What can an F-16 fighter pilot teach us about the Christian life? Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm sit down with Phill Cochran—former fighter pilot and longtime pastor—to discuss his new book, Lessons Learned at the Speed of Sound. Drawing from real experiences in high-pressure flight, Phill shares vivid illustrations that point to deeper spiritual realities—discipline, perseverance, warning, and trust. From “tightening your G-suit” to avoiding the “death spiral,” this conversation shows how God uses pressure to shape His people and prepare them to live faithfully with eternity in view. 

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of Scripture. Of scripture. Well, Jason, it's really fun to talk with an old friend and a friend who's old, Phil Cochran. That's your intro.

That's my intro. Welcome, Phil. Welcome, Phil. Hey, so we just published this book that he wrote, The Speed of Sound, Lessons Learned at the Speed of Sound, Fighter Pilot's Lessons on Faith, Discipline, and Trust from an F-16 pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Phil Cochran, United States Air Force, retired. Great book.

You know what, Phil? This is so well written. I love this book. It's so practical. The illustrations are really remarkable.

Yeah, if you've got a little boy and this book's not in a stocking over Christmas, you've made a vital error. Yeah. Yeah. And the lessons, the life lessons are really, really fantastic. So why did you write this book?

Well, first of all, Scott, Jason, thanks for having me. Thanks for having me on the podcast. This is great. I listen to your podcasts and enjoy them and I appreciate you letting me come on here. You know, the ultimate, for years, as it says, I was a pastor for 23 years over the church.

And I would use analogies from my flying career in the lessons, in the messages I would give to my congregation. And I would have many of them come up afterwards and say, you've got to write a book. You've got to write these into a book. And my family for years encouraged me to put these into a book. And so I would jot down the notes and I had a stack of notes in different places.

And finally, last year, actually, when my son-in-law developed cancer, because these have been such an important part of his life, he's spurred me on through the analogies I would give in scripture and was encouraged by him. And while he was going through his cancer experience, I decided now is a good time to get this organized and start pulling everything together and really start finalizing these notes and put them into a book for my children, for my children's children, and also so that others can benefit from the same things that my congregation benefited from. Phil, could you give us a snapshot of your military career? Just describe when you went in, when you came out, what you did. I joined the Air Force.

Well, actually, let me start back. My wife and I married when we were 18. So I'd always had a love for aviation, a love for flying. My father was a fighter pilot in World War II, flew over the South Pacific and shooting down the Japanese. And I ended up protecting them about 50 years later.

So that was an interesting change of events. But I went in the military after being married for six years with the express intent of becoming a fighter pilot and flying the F-16. And when I look back on that, just God's grace and mercy in my life, His providential hand over that to allow me to achieve my dream is amazing. And so I went in the military in 1989, went through off training school, and from there was selected to go to Euro NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training which is a select pilot training base down at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas where everybody that goes through that program graduates at least at that time graduated as a fighter pilot, but it was a longer program, more check rides, more intense, and combined with the NATO allies, we had Greek students, we had German students, British students that all went through pilot training with us. And then from there, I went to the Naval Post graduate school to get a master's in European studies and then back to pilot requalification training.

And then the F-16 replacement training unit. And then on to Masawa, Japan, where I served for three years. And then back to Luke Air Force Base as an instructor pilot. And then from Luke Air Force Base, the natural decision for most people at that stage in their flying career was either go to the airlines or stay in the Air Force. And I had originally chosen to go to the airlines, but I wasn't ready to hang up my G-suit yet.

So I got a full-time reserve position at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma. And I was an instructor pilot there in the T-38 aircraft for about 13 years before retiring in 2013, after about 23 and a half years. Okay, hey, I want to ask you about the F-16, but before that, what was the plane your dad flew in World War II? He flew the Corsair. So the Gullwing, beautiful aircraft, all engine, very little plane and a lot of power.

As you know, my dad flew P-51s in the Pacific War as well. But what a difference between those planes and the F16. Tell us about the F16. The F16 was phenomenal. I will say, I always longed for the true pilot, V-pilot of like the P-51 or the Corsair where it was pure skill against skill, no electronics, no fancy gadgetry.

It was just playing against playing, pilot against pilot. I think that would be an amazing experience. But the F-16 was always my dream. It was the aircraft that I think looks fantastic. I liked the idea of single seat, single engine.

A lot of people, a lot of pilots would give me a hard time that we only have one engine. And I would always say, well, if you're good enough, you only need one engine. So, but the jet was amazing. And the experiences of pulling high Gs and the maneuverability and the sheer power and the challenge of the missions. We had so many missions compared to just an air superiority fighter like the F-15, which they do an amazing job or the F-22 now, don't get me wrong.

But the myriad of missions that we had to prepare for from surface attack, air to air, suppression of enemy air defenses, which was one of my last missions I did in Japan. Just amazing, a lot of knowledge to study and understand and digest. So an amazing aircraft. Are F-16s still in service? Yes, yeah, yeah.

They're gradually being phased out by the new generation fighters and such, but there's still units, especially all around the world, that still fly the F-16, and that we still supply the F-16 too. Okay, so let's talk about the book. I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the terminology, some of the chapters in your book, just to give people a taste of this thing. So, Is your G-suit tight? What's that all about?

You know, again, all these analogies came out of me teaching from scripture, some passage or another, and it's amazing. I still, as I have about 180 of them now almost all together, But as I hear something, it just clicks in an aviation analogy to me. And we were experiencing, and as I'm sure you have, you've experienced these children that get brought up in homes that are very conservative and almost seem to want to throw off those constraints as they get older because they feel too constricted by it and yet we know that Jesus commands us to enter by the narrow gate you know and narrow and compressed is the way kind of the same way as the crowds pressed into G's. And so it reminded me of my G suit. G suits weren't comfortable.

When I flew, I had a lower body G suit that came up around my legs, my abdomen, and then an upper body G suit that compressed around my chest. And the whole purpose of it was not comfort, it was life-giving, it was life-sustaining and it made my job as a pilot easier because as I pulled G's, the natural effect on the body is that blood wants to drain from the head and pull into your legs. And we all know that you kind of need blood in your brain to think and act. So that G-suit would inflate and give my muscles something to strain against and to keep that blood up in the upper part of my body. And so as I would fit into that G-Suit, and it had to be refitted regularly where I would go into life support and they would restring up the strings and make it tighten all over again.

And it'd be uncomfortable all the more all over again. But walking out of the jet, it was uncomfortable. Sitting in the jet, it might have been uncomfortable. But as you begin to pull G's, you realize that that G-suit giving you that constriction, that pressure was actually giving you life and sustaining your life. And that's the same thing with God's Word and its commands upon us, the precepts and the patterns and the principles that we follow in God's Word are there to be life-giving.

Yeah, they restrict our freedom, but freedom isn't the ability to do whatever I want to do, it's the responsibility to do what I ought to do. So that G-suit being tight is the same thing as in our Christian walk of sanctification entering in through that narrow gate. That's really amazing. Okay, Your essay bag has a hole in it. What in the world?

Well, essay situational awareness is in simple terms or in one definition would be perceiving the environment around me, understanding that environment around me, and then acting upon it so that I know what to do in the future. And one thing is pilots that we were taught as young pilots. And I would then teach my student pilots is that the more information you can shove into your essay bag as it's sitting on the ground, the better off you're going to be when you take off. Because once you lift that bag off the ground and go walk to the jet and go to take off and begin flying, that situational awareness begins dripping and draining out of the bag. And depending upon what's going on around you, what changes in the weather or the flight plan or the airspace or the jet, depending upon what changes are thrown at you, depends upon, it makes a difference in how quickly that situational awareness drains out of your bag.

And there would be times that I would be just hanging on to the tail of the jet, it'd be like the jet was in front of me and I'm trying to claw myself back into the cockpit. And I know for a fact from the students I flew with that was the case oftentimes. And so the more preparation you can get on the ground, the better off that you were. And so In our Christian lives, it's the same way. The more we prepare for our day, the more time we spend in the Word, and the more time we spend in prayer and in meditation, the more we cram that situational awareness of God's Word into our lives.

Let that Word dwell in us richly before we leave the house, the better prepared we're going to be for the environment that we encounter and the way we understand that environment and then the way we act upon that environment and react to that environment. And so that's where that one came from. So here's another one. We're like giving you a pop quiz in your own book. You're doing very well.

Keep your wings level in the storm. What do you mean by that? Right. Well, and this is true of any pilot, not just an F-16 pilot, but in aviation. I started out as I was going into the air before I went into the Air Force.

I knew I wanted to be a pilot. So I went ahead and I had to get my four-year degree. And in doing that, I decided why not go to an aviation school and get all my civilian pilot ratings too. And so it doesn't matter whether you're a civilian pilot or an Air Force pilot. When you're flying in the weather, when you find yourself in a thunderstorm, and the goal is to avoid thunderstorms because thunderstorms are disorienting.

The middle of the storm is extremely difficult, not only to navigate, but hard on the aircraft. It can rip an aircraft apart, regardless of whether you're a multi-million dollar fighter or a single engine Cessna. And so you avoid a thunderstorm at all costs. But if for some reason you find yourself in the middle of that storm, the rule of thumb is that you don't turn. And I don't know if this will work or not.

Pilots talk with their hands. I'm going to talk with a jet, right? So Here's an F-16. So if I'm flying through a thunderstorm and I begin, I want to run from it so I want to get out of it. If I begin to turn, all that does is create more pressure on the jet because as my jet is banked, I'm submitting it to greater forces of G's just by the asymmetricness of the turn.

And as I begin to turn, I'm remaining in that storm much longer than I would possibly if I just flew straight through it. And so our desire as Christians is somewhat the same. We want to run from trials. We want to turn from the natural human, our new human nature is to try and find comfort, to avoid trials. And yet the word tells us to rejoice when we find ourselves in trials, that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness.

And so as Christians, our goal is to keep flying straight through the storm. And the other thing that we learned as pilots is you don't try to manhandle the jet. You let the jet do what it's going to do as it's going through the storm. You just keep your wings level, you know, and we do that as Christians by not trying in our own strength to control what's going on around us, but keeping our eyes fixed on Christ, just keeping our spiritual wings level through the word and through prayer and through meditation. And that's gonna carry us through the storm.

He's going to carry us through the storm. That's great. Okay. Guarding the stick. Another one that came from teaching to a congregation and having children and want to throw off the constraints, the wisdom of their parents and just being saddened by that.

And the idea that as a pilot, as an instructor pilot, there were times that I needed to let my student have free reign of the jet, have him have the ability to maneuver and react and make corrections, make mistakes and respond to those mistakes and learn from them. And sometimes I couldn't do that. If we were close to the ground or we were close to another aircraft, you'd be surprised, but in formation, when you're on another jet's wing, I had to guard the stick to keep my student from turning into this other aircraft at times. And you'd think that would be a natural life-preserving thought among most students. Yet there were times when I had to keep him from turning the wrong direction.

And so when things are vital, when things are important, there's a time to guard the stick and to preserve not only my students life, but my life. I had students trying to kill me every day. And it was from those experiences, it was from the fact that I was a student once. So, and then it's from the experience of an IP that we're instructor pilot, where you see students doing the same thing over and over again. As a situation sets up as an instructor pilot, you were able to go, I know what's coming.

I can see this developing. I've seen it before. And so you were just there ready to guard the stick, ready to take the jet before he killed himself and you along with him. As parents, we have that same experience. I think sometimes our children feel like maybe we were just plopped into this parenting role.

We didn't come up through the same years of education and training and experiences they did. And so the idea being that that as parents, sometimes we let our children have a little bit of space and make mistakes and learn and grow, but but we can't always do that. We have to take a hand upon our parenting and sometimes stop certain situations before they get worse. And our children have to trust us that our wisdom is what we're reacting to. And sometimes that wisdom comes from us failing.

You know, there's times that we might tell our children, hey, don't do that or, or no, you can't do that or stay away from that, not because we succeeded in staying away from it, but because we failed to stay away from it. And I likened it in a message one time to we're driving along in our car And we see a man that has that is all bloodied and bruised and he's along the side of the road He's waving his arms and he fell into a ditch. He drove into a ditch up ahead you know, would you not listen to him just because he failed and drove into the ditch or would you listen to him all the more and And so I really wanted to encourage children to not throw off the constraints of their parents and parents to properly guard the stick of their children's lives and guide them as they should. Phil, here's one You get to grade me on pronunciation now. I'm going to put myself out there and probably humiliate myself because I'm not a pilot and I don't actually know what this is at all.

Don't be a limbic. How'd I do? Close. It's a limb fact. L-I-M-F-A-K or F-A-C, limb fact.

The military survives on its abbreviations and acronyms. You know, CBPO, you know, now all of them are escaping me, but so many of them that I don't even remember, that a lot of them are military related, that they actually, I start using them with other people and I forget the fact that they probably don't understand what I'm talking about. And the LIMFAC is one of those things where my family knows exactly what it means. But LIMFAC is short for limiting factor. And it's anything in a mission, like when we were briefing and maybe the weather was low.

So the limiting factor on the ingress to the target was the weather or maybe it might have been a lack of tanker availability was a limiting factor in our success of the mission anything that limits our Successful mission accomplishment is a limb fact And so we would joke around with family members at times, you know, if they were being the weak one in the family complaining about something or not being available for something, if you will, don't be a limb fact. And they knew exactly what we were talking about. So that basically... What's that? I might have to adopt that.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that, so basically, the encouragement in this came to me as a, as a, in light of our, our, our freedom in Christ and our ability to, through Christian liberty, to do things that, just like Paul was talking about, the eating of meat offered to idols. We have the freedom to do that as Christians, but do we have the responsibility out of love to avoid those things if it's going to cause another brother to stumble or impact their walk with Christ? And so there's this trade-off between, yes, I have the freedom to do that, but it is my responsibility to love my brother.

And Christ is our ultimate example. He laid down his life. He lowered himself, and even to the point of death on the cross. And so we need to keep that in mind as we want to exercise our liberties, looking to Christ as our example. Okay, here's another.

Punching off the master caution light. Yeah, this relates to the need to heed the warnings of Scripture. It came from teaching through the Book of Jeremiah and the watchman on the wall that was warning Judah that there was danger coming and they were so hardened in their hearts towards those warnings that they disregarded them. And as a student pilot, the first thing you learn on the jet, on the just below the, where you're looking at the cockpit in the front to see the, To see the nose of the jet just below that on the eyebrow panels are what's called master caution lights Or eyebrow lights and and basically those lights are bright You can't miss them and when something drastic is going on with the aircraft that needs immediate attention they light up and you get an audible warning as well. And the goal, the first thing you do is to punch that light off, to turn it off so that if you get a subsequent warning, you're able to see it and react to it.

But you definitely don't ignore it. No pilot in their right mind would ignore a master caution light that's flashing in front of them because that means something is wrong with the jet. And if I ignore a master caution light, I ignore a low oil pressure light. It might turn into oil completely leaking from my engine and then my engine seizing up and in a single engine fighter that's not a good thing. So you want to respond to the Master Cautions in time and sin is deceitful.

It hardens our hearts. It keeps us or makes us think sometimes that those warnings are for other people, not for ourselves. And so it's important as Christians that we heed the warnings of Scripture. And sometimes that means heeding the warnings of our brothers and sisters in Christ because maybe they see something in our lives that we're not seeing. And so paying attention to the warnings you're receiving from the Lord.

Here's one I definitely know how to pronounce, the death spiral. Yeah. And this is a problem again, not just a fighter pilot problem, an aviation problem in and of itself. The inner ear lies to us. We can't fly by the seat of our pants.

The minute we lose eyes on a visible horizon in front of us, we have to rely on some sort of instrumentation and trust that instrumentation. Because the inner ear, as your semicircular canals, as the fluid in there spins and agitates the hairs, eventually that spinning becomes so normal that you lose track of what's truly happening and whether you're straight and level or whether you're in a turn. And So the idea is that a death spiral happens from as I'm flying along and I start losing that sensation of what position my aircraft is in. I start feeling like I'm straight and level even though I'm in a turn because I no longer have visibility of that horizon, but I can see my altitude descending. And so maybe my reaction is to pull harder to try and climb.

But as I'm pulling harder, I'm actually just steepening and tightening up my spiral until finally as I do that enough, I just spiral into the ground. And so the idea is that in our Christian walk, if we don't heed the warnings, if we don't trust the instrumentation of God's Word, if we don't keep our wings level using the instrument of God's Word as our instrument panel, then as we get into a descent, we may recognize that descent, but we may try in our own effort to pull harder, to try harder ourselves to get out of it, instead of trusting the word of God. And all we do is make matters worse. And sometimes that results in a greater catastrophe than we want to accept. So trusting God's word to stay out of the death spiral.

Well, this is a really neat book. I hope y'all can go out and get a copy of lessons learned from the speed of sound. This is a proof copy and more coming in, go out and get it. And thank you, Phil, for writing this book. Well, thank you for allowing me to talk about it.

And I really do pray. It's a blessing to those that read it, that encourages them in their faith to focus on Christ, to persevere, to have discipline, to approach their Christian walk with intent and with a tactical mindset, because we're at war. And I pray that this helps them to overcome. Thank you guys. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

Hope you can go out and get this book, Lessons Learned at the Speed of Sound by Phil Cochran. Hope to see you next time.