SOPs are standard operating procedures that ensure all crews perform tasks in the same way. This ensures that crews who have not flown together before will be able to work together safely and effectively at short

notice. And when things are not easy, when it's 55 Celsius outside, when you haven't slept well, then all of these things pile on or there's other stresses, do you come together for that common cause or do you just get frustrated and self-center? There's no place for that second person. It takes time to develop that talent of overcoming those frustrations to deal with what mission you've got and to make it happen. It takes time to learn how to do that.

Partly, you're talking about learning the art of leadership or it sort of dovetails into that. That it is a people-based skill and it takes time to learn. Some people have a very innate ability for it. We sort of touched on that earlier too, the importance of teamwork, right, where I talked about maintainers and things. If you can't work with your crew, like Sia and on a crew aircraft buddy, if you're not a team player, you're just not going to succeed. Not only are you not going to succeed, you're going to drag back your team. That's one of the things I loved about the Aurora is that you had a team of maybe a dozen on a flight or more, if the flight's crowded, but typically around 10 to 12. I loved working with everybody and learning from them. I learned some amazing things from ASOPS who taught me about how radar works and all that kind of stuff. Shout out to Kevin Laffen for explaining to me all the different modes of radar before I had to do my upgrade to crew commander. On the Pilot Project podcast, we always get anyone's permission before we use their name on the show. However, for the next question, we were unable to reach the person we were discussing. Because it generated excellent discussion on mentorship and leadership, we have redacted the name and kept the segment. Do you have anybody that stands out to you as like kind of the shining example of what attack hell pilot should be?

I didn't have the opportunity to fly with him as much as I'd really like to. And he wasn't even a part of my flight when I was at the squadron. He's also out of DRC after the moment, but it was Captain. And he was just even killed all the time when there were moments that I really needed to learn from. He was very direct, but supportive. Would speak truth to power. It was a consummate professional. This guy was just, he just knew how to do every aspect of the job. He was a great leader. I hope I can learn to do a lot of the things that he showed

me.