A fighter pilot flying at Mach 1.9 describes making split-second decisions while objects close at a mile every three seconds. He notes that combat stress drops a pilot's effective IQ by about 20 points, and shares strategies from his book to maintain performance under that fog of war.
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Yeah, the speeds we're flying at are incredible. So talking in that book, getting up to 25,000 feet, plugging the engine to max afterburners, so 30,000 pounds of thrust coming out of the back of the jet, you're just on this rocket ship and got up to Mach 1.9, so almost twice the speed of sound, which is actually about 1,500 miles an hour. So at that speed, things are closing about a mile every 3 seconds. So you really have to have quick decision-making. But as fighter pilots, we're also at the other end of the spectrum. We're sometimes planning missions that are going to happen days, months, or even years into the future. So it's a lot of project management with a diverse team coming together to towards one common objective. So there's a lot of carryover with what we do as fighter pilots and what people do in the civilian world. And to your point, combat does add another layer of complexity. So we have a saying that put on your helmet, you lose 20 IQ points. And that's because that stress and the fog and friction of war really degrades your ability to, to be able to perform at your peak. So I talk in the book a lot about ways to mitigate that decrease in IQ and ways to execute.