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of you. You go out and dogfight every day against your wing’s Target Arms for two<br />
weeks to hone your skills. Your briefing and debriefing skills are exhaustingly<br />
picked apart. Remember, you’re already an IP and the top pick from your base, so<br />
this is humbling.<br />
Fighter Weapons School lasts six months—and the details are almost all<br />
classified. Incidentally, all Air Force fighter pilots today have Top Secret/Special<br />
Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) clearance. The course generally follows<br />
the same structure that a pilot will have experienced in every training program he’s<br />
completed—but the course is on steroids. Remember, besides extremely lethal<br />
fighting skills, the goal is to really, really teach a pilot how to instruct others.<br />
AS YOU TRAVEL TO NELLIS AFB (LOCATED OUTSIDE LAS VEGAS, NEVADA) and spend<br />
your first week there in a classroom, the Weapons School instructors are fighting<br />
each other twice a day, every day. By the time you face off with them, you haven’t<br />
flown in two weeks, while they’ve been sharpening their claws and licking their<br />
fangs. Not that it would make a difference. They’re superb, and no spin-up in the<br />
world would save a student from the shredding he’s about to receive. It’s a<br />
necessary attention-getter: until you get thoroughly trounced, somewhere in the<br />
back of your mind is the belief that you’re still God’s gift to the fighter world. You<br />
get over it quick.<br />
Basic Fighter Maneuvers (BFM) is the first phase of the course. It’s anything<br />
but basic and much too complex to describe on paper, but I’ll attempt an overview.<br />
BFM is aerial hand-to-hand combat at 400 knots. Its purpose is to teach the pilot to<br />
truly fly and fight the aircraft. Nothing reveals the physical limits of yourself and<br />
the jet like BFM. It is fast, violent, and death is literally a few seconds away. There<br />
are midair collisions, out-of-control situations, and blackouts from G-locks. This is<br />
the blood-draining agony of sustained, multidimensional maneuvering at seven to<br />
nine times the force of gravity.<br />
It will kill you.<br />
There are four types of BFM. Offensive, which puts you at a starting point<br />
behind your adversary. He reacts, and you have to kill him before he can reverse<br />
positions and kill you. Defensive, where you’re the meat and the enemy is behind<br />
you. You’ve got to defeat his initial shots and then stay alive long enough to take<br />
away his advantage and kill him. In neutral BFM, the fight begins as both aircraft<br />
pass nose-to-nose at about a thousand knots. Each guy then claws through various<br />
options at 800 feet per second and tries to arrive at a position to employ his
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