Mike Durant

Our forward operating location was in Bahrain, and we would fly out to the oil platform from Bahrain when we did a crew swap or bring the customers out or back or whatever.

But like I said, it was winding down by the time I got there.

Yes.

Now, it's a combination, you know.

The good thing is at this point with the night vision goggles, somebody finally had the idea, we need to cut the bottoms off of these because in the early days of night vision goggles, it was a full face goggle, meaning it's a box you put over your face and then the two tubes stick out the front of the box.

So you can't see underneath the tubes at all.

When I got trained on goggles in flight school, we wore full face goggles.

And you would fly them in the daytime with filters over the tubes that replicated getting the right amount of light into the tubes so it seemed like it was at night.

That was freaking hard.

Somebody figured out, we're making this way harder than it needs to be.

Let's get rid of the box.

And then we ultimately put a mount on there where they flip up instead of being sitting right on your face.

And now you can see underneath.

So when you're down low over the water, unless it's perfectly calm, there's usually a little ripple.

And you could kind of see that out of your periphery.

But I mean, the margin of error is very, very, very small.

And I try to explain to people part of why

One pilot is on the controls, meaning you're responsible to keep the machine out of the water.

The other guy does the radios and putting the navigation information in and all that stuff that distracts away and gets you inside the cockpit.

And for people to understand,