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My name is Ryan Graves, I'm a former F18 pilot in the US Navy and I'm currently the Executive Director at Americans for Safe Aerospace.

AV Nation, what is going on?

And welcome back to the Pilot the Pilot podcast.

My name is Justin Seems and I am your host.

Today's episode is with Ryan Graves.

Ryan is a former F18 pilot in the Navy.

He's also the creator of Americans for Safe Aerospace, where it is the largest UAP advocacy organization in the world.

Which is insane, as we all know.

In January there were some crazy things flying around New Jersey and Ryan and I kind of get into it.

Not really get into it, but we delve into the topic of it and we just talk about what's going on, what you can do and what you can do.

If you see something that you just cannot explain, you can go to safe aerospace.org and you can join 30,000 plus members and you can report your UAP and it'll do some great service and it'll help figure out what's going on and just get a better idea of maybe why things are in our airspace that shouldn't be.

But Ryan's conversation was great.

He's a former guest on Joe Rogan, so this is the first time I've ever interviewed someone that was on the Joe Rogan Podcast.

So shout out to Ryan for doing some crazy cool stuff, but we have just a very candid and good talk.

We talk about his history in flying, why he chose The Navy, why he decided to be a pilot.

And then we get into what he's doing professionally right now and how he is trying to help and also some autonomous talk as well.

So should we be worried about AI?

Should we be worried about pilotless aircrafts?

Ryan tells us what he thinks.

That's at the end of the episode, so make sure you stick on for, for that.

But aviation, I hope you're having a great day.

Thank you so much for 1000 reviews on Spotify.

It's unbelievable.

I can't believe that.

If you're listening on Apple Podcast, we are close as well.

So if you haven't left a review on Apple Podcast, please do.

I think we're at 9:30, possibly maybe 9:27, but we're getting close to a thousand on both platforms, which is crazy.

You can also follow us on YouTube as well, but I don't want to take any more of your time.

So without any further ado, here's Ryan Graves.

Ryan, what's going on, man?

Welcome to the Pilot the Pilot podcast.

Pleasure to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man.

I'm excited to have you on a lot of relevant stuff that we'll get into later, especially earlier this year with all the crazy orb sightings and drones and whatever it may be that you can enlighten us on what was going on or any kind of information you have.

But first, I really want to focus on you, the aviator, you the pilot, you the F18 pilot, and kind of get a better idea of why you became a pilot in the first place.

So was it you being a three year old looking up at the sky saying, I like planes, let me go fly that?

Or was there kind of a better, different story to that?

Yeah, you know, I know a lot of guys had their stories when they were younger, but for me, I didn't grow up with really any aviation in my family or too much military service.

So it really wasn't even until college.

After my junior year, I was doing a mechanical engineering and fire protection major, did an internship in Atlanta.

And they, they thudded a book, you know, about 8 inches or so on my desk and we were like, hey, might as well start studying.

This is going to be most of the rest of your career.

And I, you know, that caused me to really take a reckoning of what I wanted to do.

And, you know, I want to go through life and thought, hey, what is.

What is something that would be, you know, much more challenging, exciting and fit who I think I want to be?

And the best answer I Came up with was, you know, to fly jets, perhaps in the Navy or the Air Force.

Changed my major, aerospace engineering.

Quit the internship and then dedicated myself to make, you know, preparing the best application I could to ultimately to the Navy in order to accomplish that.

So what did it look like after that?

So after you get this big old book put on, you're like, all right, jk, I don't want to do that anymore.

Was it looking at rotc, Was it looking at how you can become an officer?

Kind of.

What was the next steps that you took to become the pilot?

Yeah, so for me, I wanted, I wanted to get into fighters of some type.

And at first I was thinking the Air Force would be a good route.

They had, you know, a lot of different fighters and bobbers, cool aircraft.

It's the first thing you think of.

And so I started preparing myself by earning my private pilot's license.

So after college, I had about a year to get ready and put my application in.

I was working in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I would drive about an hour and a half north, do flight training about three or four times a week with some, you know, crusty 75 year old CFI.

I was half worried that would have a heart attack in the aircraft.

Valid concerns, I'm not gonna lie.

And you know, I got, I got my.

It got myself to my solo and my private pilot's license.

Just prior to that, I actually withheld because I found out that although the Air Force cared about flight time, the Navy didn't necessarily.

And in fact, if you went through, you know, you got accepted without your pilot's license, you'd actually get an extra 30 hours or so in a Cessna before you even got into a military aircraft.

So I withheld getting my private pilot's license so I could get that extra 30 hours of free training from the Navy.

Absolutely.

Someone else is going to pay for it.

Sign me up.

Right?

Sure.

Yeah.

So, you know, part of my decision too here was I also learned that the Navy, you know, although the Air Force has, you know, many aircraft, the Navy has a higher ratio of fighters to non fighters.

And of course they get to land on the boat as well.

So ultimately I made the decision to apply to the Navy versus the Air Force.

And I went through Officer Canada School, which meant, you know, I paid for my own college, did everything on my own and was able to apply for a slot.

And I applied as a pilot and a pilot only, and thankfully I got accepted on my first pass.

Yeah.

Which is awesome.

Talk about some misconceptions.

People have, because obviously you said that you had no experience with aviation, you know, family history.

A lot of people in that situation, they're kind of like, man, being a pilot just like, isn't possible.

I got to be a genius.

I got to be smart.

I got to do all this stuff, which we all know.

I, uh, we know some dumb people that can fly airplanes.

Right.

But I mean, anyone can do this, right?

Like, anyone can go, can go fly, can go enjoy this career.

Uh, did you kind of have any of those misconceptions early on, or were you just like, no, I can fly that.

If that dude can fly, that girl can fly, I can go do that?

That was my general attitude.

You know, I threw myself completely in.

There was no real option of failure for me.

Um, and, you know, I was entirely motivated to succeed and challenge myself, which is why I prepared myself with the most competitive package I could by changing my major and getting flight time.

But, you know, on the outside, you don't really know what's important, you know, in a career like that.

And frankly, it's almost impossible to know because of, you know, the classification of tactics and things of that nature.

So you really don't know what you're getting yourself into.

And, you know, as I progressed through my career, I started to see the skill sets and the personalities and attitudes that would be successful, not just, you know, a resume, resume with certain skill sets or an engineering background.

I flew with fantastic pilots that, you know, were history majors or physicists, you know, and so while, you know, a fancy background can help you, you know, there's a certain personality type and, and ego and, you know, self criticism that's required to be successful in that career.

And it doesn't matter what your resume says.

Yeah.

I mean, and you can even take that outside of that career, specifically.

You can put that in business, you can put that in life.

I play football at Ohio State.

And the people that made it at Ohio State from high school usually had the right mentality.

The people that made it from Ohio State to the NFL, you know, they had that superior mentality where they're able to go past the alone.

And I feel like that kind of correlates to aviation, correlates to business, correlates to a lot of things in your life.

Absolutely.

It correlates to life entirely.

Yeah.

But, you know, that, that would, I would say was kind of the, the, the different mentality.

And, you know, it's a career where there's, there's different, you know, gradations of, of where you can End up right.

You can end up in a fighter cockpit, you can end up in something else.

And whatever you do, I guarantee that you're going to love it.

You know, even if I didn't get fighters, I would at least already convince myself that I was gonna be perfectly happy in helicopters and something else.

And I've seen it time and time again.

It's an incredible career, regardless, you know, what platform you're on.

Yeah.

And from the outside looking in, it's kind of like the community you go into.

Right.

Like every, every different airplane in the military, whether it be the Navy, the Air Force, be a helicopter, be fixed wing, they have their own special community.

And the brotherhood or the sisterhood that you go into is what really makes that career.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And when you talk about mentality, did you have that mentality?

Was that an issue for you at all?

Did you have to kind of learn how to be kind of mentally strong like that?

Or was that something that just kind of came natural to you?

I. I mean, I grew up playing, you know, four or five sports a year in high school, you know, basically since I was a kid.

So I think in some set I already had that, that drive and motivation, and I just didn't know perhaps where to put it.

You know, as I was going through high school and college, I hadn't found that real passion yet.

And, you know, I learned what my passion wasn't through the episode I shared with you.

But as soon as I saw that kind of future, future vision for myself flying fighters, I mean, it was like I was already there, you know, I just had to work myself to get there.

Yeah.

I was entirely motivated.

There was no opportunity for failure, you know, at least within what I could control.

Right.

But being a pilot, sometimes there's a lot of things you can't control.

Eyesight or issues, you know, that prevent you from meeting the criteria to get in the cockpit.

But in that sense, I was fortunate.

Although I did have laser eye surgery in order to correct my vision.

You gotta do what you gotta do, right?

Yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Um, yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about the training itself?

Cause you mentioned you had the 33 hours we can go on a Cessna, but you go from the Cessna to a very high performance airplane, very fast.

Can you talk about the transition from flying a 172 or 152 and going into the military trainers?

Yeah.

You know, I mean, the mechanics are the same in some sense.

Right.

In a Cessna Verse, our first trainer in the Navy, which is the T34, when I went through, is now the T6.

But regardless, you're looking at about a 600 horsepower prop aircraft, perhaps a little bit more with the T6.

And so while it is a power jump, you're still just moving in a slightly faster Cessna in a lot of different ways.

You might have the power to do, you know, a loop or to do some spins and have a little bit of fun, fly some formation.

But, you know, your speeds are relatively, you know, they're not too much removed from a Cessna, right?

Maybe a couple hundred miles an hour, maybe 300.

But, but you don't get that rush and, but that's, you know, that's kind of your first basis.

So you go into the Cessna, you get the 30 hours.

It's like any other civilian training.

But getting into a military aircraft, it's not just the system is different, but the standards of operation are much higher.

In the civilian world we have emergency procedures.

Some of them are perhaps bold face, but no one's sitting there quizzing you in your face on what the exact words are in the pre brief, necessarily to the degree that we do in the military.

There's this whole level of expectation and performance and standards which we need to rise to even as early as your primary training in order to just be minimally competent and ready to go in the aircraft.

And, you know, that's a place where a lot of people can weed out because they realize that like the amount of work and the book work and the knowledge that's required doesn't match perhaps the kind of romantic vision of, you know, flying around the clouds without a care in the world.

All right, so, you know, it kind of butts up against reality in that sense and it's a good, good proving ground where people get filtered out who can't do that kind of minimum required knowledge.

And you do, like I said, some basic flying formation, you know, instrument flying, things of that nature.

But the big jump comes after primary, and after primary they tell you what your platform is going to be essentially.

So you're either going to tail hook, which is anything that lands on the aircraft carrier, or you're going in a helicopter or you're going in a big wing like an E6 aircraft.

And so I, I was selected for Tailhook, which meant I had about a 90 chance of getting jets.

About 10% of people get sent to the E2 or C2, the cargo aircraft, or the over the horizon Raider aircraft that land on the carrier.

So I was signed Mardi, Mississippi.

That's where we jump into the T45 goshawk, a training aircraft.

I believe it's about 8 or 16,000 horsepower.

But now it's a, it's a real jump.

Now we're driving a real jet.

Things move significantly, noticeable, noticeably faster from the, you know, the roll down the Runway to the time you have to put your gear up to.

Everything just happens in an accelerator frame rate.

And that's, you know, almost one of the biggest initial challenges of going into, you know, starting into that fighter pipeline is realizing that things happen a lot faster for you than almost anyone else.

And you need to be thinking, you know, several steps ahead of the jet, the aircraft just to kind of be competent.

And we do, you know, then we start ramping up the tactics.

You know, some very basics.

How do you roll in and drop a bomb, how do you fly tactical formation, how do you fly down low landing on the aircraft carrier for the first time.

I don't believe they, they've actually stricken that training since I've been there.

But that's, you know, where I went to the aircraft carrier for the first time to land during the day.

And so it's, it's, it's, you know, it's pretty intensive.

There's, this is where you really start getting that technical, you know, challenge of are you a good enough pilot to be able to accomplish what you're going to need to be able to accomplish professionally?

Yeah.

To be safe and you know, again, it's a weeding out process.

Some people end up to the, you know, are out.

Some people transfer helicopters.

You have folks that go to E2C2 pipeline and then the rest are assigned to various fighter squadrons on the east and west coast.

Out of there I've finished and was assigned to VFA106, the F18 Fleet Replacement Squadron.

And now this is, I'm now a winged aviator in the Navy, but still untrained on my fleet platform.

So I, I now go through another year of Training on the F18 in Virginia beach and this is where we're done being taught how to fly.

And it's more about learning how to employ the system aircraft as a weapon.

I think you solo in the F18 on your second or third flight in it and you're off to the races.

And again, you know, although at the time it felt like we were very much in the weeds, looking back, it was very much a surface level exposure to what we're going to be doing in the fleet.

You know, how to operate the radar, how to operate the flir all the different air to surface considerations, all the air to air tactic, but very basic level, just so that you can understand what the basic mechanisms are and how to operate.

And again, back to the carrier in the daytime, in the nighttime.

At this point, once you finish that training, you're off into your fleet squadron.

Right.

And so typically it's time such that you finish your training and then you have maybe six months to eight months to go through a full workup cycle to work with the squadron and get sent out on a deployment.

Certain individuals are selected for what's called priority Alpha.

If you're, you know, consistently, you know, above average and you nail the boat essentially at the end, you can be immediately forward deployed to an active squadron that's deployed.

And that's what I was like for.

I did well at the boat and about two to three weeks after I finished the rag, I was out in the Middle east aboard the USS Enterprise and flew my first combat mission about a week after that.

So things can happen kind of fast Once, once you're done with that training.

Right.

Like two weeks in, you're like, all right, let's go, let's go to work.

Yeah.

And, you know, I get there, I, I essentially qual on the various weapons that they're using for their loadout.

Yeah.

Understand how they're operating.

I can be effective in that type of, you know, air superiority environment, if you will.

But, you know, we went through that.

Very interesting.

We come back and now we come back and I start going through what I would consider the real training.

This is when we start going through our strike fighter weapons syllabus training syllabus as like active fighter pilots, strike pilots.

And that takes us, you know, all the way through being an effective wingman in a combat environment up to leading a division of aircraft into air to air, air to surface combat.

And that takes you, you know, all the way up basically three or four year, four years that you're there.

Yeah.

Most people finish with a section lead or division lead qualification.

And these are all like, all right, we're using bleeding edge tactics, you know, against, you know, new threats, X, Y and Z.

It's the full bore, you know, and that's where it gets extremely challenging.

You know, that's your, your PhD level kind of thesis work, if you will, of, of, of being able to operate and execute these tactics and, you know, change with the, with the environments in a fluid way.

Conducting seamless air to air and air to surface missions, rescue missions, counter, you know, surface air missile missions, electronic warfare missions.

Where we in the Navy are expeditionary, we have to do everything right.

We can't just call in the bombers or calling, you know, fighter only aircraft.

We have to do all those missions.

And so we get, you know, constant training on all types of warfare that we could see in an aircraft.

Yeah.

And it's really interesting because it's always something that, you know, when everyone looks at a profession, they see where they are.

Now think about all the hard work and everything that took into it.

It's really just you build on each, each, each step, like step by step as you go, right?

Like the throw stuff at you, you finish it, you go on to the next step, and then eventually you have this whole kind of regimen, a whole kind of training that you did.

And now you're able to go lead people, you're able to go do everything that this mission allows you, which I think that the, the military does such a good job at preparing people for that kind of, that kind of mission and that kind of flying.

Absolutely.

And you don't get that, you know, anywhere else.

And you can only do it, you know, with incredibly motivated people that, you know, believe in what they're doing.

Um, there's, you know, there's no job like that with a salary large enough to motivate people to take those risks and go out there.

That's not something that you believe doing.

Yeah, 100%.

Did you have any humbling moments in your training at all?

Like the way you're looking back on it, the way you're talking on it now, like it's all good stuff, but you ever have any moments, you're like, man, holy smokes.

Like, this stuff's hard, like, I can't do it anymore.

Or just kind of like a flight, we're just kind of down on.

Down on yourself?

Yeah.

I, I mean, where do you start?

You know, I mean, that is the nature of being in that cockpit and operating in high risk environments.

Right.

You can perform your best, but you're never going to be perfect.

And you know, there will be mistakes.

And you know, some of them can be big mistakes, right.

From releasing ordinance on the wrong target or performing unsafely behind the boat.

The, the mental errors that lead to character flaws.

Right.

Like not preparing for a mission and things like that.

Obviously those things get weeded out, you know, in the, in the training environment.

But when you're active on the boat, it.

I tell people, they ask, you know, what's that career like?

It's so hard to imagine.

I say, it's got you know, the most incredible highs you can imagine as far as what you're able to do and go out there and the responsibilities.

But it's got incredible lows as well.

Yeah.

You know, you have a lot of people relying on you.

And like I said, nobody's perfect.

There's a lot of responsibility, a lot of room for errors, and it's your job to navigate that, not just in life, but perhaps on the same flight, flight, especially in the Navy, where, you know, you have to perhaps go out and support troops hopefully successfully in combat and perhaps, you know, you have a good experience, perhaps you have a bad experience, but at the end of the day, you still need to come back and focus all your energy at landing on the boat after a 10 hour flight, you know, at 1 in the morning after you've, you know, had whatever flight you had.

And so you got to be able to, to walk that line on both sides of it.

So, I mean, I could list 100 examples, but, you know, I think anyone that's in that cockpit has, you know, a long laundry list of, you know, humbling experiences.

Oh, yeah, I would, I would hope so, because you learn from those humbling experiences.

Right.

You use those either failures or those mistakes and then you, you make better, you do better because you realize that you have to do it for your team, for the country, for the mission, for everyone.

Like you said, you're not only supporting the people around you flying, but oftentimes people on the ground too.

Right.

So there's, there's really no room for.

Error and there's, there's no room for error.

But impossible, you know, perfection is an impossible standard as well in that cockpit.

And you know, I've seen people go through, you know, as a, as a flight instructor, incredibly motivated, capable, intelligent people, I mean, like you said, dreaming about being, you know, perhaps a fighter pilot or pilot, you know, since they were three years old.

And you know, sometimes they've gone their whole lives in some sense without failing.

Right.

But you, you can't get through aviation, especially naval aviation, without hitting some type of failure point.

You absolutely will.

And you know, whether you're right for that job or not is going to be how you respond to those failures.

Yeah, 100% agree.

And you want to see how you handle diversity too, right?

Like the Navy wants to see how you handle diversity.

They don't want your first time handling diversity being in a critical mission, because then you're kind of up in like, no one knows really what the outcome could be.

So if you train it Train it, train it, train it, train it.

And if you have the ability to see the failure, understand the failure and learn from it, then you're just become a better person, a better aviator, just overall better at your job.

Right?

Yep.

It goes to the old adage that, you know, we don't rise to the difficulty of the occasion.

You know, we fall back to the level of our training.

Yeah.

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When you look back on landing on a boat.

I'm an airline guy, you know, I fly 737.

I cannot imagine lining up on a moving target that's going up and down with the waves that's moving around, especially shooting an IFR approach.

Someone talking you through, like talk me through one.

Just the first time you ever land on a boat, like what's your mentality like are you just like this is not possible or I mean talking to you sounds like you're like let's go.

Like I can do this, it's gonna be awesome.

But just talk about just the initial process of learning how to land on a boat.

Yeah.

Gosh.

So let me start with the process.

You know, we do that with a team of experts called landing signal officers or LSOs.

And these are pilots that are within the squadrons in the air wing and they're, there's both a team in the squadron and they operate as a kind of distributed group when they're on the aircraft carrier.

So before you go to the boat, the LSOs are responsible for qualifying everyone and ensuring they're safe before they go on their deployment.

And these are lieutenant ranked, you know, O3 level officers, which is a relatively low officer rank for the amount of responsibility that they have.

But there are circumstances where perhaps the skipper of the squadron is unsafe during the, what we call FCLP warm up period, the training to go to the boat.

It is still that O3's responsibility to clear him for the boat.

And there's been instances where, you know, commanding officers or squadrons have been unsafe and not allowed to deploy.

And, you know, the integration with LSOs start in the training command very early on because it is a big trust issue and you don't want an O6 barking down at you how to fly your aircraft when you're, you know, essentially scared alone behind the back of the boat on a bad day.

You want, you know, your peer out there who can keep you calm and talking down onto the boat.

And that's been part of the philosophy of, of, you know, how these individuals are selected and, you know, their rank and whatnot.

And so this starts at the field.

You know, hundreds of passes at the field.

There'll be LSOs out there and we use a islet system, a lens with the datum, a horizontal green datum and a ball that essentially moves up and down or at least appears to.

And that's how you tell where you are on glide slope, where that ball position is.

So it's above that datum, you're high, you might bring some power back to settle the ball down.

If you're low, you want to add power to get it above the datums.

And if you're right on the datums, when you come across the boat, you're going to, you know, snag that three wire, ideally.

And so the, the pilots, especially the students, are essentially getting talked down by the LSOs.

They're getting graded for their passes all the way from the 180 position to the 90 all the way through.

They're essentially getting graded with the special attention once they roll out.

And that builds that trust.

You know, they're able to, there's a whole language that we use to grade them across different parts.

So they might be high at the start, high, come down in the middle, settle in close, low at the ramp, right?

So you delineate, you break the different parts of the pass down and you can tell the story of how they were flying across the glide slope.

And we use that debrief every single pass in the grade them.

Right.

And so that starts in the training command and it Continues all the way into the fleet, all the way to the boat, all the way to combat the deployments.

Every landing, there's a group of LSOs out in the platform with a radio, literally talking to the pilot to help them on every pass.

If the weather goes bad, visibility is low on the far end of the spectrum.

Worst case scenario, they can't see that landing system on the boat.

LSOs can't even see the aircraft.

And what you'll hear is perhaps one of the worst calls you can hear behind a boat, which is 99 taxi lights on.

And what that means is that the LSOs, it's so foggy, it's so hazy, that the LSOs are going to visually pick up your landing light and they're going to verbally land your aircraft for you through your controls by talking down onto the back of the boat.

And you can imagine the level of trust it takes to do that.

Right.

And that's why that relationship has started so early.

I was at lso.

I was trained as LSO in my squadron.

I was the head landing signal officer for my squadron.

And, you know, I got to do this across multiple deployments.

Yeah.

And so, you know, specifically, like I said, they get all those landings at the field, but then eventually they go to the boat in the T45 during the daytime.

It's, you know, it's a crazy experience.

It's hard to.

It's just like this constant adrenaline high, you know, going through it doesn't feel real.

It's almost like a dream.

You're up there, you're flying out into the oceans.

Everything's blue.

And then you just see this very small ship down there, right?

And you're flying for him as a student.

You're by yourself, right?

Your instructor's in the lead aircraft.

There's three of you on his wing, and he's going to drop you off over the boat, and you're going to break into the pattern by yourself, and you're going to spend the rest of the day in your own jet landing on the aircraft carrier.

But when you're descending down to get to that point over the ship, as you know, wingman, you're just staring at the lead.

You're not, like, just staring at the ship and taking it all in.

So at first you just see it way in the distance, maybe 20 miles away.

It's a small little dot and like, wow, I can't believe I'm gonna land on that.

Then the next thing you know, you're breaking over the carrier at 600ft, 800ft.

And you're like, you know, holy smokes.

Like this.

This is.

It's almost hard to put in the words.

It's just so in your face.

It's so large.

It's.

You can see the activity on it.

And it's like, it's like, holy, this is very real right now.

And then you're stuck in this like, like just ever this intensely present state of just making sure you do every little thing that you are supposed to do and that we're trained to do, and continue doing that until you essentially touch the touchdown on the ship.

First time you touch down, what's going through your mind?

You're like, I do it.

Do I do it?

Am I here?

No thoughts, because the moment I touched down, my body and everything else was flung forward.

And, you know, your arms and legs are basically like this because there's so much force and accelerating down.

And then as often happens, you know, it didn't happen to me.

But often the first time you land, the tower has to come up and tell you to bring your throttle back because you just totally forget you're missing the signal.

But you bring your throttle back and you're.

You're still very much in it.

You're now taxing on the busiest, you know, pavement space on the planet for aircraft.

And you have as dangerous as a mission as you just had a moment ago to follow the flight directors go through your procedures, not run anyone over, not go off the side of the deck so it doesn't stop.

And typically you're taxing right back to the cat.

Now you're shooting off for the first time within a minute to go do it again.

Just like, just when you're talking about that, seeing like this little tiny boat out in the distance, I'd be like, oh, my God, what did I get myself into?

You know, it's like, it's game time.

Let's go.

Let's buckle up.

Oh, man, that's crazy.

It's just for someone that's never had that opportunity to do that, like, I can't even.

I don't even think I can truly understand what the feelings you're going through when you're doing that for the first time.

Yeah.

You're trusting someone else.

Right.

You got the ls.

So that's.

That's guiding you in.

So there's got to be this immense trust.

And then, you know, you're off just a little bit.

Things can go very badly, very fast in that environment.

And especially when you're talking about when they need your taxi light on to even just be able to see you, to guide you in, man.

Kudos to you guys.

That's amazing.

I love, always love getting the military perspective just because I've always been civilian on my side.

And it's just so cool.

It's so cool to hear.

And it's, it's just such a.

It sounds like such a revolution rewarding and such a great career to go through and, and so many people look back on it very fondly.

Yeah, it was an incredible experience and it's one of those jobs where, you know, you can't do it forever.

Yeah, right.

And so, you know, at least I always tried to appreciate just how, you know, awesome it was, what I was getting to do for that small sliver of my life.

Yeah, I think that's a.

A hard thing to do.

Right.

Like, I think that's a learned skill to be able to appreciate the time of life that you're in because a lot of times that you're never going to be able to experience what you're experiencing either right now or in the military.

But that's something that's very hard to do.

Yeah, absolutely.

So kudos to you for having that mentality when you look back on your career.

Do you.

I mean, obviously talk about looking back fondly, you enjoyed it, but can you think of like, just like one overall moment that was kind of like, man, this is, this is what it's like being a military pilot.

Yeah.

I mean, there's, you know, I've had some incredible training flights.

Right.

Because I've got to got.

I got a lot of specialized training.

I got to do Ford air controller airborne, which means I got to take command of battle space, employ other jets, you know, like tools.

I got to do combat search and rescue where I would lead the whole air wing in if anyone was shot down while we were out there, to go rescue them and fight our way in, fight our way out.

But all that pales in comparison to just being operational.

Right.

You know, there's all the crazy experiences of landing on the boat and many more we haven't talked about and the challenges of training, you know, flying a real opera operational mission, you know, with ordinance, with people on the ground, with bad guys hurting people, going out there and employing and doing the mission, helping people.

Yeah.

You know, there's nothing like it.

And up to that point, I would say, you know, I think perhaps like many people, you know, secretly, at least, you know, I was probably a pilot for mostly selfish reasons.

It was just a Cool thing for me.

You know, I enjoyed the buttons.

I enjoyed the technology.

I enjoyed, you know, the.

The teamsmanship and the challenge of it all and, you know, what it represented.

But flying a combat mission, dropping ordinance, pushing the button, you know, it.

You know, it very quickly comes back to you, you know, how much bigger your mission is and just yourself, you know, why you're doing this.

And, yeah, that was, you know, it just kind of changes your perspective.

You know, everything we've done is just to support those guys on the ground.

And it was, you know, just, you know, just a mind.

Not a mind shift.

But it was just a refreshing change to say, like, I can be effective.

I can help this now.

My training was effective.

I mean, some people go through their whole.

Whole, you know, fighter careers without dropping, you know, ordinance.

Right?

So to actually be able to utilize that training to help, you know, guys on the ground was incredible.

Do you ever have the opportunity to find out, not necessarily who you help, but, you know, whether it's in a movie and always hear, like, they're at the bar and they're like, oh, dude, you're the one that flew.

Like, they somehow they put it all together.

But was there, like, a moment where you real, like, you.

You're able to meet up with people that you helped on the ground or anything?

No, unfortunately, that.

That didn't happen.

There's been a few folks that I've met that were operational in similar places, but.

And recognize our call signs, but don't know if it was them.

Just them individually.

Yeah, yeah.

As you're starting to transition out of the military, was there ever a plan?

I mean, a lot of military pilots say they kind of see their career like, all right, I have this, the skill.

I can go fly airplanes.

I'm to just going to continue this up, go Southwest, go to American, go to Delta.

Was ever that thought that you're going to continue and just fly as a fair career?

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, I. I finished my career out as an instructor in Mary, Mississippi, instructing the T45 goshawk.

And it's.

It's kind of like a pipeline, if you will.

I mean, you build a bunch of hours there, and then, you know, it's the time of your career where you can get out.

So people make the decision, either stay or get out, and, you know, build their hours so they can go into the airlines and, you know, it's hard not to want to do that.

You hear them talking about the good life and, you know, how much you're making all that Good stuff.

Yeah.

But it was never, it was never my passion to fly, you know, big wing aircraft around the country.

And for me, I wanted to be more stable and home more, especially after, you know, being in the Navy for 11 years and travel around, you know, getting out was a point where I could, you know, starving kids and being around more.

And I didn't want to be gone a lot in airlines, but I still did pursue it.

With all being said, it just was still too juicy of a carrot.

And I did pursue it.

I had a job at American Airlines for a short amount of time until I left and went into the defense industry where I got really unique opportunity to work in advanced research and Development center where we did a lot of work with DARPA for advanced capabilities for fighter aircraft.

Oh, cool.

Which is right up my alley and you know, really interesting stuff to me.

So I, I decided to switch into that and now I'm, you know, working with, you know, folks in the defense industry to bring forward advanced autonomy capabilities for next generation fighters.

Dang, that's quite the job.

When you, you talk about that, like, I mean, airline pilots, they love to tell you how great it is, right?

They're like, oh, dude, I made 600 grand.

I flew eight, like two trips.

You know, like they're the first ones to tell you how great their life is.

And it's one of those things that's hard to not just kind of fall into and just, just do it, even if it doesn't work out perfectly.

Your life like this is what pilots do.

We fly in the military, we go to the airlines, we retire, we go on layovers, and we drink beer.

That's pretty much what people think pilots do sometimes.

Right?

But was it hard for you to walk away from that carrot, as you said, that kind of just that easy life, that easy job, you know, was it, was that a hard decision for you to do or was it just like, you know what?

But what's truly going to make me happy is, is working in the defense industry or being able just to stay at home more with my kids and my family.

Yeah, I think it was a little bit like, you know, the experience I had with that book being plopped on my desk a bit, you know, maybe not quite as sudden, but, you know, working with the reserve guys who are constantly flying, you know, in the airlines, you know, some of those guys were flying during 9 11.

Right.

And although salaries can be good, there's also a lot of turmoil that can happen and uncertainty and mergers and, you know, there's a Lot of rigidity in the, the corporate structure and the ranking system in the airlines that, you know, made it very clear that there wasn't going to be a lot of flexibility or opportunity to do anything other than that.

Right.

Like I, I guess I, I could obviously, you know, I could always expand and do these hobby projects or podcasts or something, but I, I felt like I was going to be locked into that right.

In a manner that was going to restrict me in a way that I didn't want.

So it was tough.

I didn't think I was walking away from aviation per se.

Just flying in big wing aircraft and you know, a nice check.

I'd love to continue to fly.

I don't fly at the moment, but you know, I would love to when the time's right, when I'm around an area with something fun to rent, to be able to go out and do some low level and aerobatic flying, which is stuff I always like to do.

But I don't have, I don't have any regrets in, in making that change.

No.

Good man.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I mean it's a kudos to you for realizing that because you know, sometimes you get stuck in this and you just realize, you know, the, the lot of money at the end of the career, right.

You're going to retire with X amount of million in your bank and you're just gonna be miserable your whole life and being able to just to decide like, hey, I want to do something else.

Like, I think that's awesome.

And you did mention, right like being an airline pilot, you do have the ability to have hobbies like a podcast or be a real estate agent.

Like you do have time off.

But it's truly you're still an airline pilot.

Like that's still your job.

You're still searching for trips, you're still look, making sure you get the paycheck that you want.

So I think it's awesome that you're doing that.

Are you able to say anything that you're working on with county beer defense contracts?

They're pretty hush hush.

You know, I'll just say, you know, it's, it's no secret that you know, autonomy and small form factor drones and computing and you know, machine intelligence is getting much more advanced and you know, there's a lot of problems in the military as far as retention with you know, cost benefit of being able to send highly exquisite assets after say, you know, $200 drone.

You know, we're at a pretty difficult place as kind of a legacy Fleet of capabilities, perhaps trying to now operate in a world where there's more autonomy and small form factor threats, whether they be boats or air traffic.

How do we integrate, you know, the massive amount of data that these systems bring in from across the carrier strike group into real time, you know, decisions and actions that can be used to send autonomous assets to deal with threats, you know, at a high level, without having to have, you know, a bunch of guys behind computer screens trying to process, you know, individual threats, you know, in a large swarm.

Yeah.

And so this level of like, autonomy and integration with unmanned assets is going to require a strategic rethinking of how we employ carrier strike groups, how we design them, how we man them, how we operate on them, how we integrate air traffic, how we design our sensors.

And, you know, that's the kind of space that I look at to help define what's possible in the future so that we can build those capabilities to enable that distributed, resilient capability through the Navy with manned and unmanned assets.

Yeah.

And when you hear about this kind of stuff in the news, right.

You see Ukraine doing it, you see Russia having the ability to do it, do you.

Would you say that us as a country, are we behind in any of these capacities or are we right where we need to be?

We are definitely behind in our ability to respond to UAVs.

Of course, we have some very sophisticated technology when it comes to, you know, drones and swarming, but of a military class.

Right.

Of what's perhaps useful against a nation state, but non state actors or small state actors, or terrorist organizations or companies that want to spy through third parties can utilize small form factor drones that cause, you know, a lot of havoc and uncertainty over military bases.

They can shut down runways, never mind if they're actually armed and want to take out parked aircraft.

Right.

How, how easy would that be?

So, you know, part of the problem is that our defensive structure in the United States over the continental United States is designed for a particular type of international missile threat.

Retuning, reconfiguring, and redistributing data of small form factor threats at low altitudes is a different type of challenge that I don't think we fully integrated into our defense structure.

There are progress being made on, you know, UAV detection kits, if you will, like multimodal ones that can be used to track these, that can be placed at bases.

Of course, there's a lot of work going on for doing that for defense, you know, overseas, but to bring that back home on the bases or even deploy it onto civilian land, you start running into a lot of policy and regulatory limitations, which is another way that we're not prepared for this threat.

We don't have properly controls and procedures to be able to mitigate the threat.

And that's what we saw last year with New Jersey to a certain degree, where no one really seemed to know how to respond to this threat.

Yeah, I mean, that I was flying.

I was kind of like six months into my airline career, and I was just like, oh, drones, drone drones, orbs.

And, you know, I was flying in LaGuardia, and sure enough, outside your window, I just see this, like, floating orb or whatever it may be, which we can get into if you know anything.

Anything.

But it was just.

It was just wild, right?

Like, it's just like, so interesting to think that one.

Either we don't know what it is or the fact that, you know, let's not tell everyone, because we don't want to freak everyone out what it actually is.

But just the idea that this kind of, like you said, there's no way where we are right now, it's hard to prevent anything like that from happening.

Right.

Like, our whole military is designed, like you said, for other ballistic missiles or for other kind of threats.

Right.

This is also new.

I mean, look at Russia when Ukraine and launched all those drones from.

From the back of a van.

It's like no one knew that was even possible until now.

Right.

It's just like we don't know how to respond to that.

Which is super interesting, but kind of looking back and going back to that time, what.

What all do you know about what was going on then?

Yeah.

Well, when you say time, you mean in around New Jersey, correct?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, Let me.

Let me just.

Let me preface this a little bit and say, you know, for those not aware, you know, when I was operating Virginia beach in the F18, after I came back from that first deployment, we were picking up a number of objects in our working areas.

We had just upgraded our radar to a much more advanced APG79 AESA radar.

And that's kind of when this whole conversation started for me.

We were detecting numerous objects in our areas that were behaving in ways that we wouldn't expect.

Either stationary supersonic, 0.6 to 0.8 Mach, and circular racetrack patterns, you know, rapid accelerations and heading changes.

We didn't know what to make of it.

We correlated them across all our sensors on our jet and eventually visually ID Them.

After a near miss at the entrance to our working areas, they Described it as a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere.

But that kind of is what set me down this road.

I mean, our squadron continued to have these interactions while we were there.

When we prepared for our second deployment, we went on a workup cycle off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.

We had dozens of incidences down there to the point where the Admiral, you know, was sending emails, threatening to shut the exercise down.

You know, who was ever controlling these, wasn't able to remove them because we had multiple near misses.

And this is a carrier strike group training exercise.

Prepare for deployment.

Like, if this exercise gets, you know, canceled, that's going to be a note on the President's desk because we're not be able to deploy properly in two months.

So, you know, it's a pretty big deal.

And so, you know, they were there.

We had those instances.

We.

We left for deployment.

I have a few reports from guys seeing them, you know, over there as well.

And then I eventually left the squadron to go be that flight instructor in Ridding, Mississippi, and kind of forgot about it until 2017 when a new York Times article came out that had footage from our Jacksonville cruise workup exercise with some of the videos that guys in my squadron captured.

And that's when I decided to try to speak out about this, because, you know, as a pilot, to have unknowns in your operating area, I think, you know, listen to this conversation, you can see why that's so critical.

But, I mean, so many of our systems are designed to tell who's who out there.

Are we shooting a commercial airliner or the MIG that's flying next to it, or our own Blue Air guy that's approaching them?

We have to know that it's critical to everything we do.

And so to have this one class of object on a radar that we just kind of ignored was a huge red flag for me.

Never mind the safety issues coming with, you know, multiple near misses within 500ft of these objects.

That's when I decided to speak.

I was like, I'm in a training squadron.

I'm not deployable.

I have more time.

Maybe I can, you know, provide some information to help resolve this.

Because no one seemed to be helping.

In fact, the only thing that had been done after almost two years of this continuous issue was to post a NOTAM to say, hey, be careful.

Unknown objects operating in the working area.

Use caution.

Yeah, cool.

Thanks.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, great, thank you.

And so I. I reached out.

I ended up speaking to Senate Armed Service Committee, Sunny Select Committee on Intelligence, and then ultimately Testifying before Congress in July of 2023 on, on this issue, and not just the issues that we had, but I started receiving hundreds of reports from other pilots and veterans and regular people who were, you know, sometimes seeing similar things, sometimes seeing different things, but ultimately all felt that this was something like.

Agreed that this was a national security issue and that we needed to pay attention to it.

And to get back to your question, you know, we, we received a lot of reports around the time frame when everything was happening around New Jersey, but not everyone is aware that that didn't start last year in New Jersey.

It's been going on in that area for, since about 2022 at Langley Air Force Base with some earlier reports.

In 2021, 2023 we saw increased activity and 2024 we saw it spread, you know, significantly more as well as the report reports around the country at different military bases from Ohio and Washington State.

I mean, even there were sightings 15 minutes from my house in New Hampshire all the way up the coast and down to Florida.

And so, you know, what, what was it?

Right.

One, there was a ton of noise, right?

So I think the reason there were so many sightings during that period is that it started getting, you know, national attention.

More people were looking up, people were launching their own drones to see what they could see.

The military or, you know, police are doing their thing.

And so there was a lot of noise that was injected into it once it kind of spread.

But at the core I'm confident that there, you know, and we've seen this in our reports that there are some anomalous behaviors at the core of this that kind of kick this off.

And so, you know, what does that look like?

We have about 149 reports from that period, that time period in that location, and you know, consistent reports of, you know, spherical objects that are being seen with the eye as well as with camera that, you know, have multiple colors in them that are spherical, either self illuminated or not.

A number of these objects seem to be exhibiting signal management capabilities, right.

Between law enforcement and civilians.

People haven't been able to track them with RF Radar has been failing.

Electro Optical has a hard time tracking some of these objects, especially the ones around the Langley Air Force Base.

I've spoken to the pilots that have responded to some of those incidences, government pilots, you know, using modern sensors and are unable to acquire locks.

None of this is necessarily magic, right?

You could imagine an autonomous system that is using passive sensor systems to either navigate or to conduct its mission.

You could imagine, you Know, some pretty sophisticated radar shielding perhaps around the propellers.

Right, but still that's going to be a problem.

But IR too is a bit tricky.

It's pretty hard, hard to shield IR energy, especially considering these objects seem to be coming from over the ocean, flying inland, you know, over boats for hundreds of yards, operating for an hour, hour and a half and then flying back out.

You would expect some pretty heavy heat generation as part of that process, but they don't seem to have significant IR expenditure.

So these are some of the signal management, you know, problems.

Then you got just the pure numbers and the low altitudes and the in some case swarming behaviors that folks are seeing, you know, with sudden turns.

So I don't have an answer to what they are.

But we, you know, many of what's been reported news or just generally shared, you know, often seem to be misidentifications.

But there certainly is this, you know, weird core to it that is also repeatable over the past few years.

And so I think looking to this year, I think it's interesting to see what's going to happen.

Right.

Is it going, is the trend going to continue or, or what Just kind.

Of your professional, I mean, your expertise in this, would you say?

Would you think they're man made or do you think that there, there's a possibility that it could be something else?

So, you know, my organization, Americans for Safe Aerospace, you know, approaches this from the angle that we don't have enough information to make an assessment of what they are or where they're from.

What we do assume, based off the reports that we've seen, is that, you know, very reliable witnesses are being truthful when they observe and report to us that they are observing objects that are exceeding capabilities of the known state of the art.

And that is in various ways, kinematics to signal management and other things.

Point of origin.

Right.

I mean, how many objects do we have in our inventory that can hover in space, not orbit, but hover in space at a fixed location and then drop down, you know, next to an aircraft?

Right.

I'm not aware of any.

Right.

So, you know, there's patterns and behaviors that are inconsistent with the known state of the art outside of just how fast it goes or things of that nature.

So, you know, we're very confident that, you know, what is being witnessed does represent capability beyond state of the art, not just tricks of the eyes or illusions based off of the, you know, large number of consistent reports from across, you know, sensors and individuals and everything else.

Now what that means, we don't know.

And I have some reasons why I don't think that is China or foreign military in entirety.

I do certainly think they take advantage of these opportunities, these confused states, in order to launch assets to take advantage of the situation.

But I don't think they're the primary instigator here.

What would be.

What would be better?

Would it be better if it was another country, like we found out, or to be better if it was some extraterrestrial thing?

Like one.

One way you look at it, it's like, all right, well, now we know for sure that we are so far behind on certain technologies, but the other one's like, it's otherworldly or you don't know how to react to anything like that.

Yeah, I mean, neither are very good.

And ultimately, it really doesn't matter because we have to respond the same way.

Right.

We can't make an assumption if we don't have enough information that, you know, it's extraterrestrial.

When the threat vector is just as, you know, relevant, timely.

If it is China doing it.

Right, what's important is we have answers and that we're not just dismissing this information.

There's reports because, you know, we all grew up in a culture where, you know, this topic was considered fantasy or that we've always had the technological lead.

So how dare another nation potentially, you know, be able to do something we're not aware of?

Either one's a threat and that we need to pay attention to instead of letting our preconceived notions dictate our response?

Yeah, absolutely.

Which, like you said, none of them are great options, and neither one of them are good.

When you look back, I'm just going to say UFOs just because that's kind of like what I was always just told to think of what a lot of unidentified flying objects are.

Right.

And I think they're extraterrestrial.

When I think of UFOs, that's what I think.

I think of the UFOs from Aliens and Independence Day, and so be it.

But when they come back and I. I don't remember the exact kind of story that I read, but it was.

Majority of the UFO sightings back in the day were kind of super intelligent.

Not super intelligent, were highly classified air Force or U.S. military kind of ships that were flying out there.

Is there the chance that this is something that's just like super high up in the military and that we're just kind of doing some testing and it's just.

It's just part of the program testing.

That they're doing, I absolutely think that it does account for some portion of what's reported, no doubt about it.

But some of the other descriptions, reports that again are consistent across not only multiple people, but often multiple decades, makes it a little hard to imagine that we've kept a singular technology since the 40s or 50s or 60s that hasn't evolved physically in any manner.

Right, so for example, the Tic Tac.

Right.

That David Fraver saw, you know, there's Tic Tac reports going back to the 60s and 70s.

So is that our own technology that's been in the exact same form factor for, you know, 70 years or so, or is there something else?

Right, so, and I, I don't know, I'm not suggesting one or the other, but you know, as I understand the rapid development of advanced military technology, you know, we don't have many designs that have remained exactly the same for 60, 70 years outward appearances.

You know, and another thing is that, you know, it's a pretty big deal to like accidentally show someone a SAP program or classified technology.

It's not just like, oops, well we launched it at the wrong time.

I guess we'll have have to correct that.

Like you're breaking the law.

Right.

Like if you took these technologies as some people have supposed and tested them against us in the, you know, off the coast of Virginia, like, oh, it was just a test.

Like it's just as illegal for them to do that and expose me that technology as if it would be if they handed me a classified binder with the details of the program.

Right, okay.

It's going to require NDAs and debriefs and all this read ins and all this stuff.

There are processes for it.

So to think they're just kind of willy nilly testing stuff, like super secret stuff to see how we act is blatantly illegal and you know, illogical thinking.

And there are specific locations where we have to be able to test, you know, these types of capabilities and that's what we use them for.

So yes, certainly part of the smaller picture, but if you look at the scope of the problem in entirety, it just doesn't make sense.

Especially and we haven't even talked about, you know, the international nature of some of these sightings.

Yeah, that's going to be one of my next questions.

Going to be is this something that is just specific to the United States or has this been kind of all over?

Yeah, all over.

You know, you've heard my description of the cube off the coast Virginia beach, you know, I have very similar descriptions in the South China Sea of very similar objects and elsewhere in the world.

So this very much does seem to be a global issue.

And, you know, it wasn't just New Jersey that saw an up.

Uptick in sightings.

It wasn't just the United States during that period.

But, you know, there were reports globally increasing during that time period as well.

What that means, I don't know.

But.

But we're off.

We're a bit myopic in thinking that this is only happening here certain times because we don't always have access to that broader news ecosystem because we're just not looking there.

Yeah, no, I mean, as Americans.

Right.

We seem to just focus on what's happening to us and what's happening in our airspace or technically the city you live in, whether it be small or big.

But is there any kind of what they're flying over?

Is anything that's consistent, or is it just.

Just all over the place?

Like, is it specifically military bases they're going over, or is there anything kind of.

That can bring kind of a conclusion of what they're looking for, of what the.

The reason is that they're in the air?

The data set that we have, I would say that's relatively inconclusive because of the relatively small amount of reports over what could potentially be and the type of people that we speak to.

Right.

So we do speak to some veterans who are in unique areas that indicate that these are likely attracted to uap, but we only have a few of those within our database.

We have a lot of pilot reports.

So, you know, for some reason, these seem to, you know, operate around certain aircraft.

But it's hard to say whether that's a trend or whether that's just, you know, the result of our small data set and who we're talking to.

If I expand outside the data set that we have and look historically across other data sets, deaths, then it's very clear that these things do have an attraction to what we consider just high technology.

So whether that's nuclear weapons, nuclear propulsion, new capabilities being launched by military, that always seems to bring forward additional attention.

Even transportation of nuclear waste, building of new facilities, all seem to garner attention.

Is there like a time like we don't hear about it?

I mean, we say we.

I personally have not heard about it recently.

Is there just like a time frame where it's.

Is it sporadic, is it random, or have you been able to come up with some kind of like, consistent time that the.

The sightings are Happening.

There's been, well, I've told you about the trend that's recently occurred the past few years in the Langley, New Jersey area.

Historically there's been some studies done that kind of show a bit of a cycle, you know, up and down cycle of number of reports.

There's also increased reports around the period time of the construction of various nuclear facilities in the United States, I think back in the the 40s and 50s or so.

But it does seem to be a bit cyclic.

I guess that's as far as I can say at the moment.

But honestly it, there's a dirt.

The problem is that you don't have consistent data.

Right.

It's always kind of been suppressed.

So you have to make, you know, some statements about what you know.

But you know, if we can bring in and expand more reports, you know, that's where we're going to be able to be incredibly effective.

And you know, my organization, American Safe Aerospace, you know, we've received over 850 reports, many from pilots and veterans.

And we've been taking those reports to organizations such as Senate Armed Service Committee, Senate Select Committee, Intelligence, various members in the House and the Senate.

We have a working relationship with the FBI who's built a working group to investigate this issue.

And with our witnesses permission, we've brought them in and they've shared their experiences with these individuals and, and it's caused a great deal of momentum and effort, you know, within these organizations in order to better undercover what's happening.

And I, you know, if I may, you know, I would encourage your listeners to go to safe aerospace.org and you can, you can report yourself.

We screen every report.

We have both a former witness and army intelligence officer Cason, who helps screen those with me.

And we reach out to individuals to help help investigate, process their case.

And we have a number of opportunities where, you know, you can be very impactful with what you're sharing, you know, from D.C. to law enforcement and the scientific community.

So I would make that shout out there for, for folks to join us there.

Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.

And one of the last questions I have kind of on this because I don't want to take up too much more your time, but when you present this information to the people that need to hear this, what is the response?

Is the response just kind of like oh yeah, yeah, like they kind of like just, just passing it off like oh, it's nothing, it's nothing.

Are they like truly concerned about what's going on?

I'd say about half of the People, you know, representatives, whatnot, have, are visibly relieved that they have a reasonable way of engaging this topic through a national security and aviation lens and helping pilots lend.

Because, you know, I think the average person is probably much more interested in this topic than people believe.

You know, there has been this big taboo and stigma around it.

But when I engage with people and I'm just upfront and talk about it and bring it up, especially with pilots, it's incredible how many people have had their own anomalous experience, whether in the cockpit or elsewhere.

I mean, for me, it's almost half the people I talk to are willing to be like, well, yeah, actually, you know, X, Y or Z happened.

And so, you know, when I engage members, they're just like everyone else.

And some of them, I've been waiting for an excuse to talk about this.

Others are maybe dismissive, but they can't ignore, you know, dozens of incidents from, you know, some of their best trained pilots.

They're saying, hey, you know, you put me in this position to use these tools and this training.

And now I'm reporting what I found.

Don't ignore me.

Are you able to talk about any of the reports that you have that are maybe different or kind of stick out, just not either worrisome or just like impressive data that you've gotten from any witness reports?

Oh, gosh.

Oh, I mean, there's so many.

But, you know, aviation specific, you know, one that always kind of chills my bones is a 737, I believe it was, you know, two air crew taking off out of airport, climbing about 10 to 12,000ft, about 30 miles north of the airfield or so northeast.

See a, a small object on the horizon, essentially right off their nose, kind of turns back, looks up objects closer, turns back again.

Then next thing you know, they're both watching this black triangle about 200 yards on the side fly directly over the aircraft.

Within 500ft, purple lights at the apexes of the triangle, or excuse me, red lights, I believe they were, with like a purple one in the middle.

Just absolutely massive.

Within 500ft of fully loaded, you know, commercial 737 carrying passengers.

Pilots talked, AC, ATC, nothing.

There was no, there was no turbulence from the, the, the near miss.

There was no indications on any of their proximity warnings.

So yes, these, these two pilots, you know, they have this, you know, within 500 foot pass with this very large triangle 200ft to a side.

And as they're, you know, trying to make sense of this in the cockpit through the rest of their Flight kind of going down the decision tree of what logically this could be at the end, you know, the pilots end up self administering a drug test to themselves when they got out, just thinking, like, what, how else could we be possibly seeing what we just saw?

You know, of course, you know, the test was negative, but, but that's, you know, that's the situation that some pilots are finding themselves where, you know, drug testing themselves is the best potential solution to explain, you know, what they're seeing in the sky.

So obviously not a sustainable position.

And you know, our, our goal, Mercury Aerospace, is essentially just to educate enough so that people understand that if they do see something like this, it's not the first time they've ever tried to fit this into the world view.

And they realize they're not the only people that have had these types of experiences.

And we're looking to share our reports and our experiences that our witness have provided us on our website and to our community here in the near future.

So that, you know, as, as we've learned that this, this isn't a rare experience necessarily.

And you know, there's a lot of commonalities between what people have seen.

If someone needs to report anything, you know, where would they go?

What's a website to do?

And kind of what's the process?

Yeah, so right now there's really no formal guidance within the aviation world.

The Federal Aviation Regulations ESS recommend that you contact local law enforcement, whatever that means there is.

There are organizations such as safeaerospace.org where we collect reports and then we make them actionable so that we can actually provide protections to pilots and provide formal reporting systems for this.

In the meantime, we collect the reports to assure that they get the decision makers so that they can formally petition for those changes.

We also have legislation that we've introduced last year and are still working to have passed called the Safe Airspace for Americans Act.

And this legislation would require the FAA and NASA to modify the aviation safety reporting system to be able to accept these types of reports as part of that ecosystem, as well as protect pilots who do report it, who feel they may have, have, you know, ramifications from their employer for doing so, which a high number of pilots do report to us as well.

Yeah.

What's the website?

Safe Aerospace.org perfect.

So if you see anything weird, you know where to go and you can report it.

And you might get a phone call from Ryan himself, like, yo, dude, what happened?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I've seen, I, I've seen two, like, weird things.

One was the orb I was telling you about when we're coming into LaGuardia earlier, earlier this year.

And then one was another.

I was flying in PC12, 2 o' clock in the morning, deep in Arizona, kind of sim, kind of close to, like, the White Sands area.

So I just assumed it was something like that, but something I've never seen fly so fast.

A couple thousand feet above me at like 30,000ft, which is wild.

And then one time over the Northeast, there was a controller like, hey, can you.

You guys see any of the lights, like, up at 80,000ft or like 60,000ft?

It's like, I have a signature on radar.

It's up high.

And everyone's like, yeah, we see something.

And they're like, oh, okay, don't know what to do now, but we see it.

So, yeah, that was all interesting, too.

So, yeah, you see where to go.

You know where to go now to report anything, if you see that's weird.

But, Ryan, I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

I do have one quick question that's away from kind of what this is, but it has to do with autonomy.

What do you think?

And you can answer it very briefly.

We don't have to get into a discussion about it, but a lot of pilots are worried about AI coming into aviation, coming into 121World.

As someone that works with autonomy, that sees kind of the potential for autonomy, what do you think the risk is for pilots and with AI and with autonomous aircraft?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And, you know, something I've thought a lot about, I'd say the short answer is, you know, I'd be more worried for the cargo guys than the passenger guys.

Yeah, it's good to know.

I would agree.

Why fly 120?

I fly for the passenger, so I hope that.

But, Ryan, I appreciate it, man.

Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

It's been a lot of fun.

It was my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

AV Nation, that's a wrap on today's podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.

Like I said, go check out safe aerospace.org you can report your UAP.

If you've seen something crazy, send it to them.

And they will.

They'll debrief with you and they'll figure out what's going on.

But AV Nation, hope you're having a great day.

Remember Spotify, leave a review itunes, leave a review and sign up for YouTube.

I mean, who doesn't want to watch a YouTube podcast of aviation?

Especially with Ryan talking about UAP.

It's gold it's great content.

Go check it out, send it to your dad, mom, sister, brother.

Maybe they'll become a pilot.

You never know.

All right Avia Nation, hope you're having a great day as always, happy flying.

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