I remain dismayed by the steady drumbeat of bad news from the airshow world — close calls, near ground impacts, and, too often, fatalities. From the one-of-a-kind Turkish F-4 near miss, to incidents involving military jets in North America, to the fatal loss of a Polish F-16 demo pilot earlier this year, the pattern doesn’t break.
Many of my tales about flying have some link to what went wrong — some misfortune, some lucky break. But every now and then, I did something right, and taking my brother flying in a CF-18 Hornet was one of those choice moments.
What is flying in real combat like? What do fighter pilots face when they’re sent into harm’s way? What’s in the heads of the men and women our governments send into a real threat environment? Listen to the interviews conducted by John Waters on his podcast, The Afterburn Podcast, with F-16 pilots from Shaw AFB who flew during Operation Rough Rider over Yemen and then into Iran during Operation Midnight Hammer.
The 3P’s (press, politicians, and public) keep telling Canadians that the next fighter needs to be able to land on dispersed runways. In 100+ years of the Royal Canadian Air Force, that has never once been operational doctrine in Canada. Yet the 3P’s are convinced our jets need to land on Canadian Arctic highways, as if Canada’s north is Scandinavia or Europe, where dispersed highway operations are a real, purpose-built capability. But they never accounted for the logistics of it all.
The myth won’t die. The 3P’s keep pointing to dispersed runway operations — Canadian fighters landing on northern roads, the way you’d see in Scandinavia or across Europe — as another argument for a mixed fleet.
Canada’s first F-35A is nearly ready to roll off the line in Fort Worth, but the RCAF fighter force sits at just 66% of required strength — and that gap is now officially the primary risk to the entire program. A backlogged training pipeline, a booming commercial aviation sector, and a quality-of-life crisis at CFB Cold Lake have combined to turn a long-standing shortage into a structural emergency. Ottawa has the right diagnosis: priority one is people. The question is whether they’ll act with the urgency it demands — because a stealth aircraft sitting on a ramp, cockpit empty, is not a deterrent. Stealth is useless without a pilot in the seat.
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