What's It Like To Fly A Fast Jet On The Front Line? | Minutes With | UNILAD

and then literally my now perfect mandy turned right and i hit the gas very

fast

, i just turned 120 degrees, pulled very very hard towards the ground, it immediately started sending up flares that act as a decoy for the surface . -air missile that had just been launched and locked onto my engines um well I grew up listening to stories from my grandfather, he was a WWII fighter pilot and he drip fed us these fantastic stories over the years that you know about the landing in the south. Africa dodging these huge anthills and I thought that sounds like a cool job, but there was still one big obstacle.

Women were not allowed to be pilots on the

front

line

, they were allowed to join as pilots but not operational and, um, in combat, were they? Frustrated by this at this point the frustration wouldn't even hit the mark really strange feeling wouldn't it? you're there you're flying with these guys they can all shoot up and become fighter pilots and just because of your gender you could I wasn't at university so I wouldn't let frustration get the best of me, let's just say I played a lot of sports, I played netball for the college, I kept flying a lot, um and it was my second year of college when the rules changed and I literally remember our boss walked into the bar one night and me and there were three girls there and he said girls, I have the best news for you and we She said the air force had opened its doors to women. fly

fast

planes and that was it.

I couldn't get my papers fast enough. What was it like being the only woman in your squad? I went into the crew room and all the screensavers in

what

's called the board crew room, which is In the junior officer crew room there's like four old computers, you know, outdated and all they have naked women, so I changed them all to naked men, and then the next day they were all landscapes, so here we go, small changes. There was no female bathroom there, so I was always with the men. She'd come in and say, "It's me. I'm sorry.

They're just turning bodies around to cover their credentials. But you get pretty insensitive about it." I became very kind, I came to swear a lot at one point, we were in the detachment, I looked down and I was wearing the same clothes as everyone else, you know, all the pilots wore boat shoes, chinos and some kind of blue shirt and such. once a jacket, I thought, oh God. God, I've become a guy and it was the strangest feeling and I thought you don't really need to transform into a man if you have a male job or are surrounded by men, you can still be a woman but playing the role of men in At that time you said that there were other forms of sexism, yes, I mean, we have opened the doors to women.

Great,

what

clothes are you going to wear, oh, men's clothes, obviously, so yeah, my whole career I wore men's clothes. my foreheads, you have to wear long johns and yes, always with a wife and always sinking into your hips and there were slightly bigger problems, of course, when it came to flying on fast planes because, yes, men can have a sausage plane. but a woman can't have a quick breast oh yeah so basically you have this plastic bag and for some men it has a little hole in the top and it has a sponge in it, a very very dehydrated sponge in it basically and all of them.

What they have to do is place their penis in the bag and the sponge fills up and because it's so dehydrated it just absorbs all the liquid and then it can be stored in yours with the rest of your maps, basically now all the guys have all the right. Before I got into the jet they just lit up around the edge and but I have all this gear on and I would have to take it all off, which would take me about 10

minutes

, so I can't have a Wii. right before I get on the plane, so anyway I'm coming out thinking this might be interesting anyway, after about two hours of being in the air over Iraq, I don't think this is interesting anymore.

I'm starting to feel these shooting pains, I told my guy in the back seat I said I was going to have to go pee and he said, right man, it's okay, they said, just stay calm. I have a bottle here, but it was a pretty big bottle and it was full of water, so I said. I'm going to have to drink the water, he said, sure, drink the water, I'll be fine, so I would drink, you know, half a liter of water, now it's gone, I have the capacity in the bottle to have a Wii, so I said.

I'm going to have to take off he said okay so I said put the seat pins on and I basically took off all my clothes so this is really complicated if you can imagine in a very small formula one car you're getting removing what is called a life jacket. combat survival vest I'm trying to get my arms out of the top of my flight suit I'm trying to get it down. You know all kinds of things and I also have my long johns on so you can Imagine this situation on a shelf, you have this thing called a radar homing and warning receiver here and it receives little spikes that warn you every time a surface-to-air missile on the ground he's looking at you and he goes bing and he says sa-6 you know the surface-to-air missile number six, so he bing sa-8 and every time he was about to pee, he did test 6 right at 2 in point when you stopped talking and said: I'm sorry.

I have to call them Mandy, I have to call them, so every threat that came up he called and every time I called her I couldn't wait, I failed, I basically had to put all my gear back on and now I've turned it up to ten. times worse because anyway I drank all the water I held on I held on I landed when I landed I had gotten a bad urine infection I fell out of the stream and lay on the floor basically at the bottom and my body had shut down I went into a state of shock , um, a big temperature rise, not just urinary tract infection and kidney infection, off

line

for two weeks, no, they tried, they went up, I mean, I did a test wearing a diaper, adult women, you just can't fly in a plane and just getting wet, your body won't let you do it, it's still a really debilitating problem.

So when did you first see action? What was your first wish? He had only been in my squadron for about three months when they sent us to Iraq. We were defending the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. We were assigned a task. They were about to put all their intelligence over fiber optics and we were going to lose all the intelligence we were getting through you. I knew about phone conversations and things like that because it was going underground, so this would destroy our intelligence completely, so they decided, let's cut to the chase, we're going to eliminate all these fiber optic centers that we've been operating until what's called the 33rd parallel, about a third of the way to Iraq, Baghdad, let's say halfway to Iraq, so this is much further north than we've ever been and it was a night mission, it was going to be the biggest mission in the one we had been on 80 planes.

We swore to silence any phone calls, block communications from our side when we were doing this mission. First, we took off around 10 at night and headed north. It was a really different feeling, I think it's 80 planes and they're from four different countries like Bahrain, they're in Saudi Arabia, they all get together and as we were going up my navigator was like, man, you got your night vision goggles up there. or down, I said, yes, them. You're up there, he went, let them, well obviously I'm like a little kid, if someone tells me to do something I do the opposite, I put my glasses down and basically when I click on my glasses they obviously highlight whatever light is on. the atmosphere, it was like it was. looking at bonfire night, you know, over the city, or you know, new year's eve over london, let's say it was we were seeing surface-to-air missiles going up, we're seeing tracer rounds with triple anti-aircraft artillery we're flying straight towards this but we're heading towards the target we achieved and when we landed there was a predator that was above our um our target and we landed we had a really successful mission um but we arrived Let's go back to the report and the uav guys communicated and said : "Oh my God, we have some pictures that you have to see, we went to see them and basically you have the building and you have this guy and him." He opens the door where my gun was about to go in, he opens the door and lights a cigarette and you can see that he has a hot cup of coffee or some tea and it's smoking because you can see it in the infrared because it's really bright white and it has been there, he's drinking his tea and he's smoking his cigarette and he puts it out on the floor and he throws the rest of his teal away and he goes back to the door and he closes the door and about six seconds later my gun comes through the door and it was like, " Oh my god, I just killed someone" and then he comes running through the rubble, he gets into his car, which is parked in this gated complex, he obviously had his keys with him, he's obviously in the security crash, he obviously starts the engine and then he just goes through the fence, um like he's in

front

of him, you know, and the fence is now being dragged behind him and he's just driving in a straight line to obviously get away from the target and I'll be brutally honest, I just said, oh , thank God he didn't die, thank God because when you sign up to do this, you sign up to be a pilot because you have a passion for flying and then the reality. of going to war is very raw, it is very real and then there is the reality of killing people and that is the next level.

Now I never say that was a big deal to me until you see it clearly in front of you. you and that was very, very emotional, is there a distance from your goal that helps mentally? The interesting thing and I think this is where Afghanistan, I didn't actually fight in Afghanistan, this is where all my friends who basically flew there, so it was a very different, it was a low level war, they often came in what's called close air support, so you have the troops on the ground and you can see your guys being attacked and attacked by the enemy and you approach a low level literally as fast as you can, knowing that they could shoot at you too because they probably have launchers of rockets and things like that and then you might not even have weapons on board and what you're going to do is you're going to do, it's called a show of force, you're going to come very, very fast and then you're going to stick it vertically and basically He says if you don't back down, I'm going to come and launch a weapon that was very different because people could see the impact of their actions immediately in Iraq.

It was a quite different scenario. We could see it later in our videos. We could see it later with images. Of all the unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs are like predators, but at that point you're in the zone of going through a process and it's literally like you're directing someone to the fictional island library, that's how absolutely measured and professional he is and I think that's why. Sometimes when you look at that disproportionate level that we've seen with mental health problems, perhaps among people in Afghanistan compared to Iraq, then it's been slightly different and also goes through the time when you felt in greater danger during your time in the war.

I was leading my first mission and it was my last trip to the theater. I was going home the next day and to put it into perspective, I lost a lot of weight. I had a fantastic tan. I was thinking about a new dress I was going to buy. We have done the entire route for four hours, it is approximately one in the morning. Total darkness swept away the last objective on the border into Saudi Arabia, so on the arterial routes, the ones between Baghdad, if you can imagine, here and Al Basra. You have all these railways, roads, highways, it's like you leave London and there are a lot of surface-to-air missiles out there, but once you get here to the border with Saudi Arabia, which is where we were coming from. back it's like nothing, in four months there had been nothing, it's like a tumbleweed flying, you know, so it doesn't matter if you're flying in a fast jet or whatever world you're in, you still get complacent, I'll be honest.

On the last lens in reconnaissance mode we were taking photos at this point and I was like, yeah, I'm going home the next day, God, I look good, yeah, and then literally my Mandy is fine now, turn to the right and pressed the accelerator to the floor. I quickly turned 120 degrees and pulled very, very hard toward the ground. He immediately started launching flares which are basically a decoy and burn really hot and act as a decoy for the surface to air missile he had. Just launched and it had locked on my engines while we were doing this maneuver, it literally took out the flares that were left and literally in my rear view mirrors we have these two mirrors up here.

I saw this missile, we saw it go from being locked. It was taken out. in our flares and it exploded like this huge white fountain of, you know, sparks about two miles from the plane, now we radioed what happened, um, chaos broke out a little bit on the airwaves because of everyoneaircraft that were in the air once an aggressive The act is carried out against any of those aircraft. The rules of engagement state that you have the right to carry out an attack on a target. An answer choice that you are keeping. And I learned more that night than any other night, not just about you.

I know how to evade a surface into a missile that's pretty close, yes, exhaust pipes, but most importantly I learned some really good leadership in the form of my boss. You know, he had empowered this junior team driver to lead and then when the going got tough, and you know, he literally hit the fan, he not only took control, he let me continue and I grew more as a leader than on any night of my entire service career. And how would your grandfather feel among you or what you would achieve in his career? I think he would be incredibly proud.

My mom is a lot like my grandpa and literally beams with pride all the time whenever she talks about it and you know you know. In flying I signed up as a volunteer reservist and basically for eight years after I left I flew cadets, that's how I started and it was really lovely for me to be able to pass on the love of flying and be a role model, especially for young women. who wanted to pursue this as a career because, as I heard one of the first female astronauts say, you can't be what you can't see and it's still a very, very male-dominated environment, so we need role models out there. . what I call the big bang, little bang scenario, if the main charge separates from the detonator, if something goes wrong at this stage, the only thing that will explode is a small detonator, enough to take your hand off, but not enough to turn it off completely. kill you