Becoming the World’s Best Without a Single Rep

Remember Top Gun? I’d hope so. The action, the one liners,the soundtrack, beach volleyball, and motorcycles? It’s all too good. That said, in my naivete, I was always blown away that the best fighter pilots in the world had never been in a fire fight before… like ever. 

That’s what made Maverick and Goose so legendary, remember? They saw an enemy fighter. They weren’t in war or even combat. They literally saw the enemy plane in person. That’s it. 

Now, of course, they did the insane inverted maneuver to snap the infamous Polaroid flipping the bird, but that was just Hollywood flare. 

Imagine the endless schooling, rigorous selection processes, training, and fine tuning for a situation that might never (hopefully never) arise. Of course, in the final scene there’s a real threat and they get to do some “pilot shit” but as a kid I figured that fighter pilots fight. Instead, they mostly train to fight. And, that’s actually accurate. While we have elite pilots, almost no living American fighter pilots have been in a fight. 

As we learn about the legend that has become the Ghost of Kyiv, a Ukrainian fighter pilot who has shot down as many as ten Russian fighters, I can’t help but think of the same dynamic. Odds were that his training and expertise we’re going to go to the grave with him unused. But, his number got called and the consequences couldn’t be higher. 

Are there other areas of life where incredible preparation goes unnoticed until the moment it’s critical? In some ways, training those skills seems most honorable of all.