A Fire Under Your Assįirst, you learn what to listen for. I got to hop in the back of a T-38 trainer for one of the exercise flights-but not before five hours of egress and ejection training just in case anything went wrong. F-22s, F-35s, French Dassault Rafales, and British Eurofighter Typhoons took to the skies together for the very first time, pitting the new jets in mock engagements against red air adversaries in F-15s and T-38s. I recently went down to Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, during the 2017 Atlantic Trident exercise, an international training exercise in which American, British, and French air forces fly all three nations' top jets together. And you better tuck in your knees and elbows, because if anything hits the side of the cockpit on the way out, it's coming off. Once those rockets fire under the seat, they blow a person up and out of the cockpit with enough force to seriously bruise both shoulders on the harness straps and possibly break collarbones. The turbulent process of ejecting puts pilots at serious risk of injury. The last thing a fighter pilot wants to do is eject, and it's not just because they're abandoning the ship to a fiery demise.

Rescue jettison canopy