How Air Force Pilots Fly The $165 Million Ghostrider the "Ultimate Battle Plane" | Boot Camp

it's about 43 pounds around itself so it's pretty big normally whenever we fire this it recoils about 43 inches back so you'll feel the kick definitely we feel it from the seats Pilots up front fill it everyone fills it this is the 105 millimeter cannon on the ac-130j gunship nicknamed Ghost Rider the cannon is located here on the left side of the plane along with a

30 millimeter gun both weapons take out targets with extreme precision over the last 20 years in the Middle East the U.S military used the AC-130 to provide heavy fire against insurgents to protect U.S forces on the ground but now the military says its current adversaries in places like the asia-pacific region and Europe require it to be more targeted and the newest model of the AC-130 is

meant to help it achieve this Mission continue to let this target develop for a second let's get eyes on them and if they start moving this Direction please let me know which VP is going to be the closest Insider visited Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis New Mexico to find out how the Ghost Rider is built for precision and how training on this gunship is evolving

operational in 2017 to Aid in close air support for ground troops gather Intel from above and perform controlled bombings with precision [Music] all right so yeah this is going to be the 30 millimeter is our gal 23. it's an incredible weapon very precise the J model was built with a Precision strike package which has two weapons starting with the 30 millimeter gun so it's going to

be made up of a barrel upper receiver in the feeder assembly and then within it it's going to have your flexible shoots that feeds the ammo into it Air Force leadership has said that because of its accuracy the 30 millimeter gun is almost like a sniper rifle this is going to be the 105 millimeter Hauser normally you have two Gunners that are going to be here

working it one's going to be loading it the other one's going to be pulling the brass out and then there's going to be where we store the ammunition for it so the firing is also going to be like the same for the 30 millimeter the Personnel at the mission operator palette are going to select the gun and from there where the sensor is pointing the gun

will slave to that position and then you just fire it with a trigger based off the Hands-On throttle and stick so this is going to be the mop or refer to the mission operator palette so in these two seats here you're going to have your combat system officer on the left seat and then the weapon system officer here on the right seat and these are correlated

with the sensors on the outside of the aircraft so for this one it's going to be the sensor off the nose of the aircraft and then for this seat it's going to be the sensor on the left hand side over there so for this this is where we control all the Munitions a lot of the radios we're talking to the guys on the ground and then

both the guns what's unique about us is we've got two of I think the best sensors in the Department of Defense personally and the MX 20 and the mx25 these two sensors are a key element in how the ac-130j crew collects accurate intelligence and confirms the location of targets before employing its weapons due to the sensors classified design our cameras were not permitted to film them

when the lenses were exposed all right so right here on the pilot station and is also located at the co-pilot station you're going to have your heads up display um just extra essay for the pilots it's going to give them a lot of their navigational tools so they can see and then maintained essay while having eyes out on the aircraft's wall while flying as well that

way they don't have to look down it kind of just helps keep the crew safe in addition to the heads-up display you have the side heads-up display for the pilot because both weapons are on the left side of the plane pilots fly in circles when observing and firing on targets it's going to help with the employing the Munitions and it gives them better essay on the

battlefield another update to the J model are its more efficient engines which allow the plane to fly 25 percent farther and 25 percent longer than the earlier AC-130 models luckily there are several amenities on board to provide Comfort on these longer flights pretty cool feature is we have a microwave in addition to a coffee maker as well so kind of a nice way on the longer

flights to heat up your food that way you're just not eating cold stuff all the time so yeah actually for myself I was on the longest flight in acj history 16 hours headed out to Japan and it was nice just to heat up some warm burritos as opposed to having like a cold sandwich something like that so we do have a toilet on the aircraft for

the longer flight that's super nice to have [Music] so it just comes down like that and then there's a little curtain for privacy and then you just flip it up and yeah just like a normal toilet so it's definitely needed on those longer flights now with us being out of the global war on terror I mean it's not a proud anymore we're moving towards more current

events happening in the Pacific uh maybe some things in Europe we've seen the news nicknamed the angel of death the AC-130 has been used in past Wars to provide heavy gunfire to protect troops on the ground or to clear out an area of enemy forces but that mentality is changing in previous conflicts they're really simple people would run up on the side of mountains with soviet-era

machine guns and you knew for a fact that that guy met the Rules of Engagement that was a legal strike to do according to the 2022 National defense strategy released by the Department of Defense a key priority moving forward is integrated deterrence which according to defense secretary Lloyd Austin means having Weapons Systems and technologies that make adversaries think twice about engaging in conflict that's why the

J model's Precision weaponry and sensors make it a crucial military asset and why Ghost Rider Pilots are now trained on knowing when to engage in Conflict there's a lot of training that's required for us to shift away from the global war on terror we still fundamentally want to protect the friendly Force but we have to be Discerning and that's the really tough part so you want

to train to hey you got your your Spider Sense your Spidey senses are tingling let's play this out let's develop this scenario while not putting the friendly Force at risk right now we want to stop short of actual conflict we're going to take off we're going to go up to the Clovis area for gunship Crews to prepare for potential conflicts abroad and become skilled in precise

deterrences they perform weekly training Missions at Cannon Air Force Base which all begin with a pre-flight briefing I'd rather bust a timeline but be safe and rush to failure leading the mission today is Major Riley Feeney an evaluator pilot for whether out of here today uh it seems to be just fine for takeoff however we may be getting gusting winds at like 270 uh up to

30 possibly 35 knots per the meth today's flight will begin with basic pilot training but will then move to a simulated kill or capture Mission a training scenario that will take lessons learned from previous Wars and force the crew to be more precise and cautious all right teams it's been a guy he's a arm Smuggler I've been working out of the town of Clovis stand as

the weapons officer Captain rushi gohel has been tasked with creating a mission that will train the crew on scenarios they encounter it's all made up but it's based around the different threats that we'll see that we're fighting in the current fight we'll be working in building 1-0 particularly he's hidden up in the shed right in the back the stories look like he's known to be uh

traveling with a small Posse the crew will be attempting to locate a fictional threat who is thought to have a weapons cache the team must find the threat relay that information up the chain of command and then decide whether to neutralize him right right let's go to war boys [Music] [Music] and copy take off clearance get us straightened out here my checklist has been called complete

hey Far Ready to Go Coke ready all right textbook well done once in the air the crew starts the training scenarios and so we went down to Roswell to get a couple of instrument approaches there are specific approaches with ground-based nav AIDS navigational AIDs that allow us to put the aircraft in a safe position to land down in Roswell Point Air Speed Center Line first no

side no Factor it was an excellent training at iteration today because it was turbulent winds with Gusty winds just basically at eight on the 10 scale of difficult which I thoroughly love even if it's difficult for the remainder of the people in the crew all right yeah pulled just a little bit too much stable 50. 40. 30. 20. good and walking it down so we have

an additional capability in this plane which can take us down to a hundred feet say you gotta absolutely sucked in weather and the ceiling is very low we can utilize this system to land safely and be aligned with the runway where you simply couldn't visually see the runway you get to follow these guidelines and get yourself very low to the ground and land incredibly important if

you've got a ground party who's 300 miles away and they need you to come help them well the pilots finish practicing landing at Roswell the training shifts to the back of the plane unfortunately the live fire range was closed due to some extreme weather that occurred recently however what we did is a dry fire scenario all players all players the soft force is internal to objective

building the crew began searching on the ground for the location of their fictional Insurgent all right I'm in the objective area uh just getting a quick Eyes On Target building unable to uh any weapons yet after several minutes go hell spotted a potential Target I am contact currently about eight packs they are unloading weapons from two trailers located 300 meters they look like they're game planning

and getting ready to move I don't know what direction all right hey and uh from Jackal from devil continue to let this target develop for a second let's get eyes on them and if they start moving this Direction please let me know what XP is going to be the closest we will hold up on breaching until we have an idea of what these packs are gonna

do one of the items the crew was practicing today was following the rules of engagement before firing on a Target so the Rules of Engagement are and they were really really well defined by the kind of the tail end of what was the global war on terror the explicit vervision in them is is relatively classified but the idea is you have to meet certain criteria in

order to be engaged able to PID two packs wanting to be carrying some sort of long cylindrical object before go hell fires the weapons the aircraft Commander must give consent let's go you're clear to engage with 30 and 105 Mike five four three two one Splash several we are taking cover you guys continue to prosecute until all packs are down I got six not moving just

uh Duo running South closing on friendlies all right good impact good impacts all players touchdown jackpot objective the mission was a success and a vital scenario for possible upcoming threats we wanted to give it a little bit more of a flavor of say kind of the next theater that we're looking into which is the indo-pacific theater and what we wanted to do today was kind of

throw out hey look at this thing should you shoot it and really challenge people with well does it Meet The Rules of Engagement awesome hey appreciate you guys playing today I realized today I was a lot more bumpy than you wanted it to be good news you got the mission done real we get some parole to back in and honestly I thought that was a really

good training rep for us today I thought the crew did very well they were very quick and all of their engagements and it's illegally the one thing I did want to bring up though was we were very expeditious and we were about 20 meters from danger close on the engagement for that Romeo nine Echo we didn't do anything wrong it was contact everything was within limits

we were out at like 230 meters away but it's one of those ones to like just as a technique and this is my instructional fix for the crew is any time that you're within 25 meters of a danger close engagement you probably should be talking to the to the j-tech so I thought they did a good job and I thought Captain booed did an exceptional job

of leading the crew which for me the big ticket here is watching Pilots watching aircraft commanders develop into leaders the potential of the ac-130j continues to grow to keep up with the military capabilities of its potential adversaries Air Force Special Operations Command has started testing a new high-energy laser weapon that could one day replace the 105 millimeter cannon Air Force leadership says that with this targets

could be permanently disabled without the slightest bang whoosh thump explosion or even aircraft engine hum it's very fun to take this tool which has just absolutely been a hammer in the Gold War on Terror and then pivoting it to just a queer creativity as king and and enabling that see if I can find I see Lowe's see Walmart yep I put in a new skate park

over there by the Green Acres skater die [Music]