Fighter Pilot Podcast

FPP219 - From Wimbledon to Mach 1.58: Louis Skupien’s Wild Ride into Telling Aviation’s Story

He was a national champion tennis player headed for Wimbledon, then COVID and injury ended that dream overnight. Two years later, Louis Skupien was strapped into a jet suit. Four years after that, he was breaking the sound barrier twice in an F-16D over Edwards Air Force Base, filming a documentary on the 412th Test Wing and the story behind Auto-GCAS — the system that’s saved 13 pilots’ lives. Louis, host of the Talk4 podcast and creator of the Full Throttle documentary series, joins me to talk tennis-to-aviation reinvention, flying with jet-suit inventor Richard Browning, low-level runs down Sidewinder, pulling 9Gs, and what it took to get a foreign national civilian into the backseat of an Edwards test jet. Support this podcast at: https://www.patreon.com/cw/ftrpltpdcst Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FPP218 - The Humans Behind Autonomous Air Combat

Today former A-10 pilot and Autonodyne CEO Steve Jacobson joins the Fighter Pilot Podcast to discuss one of the most important and least understood aspects of future air combat: the human-machine interface. He shares stories from flying and testing the A-10, explains why he turned down Test Pilot School before ultimately finding his way into flight test anyway, and reflects on how those experiences shaped his approach to designing command-and-control software for autonomous aircraft. Support this podcast at — https://www.patreon.com/cw/ftrpltpdcst Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FPP217 - Shot Down, Not Out: Col. Richard "Dog" Brenneman on Service and Survival

US Air Force Colonel Richard "Dog" Brenneman describes his incredible story of courage and determination. Shot down over North Vietnam on his 26th combat mission while flying the F-4 Phantom II, Col. Brenneman spent more than 1,900 days as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton before returning home and was awarded the Silver Star for his extraordinary resilience. Support this podcast at — https://www.patreon.com/c/ftrpltpdcst

FPP216 - 300 Vietnam Missions in the F-4: Combat and the Making of a Leader

Ron "Toes" Cooper grew up silent, insecure, and certain he'd never amount to much. Then four men believed in him — and everything changed. Toes went on to fly the F-4 Phantom in over 300 combat missions in Vietnam, dodge a MiG-21 missile by a split second, participate in the rescue of a downed pilot who survived 23 days alone in hostile territory, and command a squadron.  In this episode, Toes brings us into the cockpit and into the chaos of combat — and then draws a straight line from those experiences to the leadership lessons that every team, every organization, and every person who has ever doubted themselves desperately needs to hear. Support this podcast at — https://www.patreon.com/cw/ftrpltpdcst

FPP215 - U-2s on Aircraft Carriers: A Cold War Gamble

During the Cold War, the Lockheed U-2 gave the United States the ability to peer deep inside denied territory from altitudes once thought unreachable. But after the Francis Gary Powers shootdown and increasing political pressure on foreign host nations, the CIA faced a growing problem: how do you operate one of the world’s most delicate reconnaissance aircraft when access to overseas bases can disappear overnight? The answer led to one of the strangest and least-known experiments in aviation history—operating CIA U-2s from US Navy aircraft carriers under a top-secret effort known as Project Whale Tail. On this episode, Vincent “Jell-O” Aiello returns to explain how CIA pilots, Navy landing signal officers, and Lockheed Skunk Works engineers transformed the high-flying Article into a carrier-capable spy plane. From dangerous early landing trials aboard USS Ranger to clandestine intelligence missions over the South Pacific, this is the story of an extraordinary Cold War gamble that pushed both naval aviation and aerial reconnaissance into entirely new territory. Support this podcast at — https://www.patreon.com/cw/ftrpltpdcst