Lessons From The Cockpit

Welcome to this episode of the Lessons from the Cockpit show! Our conversation with Mike "Coma" Reed continues this week, telling us his story of integrating all the systems in the Lockheed F-22 Raptor, arguably the most lethal fighter jet in the world. Mike explains why the F-22 program and development performed so well and the F-35 program continues to have challenges. Age and treachery will always overcome youth and exuberance as Mike relates an event with a Russian TU-95 Bear Bomber off the

Welcome to this week's episode of Lessons from the Cockpit. This week my best friend from my boyhood Mike Reed callsign COMA was in Utah. He and I sat down to talk about his lessons from flying F-4 Phantoms during the Cold War in the Far East and aeronautical engineering. Sun Tzu's first chapter in The Art of War opens with the line "The art of war is of vital importance to the State." You may not have an interest in geopolitics but geopolitics will always have an interest in you. Coma explains how

On this episode of the Lessons from the Cockpit show: Twenty years ago this past Saturday, a phone call at 5:50 in the morning caused me to go from fast asleep to full up war in 30 minutes. The United States was under attack. While driving into work that day I was doing "Taker Math" in my head, the number of sorties and amount of gas it would take to keep all the fighters and Command and Control planes airborne to maintain a NO FLY ZONE over America, and these numbers will astound you! Talking with

On this episode of the Lessons from the Cockpit show... Many aviators have flown into bad situations or worse killed because they didn't listen to the voice in their heads. The military has a term for this voice: GUT CHECK. Malcomb Gladwell has written an entire book about this gut check phenomenon. Recently I had a discussion with a close friend and both of our professions, he an EMT in Houston and myself a military pilot, realized we shared similar attributes in working problems. One attribute of

There is a three-word slogan every aviator memorizes to help deal with emergencies in the air. It's so simple and has saved countless pilot's lives. An instructor in Pilot Training taught me the five commandments of flying complimenting the three-word slogan. On a training sortie, I violated two of them and almost killed myself. A Navy SEAL taught me a slogan that guides their training philosophy. This slogan is a reason the US Military is the world's finest fighting force on the planet. Welcome to