18b Fill In The Blank: Fill & Download for Free

As a fighter controller, I spent the better part of a decade bossing fighter pilots - or “knuckleheads” - around, and I’m sure I’ve heard every fighter pilot joke there is.Tim Hibbetts and John Chesire will confirm that there’s a lot of friendly, and sometimes not-so-friendly, rivalry between fighter pilots and fighter controllers, who work very closely together. :)But even I will admit: it’s in no shape or form easy being a fighter pilot. It is definitely not all about hanging around in the bar singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”.The fighter pilots I worked with in the ’90s were some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known, and under an enormous amount of pressure. Most of them spent their evenings studying their aircraft’s flight manual, which ran to around 1,000 pages or so.Every day, at morning brief, there would be a quiz on a random section of the flight manual, and anybody in the squadron might be called upon to answer it. So, with everybody from the Commanding Officer down watching, the squadron training officer might, for example, put up a diagram like this, with all the items I’ve marked in yellow blanked out, and ask any pilot in the squadron to fill in the blanks:Then the training officer might ask the pilots to imagine that the fuel line is severed at a particular point in the diagram, and ask them to talk through what systems are going to be affected, and what emergency procedures are going to have to be implemented as a result.And yes, pretty much every pilot in the squadron could answer all those questions - because they’re professionals, and they study hard. Their lives depend on knowing all those things.Sure, being a fighter pilot is sometimes glamorous. You do get days where you’re dogfighting at 35,000 feet pulling G and thinking you’ve got the best job in the world, or where you get your photo taken in front of a jet in your flight suit looking glamorous. Here’s Mark Binskin in just such a photo, current Australian Chief of the Defence Force, a lovely man who took me for an F/A-18B ride many years ago:But for every moment like that, there are hours and hours of poring over flight manuals, pre-flighting jets, preparing mission computers, getting chewed out by the senior pilots for pulling too many FUIs (fatigue unit indicators - over-stressing the jets by pulling too many G - a perennial issue for junior pilots!), worrying about not being allocated enough flight hours due to budget constraints, being away from home on exercise, worrying that you won’t be promoted, worrying that you will be promoted and then won’t be able to fly any more, more studying of flight manuals, keeping fit and healthy enough to keep passing rigorous aircrew medicals, and so on.Despite how we teased them, and what Lord Flashheart would have you believe, there is no sense in which being a fighter pilot is “easy”.