Day before receiving wings
Day before receiving wingsIDF Spokesman

Tomorrow there will be an Air Force wing lineup and among cadets finishing the pilot course will also be Lieutenant A., with whom Arutz Sheva spoke. He says that despite all the difficulties he and his friends have experienced over the last three years, the feeling is one of excitement that fills him a day before he gets his wings.

A., a future navigator, says he thought he would enlist in one of the field units, or as he put it, "from artillery and up," but in the first selection, like many of his friends, he didn't mark the pilot course as a target. They tried to succeed there and thus advanced from stage to stage when the feeling was that at most they'd fall out of the course to other good places in the ranks of the army.

Because we are talking about a coveted course in the IDF, a course in which the top brass of the army, the prime minister and other dignitaries arrive, we wondered whether if when he looks around he recognizes in the group something else that cannot be found in others of their age and he replies "yes and no".

"We're 41 guys, each one outstanding, with values and hard workers who come to contribute of themselves, but people came to the course who are above and beyond yet they didn't pass, not because they aren't good but because there are certain skills necessary for the profession of flight and not everyone has it. What unites us is that we're all fit for the profession. In addition, the school works in a way that it wants good people and those who don't get along with others and don't workiin a team don't stay. There are amazing people who aren't with us but are also great guys."

Regarding the perception that pilots live alone and aren't in need of company skills and teamwork, A. says this is a myth and nothing beyond that. "In the end, you don't attack the group over the hill like the infantry units, but when you go into operational activity it's not alone, there's always a structure of airplanes, a few people together who do an operation and the value of comradeship isn't dwarfed. Throughout the course we talk about this and invest in it. If there's someone who is very fit to fly but isn't a team member and doesn't get along with the guys, he won't succeed."

In A.'s family pilots can be found and we asked him if their presence is stressful or encouraging. A. says that although he has cousins ​​and an uncle who are pilots, "but the matter of the air force isn't essential in the family, in my nuclear family my father and the brothers were paratroopers and combat soldiers, but there are others with whom the corps is deep in their family and it's clear to them that this is the aspiration. The Air Force is there, it's a family that surrounds everyone in this corps and supports families, and I'm sure that with such families it's more evident.

"I don't remember one specific point, but there was a situation where many guys who succeeded so far everywhere are suddenly starting to experience difficulties for the first time in life because it's a whole new profession that needs to be learned and there are other good people around, and in the flying profession they constantly experience failures and receiving tools of coping and growing out of failures."