Air Force Pilot School Is So Much Better Than Any School You Went To

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Learning to be a fighter pilot is much, much harder than any video would have you believe. But even if you're just watching the highlights, it is still much cooler than any college course you ever took.

Even that one time you took rock climbing to satisfy your gym requirement.

Before pilot trainees ever clamber into a full-fledged fighter jet like an F-15 or F-16, they get plenty of seat time in the propeller-powered T-6 Texan II and supersonic T-38 Talon. You might not have heard of them as much as the planes currently flying over Northern Iraq and Syria, but they still have the agility, and in the case of the T-38, the speed, to feel like few other vehicles on Earth.

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Funnily enough, this video was actually shot not by an entirely-United States Air Force undergrad class, but by one set up to be primarily European through the Euro NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program. Training new pilots is expensive and logistically complex, so many European members of NATO team up and send their pilots over to the US for over a year of schooling. Students come from all over NATO, and instructors are taken from all over as well, including from countries like Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Canada, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey.

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As such, Class 14-07, featured in the video above, ended up in everything from the American-designed multirole F-16, to the European Tornado attack jet, to the MC-130 Special Forces cargo plane.

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Good luck to all the graduates. Now comes the hard part.