I'm in Sweden and as if it was meant to be today is the 27th of February 2024
and yesterday Hungary granted the final vote who have Sweden Ascend to Nato so
let's check out what Griffin brings to the alliance and we're going to do it in style.
Off we go. It will be just better and better
time to impact 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 and we have a hit.
The Gripen Sweden's very own fighter jet and it got a lot of attention in recent
years with the Russian 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine placing new emphasis on defense and
security thinking in NATO countries countries like Finland and Sweden previously neutral
applied for NATO membership. Both countries kept themselves on a cold war footing much
more so than any other nation in Europe from civil defense to homeguard reservists
conscripts to decentralized and specialized operations many of the lessons lost in NATO
were kept on a low flame in the north and no other platform shows this as clearly has the
[Music]
The first thing I did is get suited up and have a pre-flight briefing by no other than display
pilot Andre "Bulan" Brannstrom of RIAT 2023 and -3 + 9g fame. We go through the stages of
the flight the safety procedures and then kitted up to get ready and have Andre take me to places
at wet suit we wear these ones if the water is below 15° C for obvious reasons as I'm getting
dressed let me keep you in the loop what's going on here with this flight is this flight sponsored
by sap the short answer to this is yes Beyond this however I paid for all non-rip and flight expenses
Hotel airline tickets and what's in the margins by myself to really keep that delim ation between
me this community and a defense company like Zab clear and this is possible thanks to patreons and
channel supporters that fun this channel the emergency Beacon uh life West manual but it's
automatic yeah pistol but it's fake yeah that's true yeah what do I do with the moose and the the
Bears well a pretend
one
as a small lightweight powerful jet griin is optimized for quick reaction
alert airspace defense and anti- shipping and standoff capabilities designed around Swedish
defense requirements grip and shines in dispersed operations a type of operation that a lot of NATO
Air Forces stop doing at the end of the Cold War there are many things NATO can learn from this
alone and I've got a full video on that already Sweden brings about 80 new gri and aircraft to
Nato the tarian value of the alliance got a major boost with this and the grion synergies and combat
mass in the north with the emerging Norwegian Danish and Finnish F-35 Fleet will be something
to keep an eye on griin has been NATO compatible for some time and the Czech Republic and Hungary
currently lease griin Seas meaning that NATO will have a total of about 100 grippin in its inventory
getting a flight in a fast jet like griin is like nothing else it doesn't matter how many things
you read or talk about with Pilots experiencing it firsthand is something completely different
[Music] 0:03:59.680,1193:02:47.295 [Music]
fow now I could tell you about performance maneuverability load up options and more but
let's be honest you know those things and playing top trums doesn't really tell us anything for me
flying on gripon gave me two big takeaways the first one is how modern fighter jets allow the
pilot to gain time and invest this into what matters the fight and the mission the second
ties into this and that is how do you design a jet to absorb process synthesize translate massive
amounts of data into a clear threat and situation awareness picture for the pilot to execute their
mission one of the best things a fast jet can do is make a pilot stop worrying about the flying
and start loving the mission it's a quest about gaining time less time spent on controls more time
spent on building up situational awareness staying on top of the Fret picture and acting instead of
reacting a modern fighter jet practically flies itself yes yes that statement does a major diser
Serv to the engineers the coders the technicians after all it is thanks to them that this plane
cuts through the air as smooth as a hot knife for butter and regarding Ro maneuverability you can
see out to the right here when we're doing quick rolls like this and we're following a Terrain line
that's uh that's quite nice it is hard to describe but when the controls are this crisp and precise
it feels like it is is too easy doring immediate and ultimate confidence in the machine when I got
my stick time in grien it was so easy that it made me think like I was missing something obvious some
hidden challenge in the controls a soon to materialized complication but it never came
your control my control oh let's just do a lazy right hand turn I guess y I mean it's it's almost
like it's too easy it's too easy almost because the fight aircraft should be really really easy
to fly yeah because your supposed to do other stuff make smart decision maneuver the system
be effective be uh fully situation awareness and that will take uh a lot of capacity for the pilots
28 M below 280 below I expect you to it's h it's very easy to start pulling G's like you mentioned
in the briefing yeah yeah I mean I just I also really enjoy the view from up here it's yeah
it's amazing with the we will go low in this area in a couple of minutes awesome super easy yeah it
almost feels like an simulator yeah it is today it's really smooth there also yeah and now we
could try actually by you flying the aut pilot so if you uh using the pedals yeah you could do for
example a left uh rer input with a left pedal just push it pushing it yeah in altitude hold you're
controlling the R them by using the pedals oh okay so by doing that that will free you both hands
to do tactical stuff and pay attention through other things the Simplicity it keeps the Pilot's
head up looking at the fight rather than down to check on the aircraft you want Pilots to invest
time both in training and in a combat scenario on the mission and the fight not the actual aircraft
fighter jets are at the Leading Edge of the technological curve the systems installed are
always complex you can answer this challenge by either training more for the machine rather
than on the machine or you condense systems into automated and ergonomic packages that
minimize time spent head down this is especially so as Pilots operate complex tactical Maneuvers
at speed on g-loads which having experienced it is a real Challenge and [Applause] [Music]
roll [Music] constantly flying high and low this impacts tactical options how you Lop
your missiles how you out maneuver at bvr range or how you mask yourself on a deck
against enemy radar or operate synergetically with other aircraft here is0 n and we're still
not flying tactical because we're allowed down to 100 ft Overland okay wow that was
good it's it's just a nice feeling lowy [Applause] Loop and then you run from one
Mission Point to the other at Super Sonic Speed and fulfill a different Mission set
at each point okay so let's take a look on the left a short while this is like a rocket oh W
[Music] yeah you just see d's eyes and that's a straight line Y and we roll over and we will
smoothly will go back okay 1.08 right now you can see that technological leaps happen time
and time again just think of the 1930s to 1940s where hydrolic and electric systems
and engine automation substituted mechanical and manual labor for pilots pilots could concentrate
on the darkg fight rather than constantly manipulating controls in the 1960s planes
got so complicated again a weapon system officer was added just to manage the weapons before we
were able to condense the complexity back to a single crew member in Western systems we see
a constant emphasis on simplification for the Pilot's benefit this allows a pilot to manage
their Jets Firepower package so effectively it would make a World War II air marshall blush so
basically it comes with two uh with individual range missiles IR Trucking and four uh radar
Trucking missiles yeah in the sh Delta we don't have the yeah the AR IR tracking regarding the
weapon but in the grip and E we have the a IR tracker as a sensor also yeah okay but in this
version uh we could have uh four bvr missiles and two vvrs and full gun grippin isn't the
only example but it does time management very very well not only does its Simplicity on the
ground gain time in an operational context through short turnarounds and and easy maintenance but it
was one of the first to do away with the old school cockpit gauges simplifying around three
main screens in Gripen C so Charlie and one large wide angle display in gri and E Echo what appears
strange at first after all where is my sixpack does become an intuitive solution on closer
inspection the whole display is optimized for the mission building up that situational awareness
before takeoff and throughout the mission if I'm if I'm joining a fight in northern part
of Sweden I could go there with my map still standing still during refueling zoom in into
the fight and see how it's going on with the friends of H before I'm going into the field
yeah you get some situational awareness already yeah and here we now need to look at how data is
processed there is a decision-making model that is deeply connected to Air Forces thanks to its
Origins with John Boy and an American fighter pilot it is called the Oda Loop you probably
heard about it and it describes how we make decisions the challenge here is to get ahead
of the adversaries Loop or to put it more simply the pilot who sees first thinks first decides
first shoots first wins in the HUD in the H Cam that we have in the replica back there in the
left display my my Pro prioritized what what kind of targets I'm looking at will be shown here and
if I'm using a helmet mounted display it will be pointed out in a helmet instead but then you don't
actually have to look down no so I could track if I see something I could just lock visually and put
away my vvr M5 now it's a green weapon engagement Zone that's that's meaning okay you have a clear
shot we are a little bit slow in speed but that's okay I will engage him and we have a fox tree 31
seconds until uh it will be active yeah nowadays the distances is it's ridiculous yeah it's I mean
we can see mode three is walking 0753 it's hand over I'm making a left turn now it's active so
it's guiding himself you can say time to impact 7 6 5 4 3 2 one and we have a hit okay so that was
a clean shot so just go to another one and directly bang one more oh it's already off
okay yeah so first three on that one so you were tracking those two at the same time engaged one
and then the second one over I can guage four at the same time four at the same time W with
with shots okay 10 10 targets uh in in total uh prioritized but we have many many more that the
system will track at all times but I'm paying extra attention to uh some targets and then
I'm able to shoot four at the same time different location fighter jets receive an enormous amount
of data thanks to passive and active radar data Links communication ground controllers
and all of this in a contested electronic warfare environment in its raw form it's unmanageable this
data needs to be captured analyzed processed and then displayed to the pilot accurately
without overload in or missing Vital Information this has been a challenge for decades but now we
are entering a phase where only a few people so far really know how the story might unfold and
if you start to talk to those people they will always stay on a very abstract level so let's
condense this together in a way that I understand it keeping in mind of course that it will only be
in the coming decade really where we will see some tangible results in the public domain m a
few years ago the buzzword Sensor Fusion really got going and now we are seeing emphasis placed
on instantaneously adaptive processing like well AI assisted Mission data sets yeah depending on
how things go watch for buzzwords like that in the coming years but what it means is that we
are focusing on data processing and translation as a weapon in itself rather than solely as a
means to fire a missile data from engagements can lead to machine assisted projection of
what adversary Pilots might do and presenting this to the pilots to then make decisions this
doesn't mean that Pilots should be riant on the machine but it gives them a supporting tool by
which adversary patterns and capabilities are fed into the decision-making Loop a arguably early and
already existing example of this is like displayed threet zones that show adversary missile angles
right it doesn't decide for for the pilot on how to fight but it does inform them in the future
data libraries making patterned predictions can place Pilots one step ahead of the adversary yet
as technology like this is integrated into Fighters it does require major avionics and
system modularity that not every plane has while much nowadays is plug and play we know how much
a plane needs to be designed for or reworked for such capabilities by looking at planes like F35
or grien E Echo griin e looks like the same plane as Grim C but it's not it's a completely different
aircraft which is also sadly the reason why I was never allowed to sit inside a real gipon e
but even beyond the jet in the air there are major benefits Jets don't just absorb data but gather it
which can be then directly shared and provided updates to data libraries on the Force Level
and thus a whole Air Force can very quickly adapt to new adversary tactics operational patterns and
new threats while a human must be in the loop using data in a predictable way allows us to
disseminate actionable information support pilots during missions and inform tactical decisions it
frees up headspace for the mission with a tool that provides support to be one step ahead of the
adversary as someone told me before the flight you never know how you are going to react you know I I
didn't scream I didn't sing I didn't even remember that the camera was there that doesn't make for
the typical YouTube pumped up action viewing but for me it was a pure viscerally stimulating yet
analytical sensation where I just wanted to learn and understand the thing I had been studying for
so many years and present that to you now flying on grien was a humbling experience it put a lot of
things I had read about into context and provided New Perspectives on things I B basically took for
granted and also in full honesty it really showed me not just the limits of my current understanding
of fastjet Ops but made me really appreciate even more the sort of level of skill training and
character that is required to really fly sustained highlevel fastjet operations a massive thank you
here to Sab Andre and well you know who you are as well as you of course the military aviation
history community and the patrons and channel supporters who make this possible you follow the
channel you make it grow you provide feedback and you fund research and filming tricks at the end of
the day we are well we're all just like-minded Aviation nerds talking about our passion here
but without you this channel would not be where it is and where I want to take you next [Music]
I was so SI yeah yeah not once not twice three times it was good I shouldn't have
had the sandwich no but it was really guys like above the clouds amazing
just clear skies doing barel rolls shouldn't have done that but we did
um that's really really low on the deck as Frozen legs and everything and then a
looping can we do this again