YouSaid · the spoken record

David Fravor

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332
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2020-09-08
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2020-09-08
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  1. “So, well, he does it, and then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle, they have what their side stick controllers, so they can control all the sensors. And they can just toggle around and do stuff. So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick, and it will go from that azimuth elevation on the radar to the targeting pod. Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes, oh, what's over there? And it'll stare because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked together. You can decouple them, but they're going to automatically couple up. So when he casts over, it's a switch. It looks like a castle switch was a castle. So when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says instead of looking at the radar, I want to look at the targeting pod, he sees it on the targeting pod because the targeting pod's already looking there.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, you can meet well, it does. It goes full into it, it's being jammed at about every mode you can possibly see because everything comes up and this aspect gets long. It's all kinds of, I don't want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed. As he said on Rogan.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “He locks it up. When he goes to lock it up, now he's putting a bunch of energy on it. He's telling the radar, stare down that line of sight. And whatever's there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it, which will tell us How high it is, how fast it is, and the direction that it's going. Okay The radar is smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed. So that's all it is, is you send a signal out, something it manipulates the signal, either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back, and the radar was smart enough to go, that is not a return that I'm expecting something's messing with me. I'm being jammed. And it shows you, and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar, and it does some stuff”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “When he goes out, what he's looking at on his displays is he has basically two radar displays up. He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has the azimuth and elevation on the left one. So this is called the Azel display, and this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom of the square. It's really taken this. It's taken a cone because the radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares it out. So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this, they square it off. So he goes out and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it because when he's not trying to lock it. So the radar's just throwing energy out and getting it. It's a Doppler radar. So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing. It's going, hell, I can see you. I can see. And it's looking for return. So he gets a return. So he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square unless it builds a track file on it. But the little green square is just sitting there. It's not moving because it's sitting in one spot in space.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Dude, I go. I told him, I said, dude, get video. And he goes, and that's how he is. He's like, I'm going to go. And he was. He was determined he was going to find this thing. When you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn't out that they don't see because not all the, all you see is the flare tape. That's the targeting pod, the forward-looking infrared receiver.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Never saw it there. Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed. We told them, hey, look, we just. We just chased this thing. They're like, What I go chase it? And they're like, why? I go.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “But I don't know if maybe it knew where we were going because we use the same one day after day after day. But you never saw”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “That's a good question. That's the one, you know, you don't tell it, we don't broadcast it. We have a waypoint in the system.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We get back to the ship, word's going to get out, and we're just going to catch maximum shit. And we did, and it's kind of that joking. So the ship plays movies. We have movies on the boat, and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat because there's a day check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night play. So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat. Drives my wife crazy because I'll watch stuff on TV that way too. I'll be like, Oh, hey, I've seen this, and I'll jump into a movie in the middle, and then I'll pick it up later, and I'll see the beginning, and I'll put it all together because that's how we have to do it because we're so busy. Well, the movies became, and it was Men in Black, aliens, Independence Day.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, we come back up to train, we go back as we're flying back the controller, because we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, they're called OSs, they're operation specialists. They're the ones that run the radars. And we're talking to him, and he's like, hey, sir, you're not going to believe this, but that thing is at your cap. It showed back up. It just popped up. This is like 60 miles away. It just reappears. We're like, oh, okay. So we got the radars out we're looking for it. We get out there. We never see it. We never see it again. We do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like, oh, this is going to be, you know, I told him I go, dude, you know, we're going to catch shit for this.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Just listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up because they know that we all know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on. He's like, because they canceled training. So, what else is he going to do? He's just going to hang out there and do circles while he's waiting him and his wingman. So they're listening to all this go on.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's where we hold. So it's called a combat air patrol point. So we're just going to hold at one end. He's going to hold at the other end. It's kind of like, hey, you guys are going to get, think of it. If it's a football field, we're going to sit on one goal line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say go, we're going to run at each other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our reset points.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, no. So as we turn, we go, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I got to put on my real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to, you know, overseas. So we got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially as a CEO, because I got to get it training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that. So, hey, let's go back. And the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the CEO of the Marine Squadron. And so Cheeks is at the he's listening to all this happen, you know, because he's just like, because when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little hornets, the legacy hornets, the F-18Cs, don't have as much gas as the super hornets. So he had launched first, and they were going to do him. And then they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your cat point down south, and we're going to send, we'll pass this off to the supermarkets.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And it just is, it crosses our nose, it just accelerates in literally in less than probably less than a half second. It just goes and it's gone. And so we're like, and the first thing is, dude, do you guys see it? The other airplane's like, it's gone. We have no idea where it's at. So we kind of spin around real quick. I go, well, let's see what's down here. And I turn around, we're looking for the whitewater. The whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go. And I remember telling the guy in my back seat, I go, dude, I'm I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, at the time like 30, some hundred hours of flying, I'd been doing it for 18 years.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And I'm driving, and I get to probably, I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, a half mile is pretty far, half mile in aviation isn't, it's nothing. I mean, you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane. You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail. So I'm like right there, and it's coming across my nose. So now I'm basically pointing back towards east. So I'm cutting across because I'm going to the three o'clock position. It's at 2 o'clock and I'm going to meet it at 3 o'clock. So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around estimating about 12,000 feet. So they're at 20. So they've got about 8,000 foot of altitude above us when this happens.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o'clock position. We're about the eight o'clock position. And I'm like, oh, I've got enough altitudes. I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm going to do this. He's like, go for it, skip, because I was a skipper. So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude as this thing's coming up. I'm going to meet it.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The other airplane ends up about that. Okay, gotcha. So they're still about 20,000 feet. And I'm descending, they're staying up there. So I'm kind of doing this as they drive around. Okay.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Obviously, knows that we're there. Whatever this thing is, it knows that we're there. So as we drive around, it's coming up, and I'm just coming down. I'm just watching it. You got to remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes. This is not like we saw it and it was gone. Or, oh, I saw lights in the sky and they were gone. We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers to watch this thing for later on. So we're like, okay. So I get over to the eight o'clock position, and I'm a little thousand feet above it, and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15k, I think it is. I think that's my story is about 15. It's just estimating. So you can see it's really easy to send because”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So she's up here, and I'm down here as I'm descending, she can watch because right now all I'm watching is the tic-tac. She can watch me and the tic-tac. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important. You'll hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me, which is perfect as the story goes on because it gives us two perspectives that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. And they don't, you know, because if it's just like, oh, I lost it. And they go, no, it's over to the right. We can still see it. We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock and I'm descending. It's an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering because I have everything available to me at that speed. So I'm coming down. And as I get to 12 o'clock as a tick-taking's doing this, it literally, it's like it's aware of us and it just goes blip and it kind of points out towards the west and starts coming up. So now it's off.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So by this time we're driving around. So if we were at the six o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and we're just watching this thing. And it's just, it's still pointing north-south and it's going left, right? And it's kind of moving around the object. And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half. So if you've got the east-west and then the north-south kind of across, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out. It's just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it's crossing over it and it's going up. So now we're like, what the hell is that? So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out. And other pilot says, I'm going to stay up here. And I said, yeah, stay up high because now we get a different perspective.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter, right So you go, oh, what is because when we see it's moving, we're like, oh, helicopter. So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash. So you see it and you go, Well, there's no rotor wash. What is that thing”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And then we see this little white tic-tac because we're about 20,000 feet above it, and it's doing basically north, south, and then east-west, north. And it's abrupt. It's very abrupt. So it's not. Like a helicopter, if a helicopter's going sideways and it goes once, it's going sideways left and it goes right. What it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed, it slows down because there's inertia. It stops, and then it goes back the other way. This thing's not. It's like left, right, left, right with no.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So we see the whitewater, and that's what draws our eyes down. Otherwise, we'd have never seen it. So we see this whitewater.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So that's what it was. We see, we don't see an object because there's all kinds of, oh, they saw another craft below the way. We didn't see anything below the water. We just saw white water. But the whitewater, and I like to shape it, you can say it was across. I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water. So the wave is breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the plane is at, you'd see this kind of shape. So it looks like a cross. As we're looking down off the right side, the backseater in the other airplane, Jim, says this is that talking in parcels again. He says, hey skipper, do you? And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, what the hell is that in a nice way?”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So, what happens is at C, when you get a seamount, you'll see stuff come in, the wave will crash, and you'll get whitewater. You can go out when it's high tide And any one of the coasts, you can go out here off of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks, and at high tide, I can't see the rocks are covered, but there will be white water around those rocks. You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make sense?”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind. So there's no waves, there's no wind, there's no white caps. And we look down and we see white water. So if you put a piece of land, a sea mount below the surface, like even 20 feet below the surface, it's big enough, as the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length. When they come in, that's what happens on the shore. When a wave comes in, it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can't go anymore. And then it breaks over the top.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Oh, yeah, they're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or so if it's a really white cap windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving when we land on it. It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move where it's got a big weight because it has to make its own win-win when we land, which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay, and it creates what's called, we call the burble, but when the air flows across the flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know? And then it kicks back up. So when you're coming aboard to land, it's going to make you go up a little bit, and then you're going to fall, and you gotta anticipate that to stay on glides. So we're pretty...”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “From 20,000 feet, you'd be amazed. You can do the calculation. You can see stuff, you know, you'll see land 50 miles away. When you're looking at a continent, it's really easy to see. You're not looking at an island. I mean, you're looking at Mexico.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “It's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to the horizon. It's just clear. It's nothing. We're basically off the coast. If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that and we're probably about... By the time this all hits, we're probably, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So, as we look out to the right and you look high and low, because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up. Now, keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away, so it can't see the surface. And you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it's the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel, can he really see there are radars that can see around the curve? But let's just say that it can't at this time. So you go, where is it at? As we're looking around, we see, now this is a it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no white caps. It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day if you owned a sailboat. It was that five to ten knots of wind and you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have white water coming over. It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So they call merge plot. Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around, something's around you, get your head out. So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizos, the wizos can look, but everyone gets heads out. When they say merge plot, you're done looking at your displays inside, you're doing this, and you're trying to find it.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Exactly it. So we start driving out there. And as we get down to, he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles. And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar because radars don't see everything. So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right? So, and it's basically think of a little cube. So they can, and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes, and they're looking. So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube, then the radar can only see one thing. Does that make sense? Yeah.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “They're telling us they have a contact on their radar. They don't know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things. And what he told me is they've been looking at these things as we're driving. He says, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks. We had been at sea for two weeks. He goes, this is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking. So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left-hand side of me. So she's kind of stepped up like this. And I'll use your mic box to start. So as we're going out, they're calling ranges. They're called Bra calls, bearing range and altitude. And they're telling us, hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles. So they're saying a 270 30 20,000 that's all they say. So we got our radars and we had to mechanically scan radars at the time, APG-73. Good piece of gear. APG-79, new ones way better. But anyway.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So we had what's called a catam 9, which is really just a blue tube with the aim 9 seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile. So there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off with a sledgehammer. You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back in that hold it on. When it really fires the impulse from the engine, actually throws the lugs forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail. That's how it works.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So we're flying out. We get vectored. They come up and tell us, hey, we're going to cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is the siege's cruiser. So we're talking to one controller. Who is like, Hey, sir, first he asked what ordinance we have on board, and I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance and training typically because bad stuff happens. Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a good airplane and it's not good.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “So here's what I know. So, yeah, we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission. And they sent us. And there's all kinds of rumors out here. There's all kinds of, after this has come out. So originally it was the four of us. There's two jets, two people in each jet. They're F-18S. There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I mean, literally, we have yet to pass that. And then you also ask well, is there a need to pass that? I go, I don't know. We got stuff in space. So do we need to make an airplane that goes that fast? I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don't have to put a person in it does all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Really there because you got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around It was the U2 and the SR71 that were out there doing that work. So at the time it was needed. If you think about it really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “We would see it flying when I was flying hornets because it's called R2508, which covers the Navy China Lake area and Edwards. It's a huge area. It's actually, I think we had a guy from Switzerland come out because they had hornets and he's like, this is bigger than our whole country because it's a pretty big area in California that you fly. But you would see the SR-71s. They had a loop because NASA was flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington state and Montana and they'd do a loop. So you'd see them coming back down. They'd descend out of above 60,000. You'd see them, they get contrails, you know, the white lines behind airplanes. And it'd come down and hit the tanker and then they'd go back up. So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying. But, you know, I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, you know, because they're everywhere now. I mean, you've got commercial companies putting satellites up. How much of that need was?”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And then you have to turn well. The airplane didn't have anything on it, it was a slicked off superhornet, so it was basically just the airplane. No pylons, no pods, no nothing And then we had to get it turned around because we got to go to the exit point for the area. And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic. And there's a bunch of things that are disabled, like the speed brakes that normally we pop out when you're going that fast. They don't, because the super hornet really doesn't have speed brakes. It deforms the flight controls. They don't function, so you really're trying to maneuver, and when you're going that fast, you can't turn because a 7G turn at. 1.5 mock is a pretty big turn. So it's just crazy.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Space Limited because I'm off the coast of California, big sir, and I'm going and I can see Pebble Beach out in the distance, you know, the whole Monterey Peninsula.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Or, no, okay, maybe not. You always want to push the limit. You know, it's like, how fast I could have got it going faster. It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but it was fuel limited.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “When you get that fast, to me, it got a little bit weird because you realize in your brain, and I did, that there's no out. If something happens, I can't eject. The ejection would kill me.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Capability of the airfoil. If I'm below that speed, I'm going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G. Okay, so when you look at something like that, you go, is it really going fast? And when you look at an SR-71 that's flying upwards of 70 plus thousand feet, the air is so thin, you know, just like the X-15, you can get to a much higher speed, but the relative speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low. So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low, but because you're going fast to get enough air over your pedostatic system to show that you're going 300 knots, you're screaming. Well, soon to be Vice Admiral White. So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78. I got a superhorn it up to Mach 1.78. And it was, and we were struck by Pebble Beach too. And then it was...”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “What's funny when you get into it is it's remember fast is relative, and when I say that, I mean, so if you're going 3,000 miles an hour 100 feet above the ground, you're going 3,000 miles an hour through, you know, that's how fast you're going. When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's your ground speed. So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane. Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots but at 300 knots you're really doing 2,500 miles an hour over the ground. So like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full the maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing 200 and you know some mod knots, it's actually slow for the airplane. You're getting there's maneuvering speeds. You know that if I hit a certain speed in a super hornet that I have the full”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “For what that was able to do, and then when you get into history of it, you know how they actually built the CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia. To me, it's an incredible engineering marvel.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “You don't get to like from pure speed, I would say SR71. I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually developed in the 50s by Kelly Johnson, you know, Skunk Wor”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “So, you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to kill you, but if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just going to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds. It's overall energy package, and that's that you got to be constantly evaluating where you're at. And this is that 80% solution. Can I afford to do this or not? Yes, no. And you have literally a split second to make the decision.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “This is really important when you're fighting airplanes and you're really max performing. So when you go to an airshow and you see the air demo, he's literally playing with it. He's got a finite amount of energy, right? He can add some with the motors and stuff, but what you're really doing is it's a trade-off. And you can trade off kinetic energy speed for altitude, which gives you potential energy. The other piece is I can trade some of that kinetic energy for performance. Because I know if I do a nice, easy turn, the airplane will make it and what doesn't bleed energy. But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split S that it's going to cost me energy. So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right, I'm going to come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots. Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential energy, I converted that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance turn. And you have to constantly evaluate where you're at. And it's your overall energy pack.”

    2020-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source