A flying squadron is a strange place. It is a tight-knit enclosure full of alpha males, each of whom always wants to be the best. If you lined up fighter pilots in a circle, one would be better than the other until a kind of divine infinity was reached. Please forgive me for this figurative exaggeration, but I would like to make one thing clear: the pressure to compete and perform is great. Nevertheless, this fighting community is always a group that is not in an adversarial but rather a competitive relationship. While in the former everyone tries to secure their own advantage and slow down their fellow competitors, the latter is characterized by the mutual motivation to achieve top performance. When your survival in an emergency depends on your comrade, it becomes obvious that jet crews can never be loners. Nobody can do everything, nobody knows everything and nobody can survive alone in the sky.
Although the cockpit workplace is per se a completely isolated command post, we are always dependent on optimal cooperation in peace, crisis and war. The most important task of every squad and squad leader is to lead their own wingmen safely back to their home base at all times. Although these principles of comradeship extend to all military areas, they are made particularly necessary by the challenges of the third dimension. We fly together and if the situation requires it, we will fight together. It remains important to understand that the fighter pilot is, first and foremost, one thing: a military leader with vital responsibility for the survival of his flying comrades.
"comradeship"
Gerald Groß