Ryan Bodenheimer

But I think there's so many advancements here from this, just seeing it, that can make aviation safer, can make your fighter jet safer, can make you more combat capable and to, you know, survivable.

You know, you're up there flying in these austere environments.

Being more survivable and more lethal is super important.

But if you want, I can just dive into some of the encounters.

I'll get off my soapbox and tell the people what they came here for.

I love it.

Yes.

I think that's a great perspective.

So I guess I'll start there with what was kind of the most similar to a Tic Tac that I saw.

This was in 2010 to 2012 ish timeframe.

Actually.

So right before I was preparing to deploy, we were doing a lot of operations off the East coast of the U S so it's called the whiskey areas out there.

There are MOA,

So there's ships and things operating below you, you know, commerce is happening below you, but you're up there and you typically own, typically it's like you own like a thousand feet above the water, sometimes surface up to like 60,000 feet.

So you own like all that airspace, which is great for training, right?

You can do all kinds of different situations, defensive counter air, offensive counter air, strategic strike, like all this stuff.

But typically, I mean, it was it was happening almost every sortie where at the end of it, you're you're you've completed your training mission.

You've done your big air war.

And then on the way out, the weapon systems operator in the back has, you know, this amazing we call it like a Gucci of technology, which just means fancy.

It's a targeting pod.