[On-screen title] Flying with the Roulettes

When I joined the Air Force and first started flying, it was very, very daunting. The first time you see all the material that you need to learn; you see the standard of flying that you need to achieve. 

Before you go flying we have a thing we call 'the bubble.' Basically once you step for the flight, and you're walking towards the aircraft, there can't be any other distractions. If there is any other distractions then you need to really think about if you're still going to go flying, because you know, you're flying quite high-performance aircrafts with a lot of high consequence if anything goes wrong, and if your mind's not there and if you're not with it, you could be a danger to yourself or you're dangerous to one of your wingmen or someone else. It's very much a mental health aspect of flying; it's not just the physical hands and feet - are you mentally ready to fly.

There was once when I was out flying our C-130 Hercules as a co-pilot and we were doing a tactical mission at night so we're about to go out and we've never done this profile before. The captain came up and asked me a question and she saw that I was distracted and a little bit agitated, and she's like, "You alright?" I'm like "Yeah I'll get it done just just leave me to it I'll get it done." 

So she walked away and sort of watched me from a distance, and she came back and she goes "Yeah we're not going tonight, it's as simple as that." She's like, "Your head's not in the right spot."

It was very good that she recognised that, because I was so much just focused on getting the job
done and flying, and I was didn't realise I was overloaded. So you've got to learn to work with failure; you have to accept that no one's perfect. You might have had a really bad flight, the instructor might have said, "Mate, that wasn't satisfactory, that's a fail, we need to do some remedials."

It's quite tricky because you really need to swallow your pride and swallow your ego and you need
to have that fortitude and force, like to keep going and press on regardless really, with trying to be your best.

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