Jared Isaacman

You know, Jive Kirby, I was flying the F-4 Phantom demo.

Stroker Gustafson, Slickbaum, just off the Thunderbirds.

And basically we put together an air show team.

uh in 20 um in 2010 and 2011 and uh we had seven jets doing like a blue angels type routine um i was flying right wing in the diamond and we just had all stars that i was able to learn from but we were having the absolute time of our lives because that was a year of sequestration where the blue angels and the thunderbirds were stood down so every show in the country was begging for us

And it was like this horrible rock star life where you're flying constantly, you're drinking late, you're eating terrible, everybody's gaining like 30 pounds.

And we were like, this is going to end poorly for us if we don't kind of pivot to something a little more commercial.

So we went around the world and bought up about 100 fighter jets and created this commercial adversary business where we were just professional bad guys for the Department of Defense.

And that's where Draken came from.

That was part of the fun.

So we were flying air show fighters that are basically trainers.

And they're great for making noise in front of the crowd and doing loops and rolls.

But they're not tactically relevant.

They're not a credible threat.

So you're not going to train the DoD against it.

So we had to fly around the world to different countries that had fleets of aircraft that still had life left on them.

that were relevant, that were threatening, so they had a radar, you could put a training sidewinder on them, and that you had enough quantity of that you were a useful training aid.

One or two jets isn't going to make a difference, right?

And that's hard.

That's the whole secret sauce of the business was finding aircraft.

you know, that were safe, credible, and sustainable.