Combat aircraft

Above: The

squadron

operates a mix of

five single-seat

F-16AMs and five

two-seat F-16BMs,

all of which have

undergone the

European mid-life

upgrade.

really closely, sometimes at a distance,

to see how things progress and steer

where needed.

‘There is a chance that you might lose

people. You can never predict this in

advance. Technically you might lose an

entire class. This class right now started

with five students, but one washed out

during our dogfighting phase and not

because he couldn’t fly the jet or anything.

He couldn’t handle the g and that’s

something that you cannot predict. He

might do OK tolerating 9g in a centrifuge,

but everything is different when you pull

the same amount and have to look over

your shoulder, flip buttons, think, talk and

change of pace and is more family-

oriented, with more stable personal lives.

‘We have one deployment each class,

which is a two-week visit to MCAS

Miramar. We go there to train over water,

which is really important as a lot of our

flying at home is over water. If we only

trained over land, where you always have

great visual references, then by the time

you undertake super-demanding missions

at home over water without those great

references, we find ourselves at increasing

risk. All your visual references over water

are completely different, so it’s important

to learn things like cross-checking the

altimeter.’

Training to win

The winning formula is all about getting

the most from the range of students that

come here, all essentially to do the same

job. ‘Nobody gets a free ride,’ smiles ‘Niki’.

‘We need to get them to a certain level of

aggressiveness because we don’t need

people that don’t think for themselves.

We don’t spoon-feed them everything.

We let them explore and see what is right

and what can and cannot be done. We’ll

be watching the entire way, sometimes

Best seat in the house —

‘Niki’ gets his ‘Viper’ down

among the granite on a

low-level sortie.

UNIT REPORT // DUTCH F-16 TRAINING IN THE US

74 June 2018 //^ http://www.combataircraft.net

70-78 148th FS C.indd 74 20/04/2018 09:50