast. If I pushed us into the valley, I might get just get through but if the cloud became too low then I wouldn't be able to turn around - I would be committed. And there was every chance that I might not be able to out climb the valley walls either which would mean certain death for both of us.   'Arrgghh!' I thought, 'Which decision do I take?'

http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/-if-you-dont-make-a-decision-in-the-next-5-seconds-we-are-going-to-die

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Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/fast-jet-performance.

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Did you know that some people come up with great ideas everyday that could earn them millions? It’s totally true.I had a buddy who came up with an app that he said was going to make him the next Mark Zuckerberg.He spent months refining his idea, built a business plan so he could get some capital together and kept it secret from all of his friends and even his family.He even started to learn to code so that he wouldn’t have to share his idea with an app developer.​He did everything right.Except one thing.

http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-to-create-insane-success-in-just-3-simple-steps

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Want to know what we should've been told at school? Remember those career advisors who told you to do the right thing and get a steady job like your parents did? Well, they should have been saying something else. You see, every week I get a lot of people emailing me asking what their next job move should be.

• Should they join the military or the airlines?

• Should they change careers from banking to something more ethical?

• Should they start their own business?

 And my answer is always the same. But before I tell you, there's something you should probably know about me - when I signed up to fly military fast-jets, I had no idea what I was doing.Really, I didn't. I was just a young kid who'd seen planes flying around at a few airshows and thought 'Hey, that looks cool!' I'd built some model aircraft, seen 'Top Gun' maybe 20 times and thought that one day I could be Dougie Masters from the film 'Iron Eagle'! And that was about it. So, when people ask me what they should do with their career choices - this is what I tell them.

http://www.fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/the-one-essential-piece-of-career-advice-that-you-missed-out-on-at-school

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‘RECOVER!’ came the shout from the back seat of my Tornado GR4 combat jet but it wasn’t necessary - I had already started to yank back on the controls as hard as I could! Our 25 tonne fuel laden bomber was now a treacherous 40 degrees nose down and shuddering madly as the airflow violently separated from the wing due to my impossible demands. As we broke through the base of the cloud, my Head Up Display was suddenly filled with a sickening amount of earth and fields. This was bad. The Ground Proximity Warning System sounded. ‘WOOP, WOOP! - PULL UP, PULL UP!’ ‘7, 6, 5 - that’s 400 ft Tim!’, called my Weapons Systems Officer. We were well outside ejection seat parameters and we both knew it. How had I got us into this mess?

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