-: So when we were flying into Iraq,
after the second Gulf Conflict,
a lot of what we did was at night
because you know, you're not seen at night,
but to make everything clear,
we would wear night vision goggles,
and the approaches that we would do
would be as steep as possible,
to keep us as high as possible,
until we were over the airfield.
One of my great joys of those detachments
was rather than, if you imagine, a normal trip,
you'd have the autopilot in,
and you'd do a nice gentle descent
into an airfield at the other end.
In this occasion, you know,
you'd be up a height at 24,000, 25,000 feet.
You'd have your helmet on,
with your night vision goggles on,
and you would take out the autopilot
and you'd manually fly the aircraft,
and you'd fly the steepest descent possible,
and there's just something really,
there's something that brings you alive
holding 60 tons of aircraft,
metric tons of aircraft at your fingertips
on night vision googles,
at night, landing in an airfield.
There's something just really fun about that.