00:00And I just want to pick up on something you were saying at the weekend on one of the U
00:03.S. TV news shows.
00:05You seem to be very certain that the missing airman had indeed survived.
00:10Now, I want to ask you what made you so sure?
00:12Well, not going to really, you know, release all my sources and methods.
00:16Let's just say that fighter aviation is a very small community.
00:19It's a tight fraternity, a tight sorority.
00:22So we worry about our own and we have a very tight network.
00:25So I added on high confidence that this airman was rescued successfully and still alive, obviously, before the rescue.
00:35Yeah, I mean, this was a highly complex rescue mission.
00:38Took about 36 hours.
00:40You're quoted as saying that those involved are ultra prepared.
00:44You say they eat, breathe and sleep combat search and rescue.
00:49And I just want to ask you who you think deserves the most credit here.
00:52Those folks, you nailed it.
00:54Combat search and rescue.
00:55And this was their Super Bowl.
00:57They trained for years and years for this exact scenario.
01:02So when this happened, nobody was necessarily surprised, right?
01:06A complex machine kicked into gear immediately.
01:10After the past six weeks, we've flown over 13,000 combat sorties.
01:15And I'm just a political science major from South Jersey.
01:18Losing two aircraft out of 13,000 sorties, that's a 99.98 mission success rate.
01:25So up until these aircraft were lost the other day, this combat search and rescue folks were sitting alert on
01:31the end of the runway playing cards.
01:33And then when that horn sounded, they sprung into action.
01:36And they knew exactly what to do, who does what, by when.
01:40And even when the two aircraft got bogged down in some mud and couldn't take off, there was a contingency
01:46plan for that.
01:47They weren't surprised.
01:48So we have death by planning, so to speak.
01:51We sit in the brief and we go through what reasonably could go wrong in this mission that we can
01:56talk about right now instead of freaking out if and when it does.
02:00So this was just near absolutely flawless operation.
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