Ryan Graves: UFOs, Fighter Jets, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #308

How are these interacting with our fighters? If they are, how are they interacting with the weather and their environment? How are they interacting with each other? So can we look at these and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm, especially off the east coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects.

The following is a conversation with Lt. Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot, including roles as a combat lead, landing signals officer and and rescue mission commander. He and people in his squadron detected UFOs on multiple occasions and he has been one of the few people willing to speak publicly about these experiences and about the importance of investigating these sightings, especially for national security reasons. Ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from WPI and an interest in career roles in advanced technology development, including multi agent collaborative autonomy, machine learning, assisted air to air combat, manned and unmanned teaming technologies, and most recently development of materials through quantum simulation. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Ryan. Grace, what did you think of the new Top Gun movie? How accurate was it? Let's start there.

I thought the flying was really accurate. I thought the, the type of flying they did and how they approached the actual mission of course had a lot of liberties. But one thing that seems to be hard to capture on these types of things are the, the chess game that's going on while that type of flying is happening.

The chess game between, like in a dog fight between the pilots and the enemy or between the different pilots.

I'll even speak to just that particular mission they flew there and for that particular mission. It's kind of a chess game with yourself to get everything in place. So what kind of flight they flew is called a high threat scenario, which means they have to ingress low due to the surface to air threats, the integrated air defense systems that are nearby. And they have to ingress low and pop up like we see in the movie and in that particular movie that was a pre planned strike. They knew exactly where they're going. But there's a scenario where we have to operate in that type of environment and we don't know exactly where we're going to strike or we're going to be adapting to real time targets. And so in that scenario you would have one of those fighters down low like that operating as a mission commander, as a forward air controller and he's out there calling shots, joining on those other players in order to ensure they're pointed at the right target. So that's a bit of the chess game that he'll be playing.

Can you actually describe for people who haven't seen the movie what the mission actually is?

Yeah.

What's involved in the mission?

So in this particular mission, it's kind of what we would call a pre planned strike. So there's a known location that's in a heavily defended area. And the air crew, in this case, I believe it was four F18s on the initial package. Their job was to ingress very low down a canyon to stay out of the radar window of the surface to air threats.

What does ingress mean?

Ingress means that they're going to be pushing from a start location towards the target or the objective. So there's an ingress portion of the mission and an egress portion of the mission.

Oh, okay, like the entrance and the exit. Correct type of thing. Got it.

But it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit. Right. Because when we're entering someplace, we have the option to enter, but when we go drop a bomb on location we're exiting, we don't have that luxury. We don't have that option. So it actually changes our tactics and our aggression level.

Got it. And so they were flying low to the ground, and then there's surface to air missiles that forced them to have to fly low. Is that a realistic thing?

It is realistic. So driving those aircraft in the clutter, you know, all radar systems, or most, I should say, are essentially line of sight. And so they're going to be limited by the horizon or any clutter out there. And even a number of radars, if they are located up high and looking down towards that aircraft, the clutter, all the objects such as trees and canyons can have effect on radar systems. And so it can be a type of camouflage.

So that's a camouflage for the radar. But what about the surface to air missile? Is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles is fly so low, like fly, I guess below their level?

As far as I know, you can fly under any radar. Right now we don't have necessarily radars that can look through anything. So there is always going to be the ability to mask yourself, but with a larger number of assets and distributed communication networks, where those radars are looking makes all the difference. And I said they were ingressing past an iaas and that's an integrated air defense system. And that linking of air defense systems is what makes it so hard, so complicated is that the sensors and the weapons are disassociated from each other. So that if you took out the target that was Shooting at you, it still has the ability to intercept you from another radar location. So it's distributed and it's stronger that way.

You mean the surface to air missiles? Like it's a distributed system in that if you take out one, they're still able to sort of integrate information about your location and strike at you.

Correct. And there's a lot of complication that can go, you know, once we start thinking about distributed systems like that and the ability to self heal and repair and adapt to losses, it's an interesting area.

Are you responsible for thinking about that when you're flying an airplane?

To some degree. When we ingress to an area like that, we're presented with information about targets, air to air or air to surface, or surface to air, I should say. And we can essentially see where essentially the danger zone, if you will, is located. And so essentially we would stay out of that. And so having a full picture of the environment is extremely important because you know, at the end of the day, if we go in that circle, we can die pretty quickly. So it's absolutely crucial.

So there's regions that have higher and lower danger because based on your understanding of the actual whatever the surface to air missile systems are. So you can kind of know. That's interesting. I wonder how automated that could be too, Especially when you don't know. It seems like in the movie they knew the location of everything. I imagine that's less known in most cases. And also a lot of those systems might be a little bit more ghetto, if I can use that technical term. Like I've gotten ad hoc maybe is the. I don't know. But you know, having just recently visited Ukraine and seeing a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought, there's a lot of improvised type of systems. So you take high, high tech, like advanced technology, but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it is very improvised and ad hoc and is responding to the uncertainty in the dynamic environment. And so from an enemy perspective or whoever is trying to deal with that kind of system, it's hard to figure it out because it's like me, I played tennis for a long time and it's always easier to play. This is true for all sports. Play tennis against a good tennis player versus a crappy tennis player because the crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty and that's really difficult to deal with. It seemed like in the movie the systems were really well organized and so you could plan.

And there was a very nice ravine that went right down the middle of Them.

That's how movies work, isn't it?

Yeah, but no, I absolutely agree. So, you know, what you say is a very good point. And as you know, if we were to take a chunk of airspace and break it up into little bits, there'd be places that are better to fly or less good to fly. And we are seeing that now with what they call manned unmanned teaming. We see tactical aircraft or some type of aircraft or platform that's being automated. And it's not being automated in traditional sense where people think air crew are flying them around to conduct missions. But it's very high level, objective orientated mission planning that allows the air crew to act more as a mission planner, mission commander, versus having to just pick the right assets or fly them around or manipulate them somewhat physically.

So actually, going back to the chess thing, can you elaborate on what you mean playing a game of chess with yourself when you're flying that mission? What exactly do you mean by that?

Well, there's a few people you're usually fighting against in the air. You know, there's the bad guys and then there's physics and mother Nature. Right. So when we're down at about 100ft, it's a chess game to stay alive for the pilot, and it's a chess game for the Wizzo to process the information he needs and then communicate it to all those other aircraft that were flying around to ensure that they're putting their weapons on the right target.

What's the wizzo?

Wizzo is a weapons systems officer. He's a backseater who is not a pilot. But they're responsible for radar manipulation and communications and weapons deployments of certain natures.

So the chess game is against physics, against the enemy.

Time.

Time. What about your own psychology? Fear, uncertainty?

No, no, there's no time for that type of self reflection while we're flying. I want to get to that, but I don't want to forget the point that you made about increased randomness being a tactical advantage. As you mentioned, you can introduce autonomy into there and when you bring autonomy in there, and my expectation would be as we bring different abilities and machine learning, as we gather more data, we're going to be able to bring the tactical environment around that jet. The war space that it goes into will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy's perspective, where it'll almost seem like every tactical environment they go in will be random and yet very deadly because the system is providing a new tactical solution essentially for that particular scenario instead of just training to particular Tactics that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal. Right. But not necessarily the most lethal because they have to be trainable. But if we can introduce AI into that and to have a level of randomness, or at least appearance of randomness due to the complexity, you know, I would consider it like a stochastic tactical advantage because even our own blue fighters wouldn't be able to engage in that fight because it would, it would be unsafe essentially for anything else. And I think that's where we have to drive to because otherwise it's always this chicken and mouse cat game about whose tactics and who knows what. But if knowledge is no longer a factor, it's going to make things a lot different.

That's really interesting. So out of the many things that are part of your expertise, your journey, you're also working on autonomous and semi autonomous systems, the use of AI and machine learning and mand on man teaming, all that kind of stuff. We'll talk about it. But you're saying sort of when people think about the use of AI in war, in military systems, they think about computer vision for perception or processing of sensor information in order to extract from it actionable knowledge kind of thing. But you're saying you could also use it to generate randomness. That's difficult to work with in a game theoretic way. Like it's difficult for human operators to respond to.

Exactly.

That's really interesting. Okay, so back to Tom Cruise and Top Gun. What about the dog fighting? What aspects of that were accurate?

So dog fighting is kind of an interesting conversation because it's not the most tactically relevant skill set nowadays by traditional standards, because the, the ranges with which we engage, employ weapons are very significant. And so if we're in a scenario, we're in a dog fight like that, a lot of things have probably gone wrong. Right. And that's kind of how this mission was set up. Right. It was a, you know, a no win type scenario, most likely. And so for a dogfight, the aircraft size and the ranges and the turn radiuses make it so it's not very theatrical. Right. The aircraft looks small and while it's intense with the systems I have and the sensors and what I'm feeling and all that, if I, you know, we've done it and we've done it right. We take video of that and it's just like a blue sky and you see a little dot out there. So not very interesting. And so anytime it really looks interesting in dogfight arena, that's most likely fiction because we really only get close for, you know, a millisecond as we're zipping past each other at the merge.

You're breaking my heart. Right?

I know, Breaking my heart.

No, I understand.

You can go and have fun. But you know, in a dog fight.

Specifically, maybe that was more common in the earlier wars of World War II and before that. Is it due to the sort of the range and the effectiveness of the weapon systems involved?

Basically, and the accuracy of the targeting systems at range. But there's also a train of thought that hasn't necessarily been tested out yet, which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare, EW and or unmanned assets, the battle, battle space may get so complex and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky or wasted such that you're going to be in close with either IR missiles or guns. If it's a no kidding, must defend type scenario.

First of all, what's electronic warfare?

It's basically trying to get control of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest of whatever operation is going on. So in the tactical environment, a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar or can we deceive the missile or just, you know, stop their guidance, things of that nature. Man.

It's a battle in the space of information, of digital information.

Yeah, well, F22 and F35. Right. F22 is a big expensive aircraft and it was made to be a great fighter. But the F35 is not as great of a fighter, but it's an electronic warfare and mission commander platform of the future where information is what's going to win the war instead of the best dogfighter. And so it's interesting dichotomy there.

What's the best airplane ever made fighter jet ever made?

I know the aviators in the audience are gonna hate my answer because they're gonna want that sexy muscly F14 Tomcat type fighter or maybe P51 type aircraft. But the F35 is maybe not the best dogfighter, but it doesn't have to get in a dog fight. Right. It's like how you'd be the best knife fighters not getting a knife fight sometimes.

Lockheed Martin F35 Lightning 2 looks pretty sexy.

There's two real strengths you can have as a fighter. You can have the ability to kind of outmuscle your fighter, your opponent, and beat him on G's and power and raid around on them. And then there's the other side of that, which is you can be overly maneuverable. You can bleed energy quickly and that's what the F18 was good at because it had to be heavier to land on the aircraft carrier. We had to give it extra bulk. But it also needed special mechanisms to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier. So it made it very maneuverable. And what that leads to a lot of times the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight, which is very good. But if you do make that sharp turn, you're going to bleed a lot of your energy away and be more susceptible for follow on shots if that one's less susceptible. And so there's this kind of aggression, non aggression game you can play depending on the type of aircraft you're fighting.

Where does the F35 land that spectrum?

The F35 lands somewhere behind the F22s. So there'll probably be a row of F22s or F18s and F35 will be out back. But it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare that's happening in front of it.

Is it one of the more expensive planes because of all the stuff on it?

It certainly is, yeah.

In the movie they have Tom Cruise fly it over Mach 10. So maybe can you say what are the different speeds accelerations feel like Mach 1, 2, 3 or hypersonic. Have you ever flown or hypersonic?

No.

Does it get. How tough does it get?

I'll just going to call out the. The BS of ejecting at Mach 10 just for the record because in the movie there's been I think at least one ejection that was supersonic. And I'll just say, you know, it was not pretty but he survived. So there have to be some interesting mechanisms to eject successfully at Mach 10. But I'll digress on that for the moment.

Yeah, that seemed very strange and he.

Just walked away from it. But anyways, anyway, so you know, he seemed disheveled.

Okay, it's Tom Cruise. You know, it's like Chuck Norris or something.

Indestructible.

Yeah, indestructible.

Doesn't age. Yeah.

But anyway, so what, what's interesting to say about the experience of the. As you go up, does it get more and more difficult?

In the end of the day, crossing the sound barrier is much like crossing the speed limit on the highway. You don't really notice anything to cross that. At least an F18 because we have a lot more weight than most fighters is typically we'll do that in a descent and we'll do that a full afterburner just dumping gas into the engine and so that'll get us over the fastest. I Think I've gone was about 1.28. But what's interesting people realize is that if I take that throttle and I'm an afterburner and I just bring it back and just bring it back to mil, which is full power, just not afterburner. The deceleration is so strong due to the air friction that it throw you forward in your straps almost, I would say maybe like 70% as strong, almost as trapping on the boat. It's pretty strong. So it's almost like reverse car crash just for the deacceleration. So the acceleration is usually kind of slow and you don't feel anything, of course, when you're crossing through it. But the deceleration is pretty violent.

The deceleration is violent, huh? Okay, but is there a fundamental difference between Mach 1 and hypersonic? Mach 5 and so on? Does it require like super special training? And is that something that's used often in warfare? Is that. Not really that?

No. So hypersonic human flight, if it exists, is not something that's employed tactically in any sense right now that I'm aware of. So, you know, when I think of hypersonic technology, I think of missiles and weapon systems and delivery platform. I don't think of fighter aircraft necessarily. I can think of bomber or reconnaissance aircraft perhaps, but those would be more efficient, very long, long range. I imagine acceleration would be kind of gentle.

Honestly, the thing you experience is the acceleration, not the actual speed. There's been just a small tangent, a lot of discussion about hypersonic nuclear weapons like missiles from Russia bragging about that. Is this something that's a significant concern or is it just a way to flex about different kinds of weapon systems?

Hypersonics, I do think, pose a challenge for our detection systems because there are design considerations in these sensor systems. As always, when you build them and the technology progresses to a point where maybe it's not feasible to use that technology. There's a problem. But with the all domain and cross domain data linking capabilities we have, it's less of, you know, it's more of an integrated picture, I'll say. And so the hypersonics are really what it is, is how fast can we detect and destroy a problem. And you're just shortening the time available to do that. We call something like that the kill chain. Right. It's from locating a target and identifying it and essentially authorizing its destruction by whatever means employing and then actually following up to ensure that you did what you said you were going to do in some sense. Right. Does it need another reattack something of that N. And so there's an old dog fighting framework, you could call it. It's called the OODA loop. That kind of made its way in the engineering business now. But the old observe, orientate, decide act was initially a fighter mechanism in order to get inside that kill chain of your opponent and break it up so that he can't process his kill chain on you. And so hypersonics are a way of shortening those windows of opportunity to react to that.

I wondered, to what, like, how much do you have to shorten it in order for the defense systems not to work anymore? It seems like it's very, you know, I. I'm both often horrified by the thought of nuclear war, but at the same time wonder what that looks like. When I dream of extreme competence in defense systems, I imagine that not a single nuclear weapon can reach the United States by missile with the defense systems. Defense systems. But then again, I also understand that these are extremely complicated systems. The amount of integration required, and because you're not using them, I mean, this is exactly. There could be, you know, there's like an intern somewhere that, like, forgot to update the code, the Fortran code that, like, is going to be make the difference because you don't have the opportunity to really thoroughly test, which is really scary. Of course, the systems are probably incredible if they could be tested. But because they can't be really thoroughly tested in an actual attack, I wonder.

I guess one assumption there would be that these hypersonic missiles would only be launched in the case of attack. It'd be interesting if there were other hypersonic objects that we could use to flex those systems.

Another thing that actually happened. I just have a million questions I want to ask you. It's fascinating to me is there's a bird strike on the plane. Does that happen often?

Yeah, it's a serious issue, and it.

Damaged the engine, and they made it seem like it's a serious. Exactly. A serious issue.

I've hit birds. I know someone that took a turkey vulture to the face through the cockpit, right. Shattered the cockpit, knocked him out. I think that. Actually, I don't know him personally about the story. I know from the command I was at, and I believe the back seater had to punch out and punched them both out because he was unconscious, you know, in the front seat from the bird, it can kill you from hitting you. It's, you know, it's like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour. It can take out an engine very easily. Every airport I've flown At in the Navy, I've had to check the, the bird condition, if you will, to see how many birds I've. We've had to cancel flights because. Because there's too many of them around the airport. Some airports even have bird radars. Military airports. There's.

Is there systems that monitor the bird condition?

There is, yeah. There's actual radar systems and you can go in the certain bases you have to call up and they'll tell you what it is for the day or for that hour. And other ones have it in like their, their weather report that goes out over the radio.

What are some technological solutions to this? Or is this just because it's a low probability event, there's no real solution for it?

I would say it's not a low probability event. I mean, this is happening a lot. I mean, although the hits themselves aren't necessarily that common or I'll say a catastrophic hit, either a near miss or a hit or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it is pretty common and in fact, it seems stressful. It is. It's so common, in fact, that we know that you never want to try to go over or you never want to go under a bird. If you see it in front of you, you always want to try to go over it. Because what they'll do immediately if they see you is, and you startle them is they'll. They'll bring their wings in and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path. It's interesting. I didn't know they did that, but. So if you immediately, if you try to go under them, you, they're going to be dropping into you, so you typically want to try to go above them.

Is this something you can train for or no? Is this one of those things you have to really experience?

It's a skill set that you somewhat trained for in the duties of being a fighter pilot, in a sense. Right. Being able to react to your environment very quickly and make decisions quickly.

Is that one of the more absurd things, challenges you have to deal with in flying? Is there other things, sort of maybe weather conditions, like harsh weather conditions? Is there something that we maybe don't often think about in terms of the challenges of flying?

Birds, in a way aren't a ridiculous threat for us. It's a safety threat that anything physical in the air is something that we really have to be careful about whether we're flying formation off of the aircraft right next to us or whether it's a turkey vulture at 2,000ft or a flock of 5,000 birds at the Runway and we have to wave off. And although they're low probability, a lot of bases will have like actual Environmental protection Agency employees that are responsible for safely removing migratory birds or different animals that may be in the runways or flying about. Wow.

I didn't know what a turkey vulture is. And it really does look like a mix between a vulture and a turkey and look kind of dumb, no offense to turkey vultures. In that movie, who was the enemy nation? Was it. I mean, I guess they were implying it's Iran or is it Russia?

I didn't think they were implying any particular nation state, frankly. I think they did a somewhat decent job of having some ambiguous fifth generation fighters. The location and the stockpile. I get how the story kind of insinuates certain things, but they seem to do a good job of not having anything directly pointing to it. Another nation, which I thought was, you know, the good move. I enjoy these type of movies as an aviator and you know, as an American. Right. Because it's a feel good movie. But, you know, we shouldn't be celebrating going to war with any particular country. You know, China, Russia, whoever may have these weapons. It's, it's fun to watch, but it would be an incredibly serious event to be employing these weapons.

Yeah, we'll talk about war in general because yeah, it's the, the movie is kind of celebrating the human side of things and also the incredible technology involved. But there's also the cost of war and the seriousness of war and the suffering involved with war. Not just in the fighting, but in the death of civilians and all those kinds of things. Well, you were a Navy pilot. Let's talk a little bit more seriously about this. And you were twice deployed in the Middle east flying the F. A. 18F Super Hornet. Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a Navy pilot?

Sure. So I joined the Navy in 2009 right after college. I went to officer, essentially officer boot camp, Officer candidate school. I applied as a pilot and I got in as a pilot. That was the advantage of going that way, is that I essentially choose what I wanted and if I got in, great. If not, I didn't get stuck doing something else.

So you knew you wanted to be a pilot?

I did. I joined, I went through my initial training, I went through primary flight training that all aviators go through. And I did well enough that, you know, one of the first lessons they teach you in the Navy is that, you know, you can have a great career in the Navy and you can, you Know, see the world and do what you want, but at the end of the day, it's all about the needs of the Navy and what they need. So, you know, they may not have the platform you like, or, you know, you may not necessarily get to choose your own adventure here. But I was lucky enough that there was one jet slot in my class, and I was lucky enough for fortunate enough to get it, so was a jet slot. So. Well, yeah, what that means is that I was assigned actually tail hook at that point, which meant I would go trained to fly aircraft that land on aircraft carriers. And there's essentially three aircraft that do that at the time is F18 and the E2 and the C2. C2 is kind of like the mail truck for the boat. E2 is one with the big radar dish on top of the. And then there's all the F18s.

So E2s comms. C2 mail truck.

Yeah, C2 basically go in mail. They literally bring them shore, and they're the ones that bring supplies to the ship via air. And people.

Sorry if I missed it. Is it a plane or is it a helicopter?

It's a plane.

Okay.

All right.

And the F18 is a fighter jet.

Correct.

Okay.

So I selected tail hook, which meant I could get one of those other ones. But 80% of them or so are jets. So I was in a good spot at that point. And that's when I went to Murdy, Mississippi, to fly my first jet, which was the T45 goshawk.

Cool. So what kind of plane is that?

Is that.

That's what you were doing your training on?

That's the jet aircraft you get in before you actually go to the F18. It is carrier capable. So go to the boat for the first time in it during the day, drop fake bombs, do dog fighting, low levels, formation flying day and night.

Oh, it's a pretty plane.

Yeah. And it looks like a cone so that no one hits it.

Okay. So it's usually not used for fighting. It's used for training.

It's used for training how to fight.

Got it. So what. What was that like? Was that the first time you were sort of really getting into it?

Yeah, that was really interesting because before that, it was a 600 horsepower prop plane. Going from that to the T45 is one of, like, the biggest jumps in power and, like, Navy, you know, machine operation.

How much horsepower does the T45 have?

Approximately like 15,000 or so.

So it's a huge jump. From 600, you said. Horsepower?

About.

So it's a big, big leap, but.

It'S a jet, you know, so it performs differently. It's faster, right? And what that means, not just because it's faster, your whole mind needs to be faster. Everything happens faster in the air now, right? Those comms happen faster. Your landing gear has to come up faster. Everything just happens faster in a jet. And so it's a big jump. And I'll never forget going on my first flight in that aircraft. It was a formation flight for someone else and I was just in the back watching and there was an instructor in the flight. And so what that means is instructor is in a single aircraft and then there's three or four other aircraft and they're learning how to do joins and they're learning how to fly in formation. And as a new student in the back, it's amazing, right, because you know, photo op time and all this, like I'm seeing aircraft up close for the first time. It's awesome. And on the way back, we couldn't get our landing gear down ironically. So it, you know, to make a long story short, because it's overall not that exciting, we couldn't get the gear down. We actually went to go do a control ejection to the target area that, where that is about 15, 20 miles to the north of the base.

Did you, wait, did you just say that's not that exciting? Well, because that to me is pretty exciting. First of all. I mean, that must be terrifying. Like early on in your careers haven't seen those things.

That. Yeah.

Like how often does that kind of thing happen?

Decent. More than you would think. More than you would think.

There was no significant panic. This is like misunderstood. This is what has to be done.

In this case, I think I was probably just too dumb to realize the significance of it because as a new student, not really appreciating just what is ahead of me if we are rejecting. Um. But at the time it was more, it was just like rote, right, Because I was back there and then I went from a observer mode to a I'm going to provide you the help that I can provide you as member of this crew, you know, mode. And so it was less about, I'm, you know, on this 20 mile trip and thinking about my, how vulnerable I am. You know, we're going through checklists, we're talking to people, we're getting ready. So no, it wasn't, it wasn't fearful. And the whole time we were doing one of these to try to get the, the gear down. So we're Unloading the jet and then loading it back to try to get the gear out with the stick. And, and it came down, it came down halfway there, just on its own. So it came back around and we did like a safety trap in case there was a problem with the gear. And that was my first flight. You know, a little bit of serendipity, but I'm going to fast forward a bit. And I went back to that squadron as an instructor about five or six years later. And I was an aviation safety officer at this point, which meant I was responsible for investig mishaps. And a, a student went in and he, he went in the back seat of a form flight just like the one I went on and he went out and he ended up ejecting on that flight. Exact same type of flight. They went out and they had a runaway trim scenario and it caused the aircraft essentially just invert itself almost 180 degrees at about 600ft over the ground. And they punched out just slightly outside the ejection window at about 300, 400ft or so, but they were completely fine. So, you know, and then about two months later we had another ejection. About three months after that we had another ejection. So unfortunately, you know, it can, it can be more common than people think.

What does it feel like to get ejected?

Thankfully, I don't know. I can describe it to you, I can tell you what it's like from what I've heard. But I truly think it's one of those things that you just don't understand until it happens. It's like instantaneous. About 250 GS which is only possible because of inertia in our blood. Right. So you can actually get like 250, 300 GS for like a few milliseconds and then it backs off to like 40 or 50 GS to get you away from the vehicle itself. And so, you know, you may lose consciousness if you do, you know, who knows where you wake up. You know, you could be in a tree, you could still be falling, you could be in the water.

So the physics of that is fascinating. How to eject safely.

Do you know the story about how that was tested at all? I don't know the full story, but.

There was, I guess nobody knows the full story. It's probably a lot of shady stuff going on, but. You mean like in the early, early days or they used to hook a.

Flight dock up to a rocket sled and just see how much their body could take it. And he turned a lot of his body into. In the mush, in the. In the process of getting that science done. But he saved a lot of lives.

People used to be tougher back in the day. That's how science used to be done. So how did your training continue? So take me farther through your career as you work towards graduating towards the F18s.

So in VT9, where I was a student, there's two phases. There's an intermediate, and an advanced intermediate is getting very comfortable with the aircraft. And at that point, you truly hear, all right, you're going jets now, or you're going to go one of the other aircraft that land on aircraft.