The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Jennifer "SWAT" Cannon

Aircraft flown: F-15E

Join us as we explore the extraordinary career of Jen Cannon, a retired F-15E weapon systems officer with over 2,000 flight hours, including 1,100 in combat. Discover her insights on flying the F-15E, combat experiences, space policy, and the future of space exploration.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing: cool flying stories. I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with Jen Cannon, call sign SWAT. SWAT is a retired F-15E weapon systems officer with more than 2,000 flight hours, and of those, 1,100 of her flight hours were in combat. Let me just say that again. She has more hours in combat than she has in training over the course of her career. She's flown all over the world, including in Afghanistan, the UAE, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. She retired from active duty in 2023 and since then has earned her doctorate focused on space policy and international relations. Jen, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Thank you for having me, Never. I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

For those who haven't flown the F-15E, put us in the cockpit. What's it like?

SPEAKER_01 1:02

I'll start off by saying I'm a weapon systems officer. Wizo shorthand for weapon systems officer. And what that means is I'm in the backseat of the two-seater F-15 strike eagle. And it's a dual role, air to air, air to ground, which means that my role as a WISO was integrating all of the sensors for both of those roles. When you get in the backseat of an F-15E, I will say the first time we took off, you could feel every stage of that afterburner on the takeoff roll, and you can feel yourself getting deeper into your seat as you get into that last stage of afterburner. So that initial flight was much different than anything else I had flown with the power you feel immediately. And then when you take off, you're immediately pulling over a G, obviously, to pull up out of the airspace, uh, the tower airspace. And then when you get to altitude, it gets a little bit quieter. But a lot of what you do in the F-15E and a lot of what you feel has to do with the people you're talking to in the air and on the ground. A lot of how you feel as a weapon systems officer is how the people that you're talking to feel. You kind of take on their emotions. And especially when it comes to troops in contact and close air support missions, the feeling inside of that jet during those missions is one of urgency. I need to protect my American and coalition partners who are on the ground. And so it's not just a physical feeling when you're in the jet, but when you're executing your missions, you also take on that urgency and those emotions of those who are in harm's way.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

So let's go back for a moment to a less sophisticated airplane than the F-15E and talk about our uh training experiences because I believe you and I had a similar experience during spin training. Tell us a bit about your your experience uh um executing a spin.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Absolutely. I love spins, first of all. I think they're so fun. I first did them in a Piper Tomahawk, and it was terrifying, but you just don't drop that fast. So you have time to execute the maneuvers to get out of the spin, right? But the second aircraft that I executed spins in in the front seat when I was flying in the front seat with an instructor in the back was in the T6 Texan. And it's a pretty powerful aircraft with a big engine. It's a prop, but it's still very powerful. And you have to do the training to do the same thing, get out of the spin to make sure if you ever execute the incorrect maneuvers that you can get out of them. But unfortunately, uh, what I did on the first spin in the T6 was execute the complete opposite uh maneuver or controls that I was supposed to execute. And so we got in one of the worst spins that you can get into in a prop, in a turboprop. And this was at least at 10,000 feet. So we had some time, and I think it was at 5,000 feet where my instructor took over and fixed it. But after that flight, he said, Jen, I was terrified. I have not seen a student do the exact wrong thing ever. You're the first one.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Well, it just meant that he hadn't flown with me because I I think I did exactly the same thing on my first spin with uh first lieutenant Mark Fish, who was my instructor at uh at pilot training. And so we go up for the spin training, and uh, I still remember you know you had to memorize the maneuver, what you're gonna do to recover. And it was like, you know, throttle sidle, rudder is neutral, you know, uh uh stick, you know, full forward, and then rudder abruptly full opposite the the spin. So if you're spinning left, you want to stomp on right rudder. I stomped on left rudder. And so we were spinning at a you know pretty gradual pace, and then all of a sudden we whipped into a much faster blender-like spin. At which point, Mark said over the radio, I have the aircraft. He sounds very calm, but that's why you start spins at a pretty high altitude for students like us. Uh so you we've got time to recover. I will digress from I haven't told that story to anybody in years.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

So, Jen, I'm intrigued. I've I've never spoken to someone who had more combat time than training time. Let's dive into some combat stories. First, tell me what was the most mentally challenging task you've ever had to perform in the cockpit?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

This is an easy one because this was the only time I had to execute trigonometry in the aircraft in combat. We were at 25,000 feet, and we had put in the target for some leaflets we were going to drop, which was not a main mission of the F-15E, by the way, but it was something that we did during Operation Inherent Resolve.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

And this was where?

SPEAKER_01 6:29

This was over Iraq and Syria. The target that we saw on the ground for these leaflets was across the border in a country that we did not want to drop in. A friendly country. And so in the aircraft, my pilot and I realized we were going to have to do this math. And thank goodness there are two people in the F-15E for this kind of a mission, right? Because my pilot is the flight lead, and I'm, well, I'm also the flight lead, but the WISO, and so I'm having to do all this math for the rest of the flight to make sure that we drop these leaflets in the right place. And I we have about 30 minutes as we're flying north through a rock. We have some time, but as you know, when you're flying at 0.8 Mach and 25,000 feet, your brain doesn't work the same. So I am doing a squared plus b squared equals c squared and so catoa in my head and on paper. And I think I still have the paper where I did all that math to make sure that we put the correct aim point in our jet. Thank goodness I loved math. I took advanced calculus, so all of that was, I guess it's good uh to do that if you're gonna be a weapon systems officer in the F-15E. We ended up executing this mission and we dropped in the correct country. And so the leaflets made it where they were initially supposed to go. But I always tell air crew who think they're never gonna have to do advanced math again that this story, because it is very possible that you're gonna have to do it on your own.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

So you mentioned a few minutes ago that as a WISO, you very much took on the personality and the circumstances of the people you were talking to. And you mentioned in particular troops in contact. Can you tell us um were there times you flew in combat where moments that stand out as particularly memorable where you were dealing with troops on the ground and uh troops in contact or close air support?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Absolutely. There were several where we felt the urgency. There was one specific mission. It was a daytime mission, so it made that a little bit easier. So we could we have a full canopy, you can see outside, you can see what's happening on the ground, especially during the day. You don't have to wear your night vision goggles, it makes it easier. So we were we were able to listen to the joint terminal attack controller and the joint fires officers who were in Afghanistan. And when we checked in for this troops in contact, they told us that number one, they were surrounded by Taliban forces and they were being shot at from 360 degrees. Number two, they were running out of batteries for their radios. And number three, they were running out of ammo. So what is the first thing that you have to do is, of course, an F-15E air crew to hopefully calm down the situation a little bit is you do a low pass, right? So we we get our eyes on the friendly troops, we understand where the enemy is, but because they're surrounded on all sides, it's danger close. Like they're they're pretty close to our friendly troops. And so we do a low pass to try to scare them, get them to stop from firing. And we come back up, and there there are two of us on station at this point. We come back up to altitude and ask how it went and if anything has changed. And they're still firing. Not as much, but they're still firing. So we had to be talked on to the specific firing position. The next escalation of force is 20 millimeter strafe. And so we execute this 20 millimeter strafe at the point where they tell us the firing is coming from. And then we get up and regroup and they tell us the firing is stopped. Okay, now we can focus on the other things that you need. How can I help you? And so we had to help them tell the headquarters that they needed more batteries and ammo to be flown in from the Helos that were at the forward operating base. And as time went on, they started firing again. So it was more of a tactical situation, but we stopped the firing, we ensured they got what they needed from the headquarters, and then we continued the mission until they could exfiltrate from one direction. And that mission, not just understanding how close they are to being overrun by the Taliban, the feeling of that, but but also when we landed, we didn't know they were going to come visit us at Bagram. We didn't, usually for these missions, you you don't know who you're working for. You don't know who these guys, mostly men that you're talking to on the ground, are. But that week, because of the actions that we took in that troops in contact situation, they were able to all stay alive afterwards. They came to us and they said thank you. And since that was the only time that happened, it will be absolutely unforgettable. I still have the photo with those two joint fires officers. And surprisingly, they were Air Force. There were two airmen that were calling in the fires, and the everybody else was army. And I at that time I was new to combat. I didn't know that we integrated with the army like that, that closely. Um, but anyway, it was just wonderful to understand that we were supporting the joint force and to have them come back and thank us just meant the world.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Jen, what sort of has given you the greatest sense of accomplishment after you completed the mission?

SPEAKER_01 12:29

In 2011, it was after my squadron had left and the new squadron came in. So I was flying with kind of new people. They had more women in their squadron than we did, and we were actually able to execute a mission with all women, uh, front and back seat, number one and number two jet. That's the reason we called it dudet flight. Our normal call sign in Afghanistan was dude, but this time we were dudet. Nice. And so during that flight, we again, of course, we did a lot of this in Afghanistan, but we got called two troops in contact to do close air support. And this time it was supporting the Marines in the army who were hiking up these really tall mountains in northeastern Afghanistan. If you've never experienced northeastern Afghanistan on the ground, you can't imagine the terrain that these men were walking up and having to fight in. And they got in a firefight with the Taliban again. And we were, to us, it seemed like a normal troops in contact situation. But we were at the point where we had no weapons left. We had dropped all of our GPS guided bombs, our laser-guided bombs. We still had some guns, gun left, but we didn't need to use it. So from bolt number one and number two, we had no more bombs. So we had to go home and somebody else took over. But after we landed, I was lucky enough to have been flying with Grinder. And I'm gonna call her out because she was the best flight lead in that situation. Uh, Christine Kelly, and she took us to the hospital at Bagram to see what happened when you know people got hurt in the this conflict in northeastern Afghanistan in those crazy jagged mountains. And we took a tour of the hospital. We saw a Marine who had lost both of his legs after stepping on a landmine. We saw a Taliban member who was in the hospital because he got injured, but he was locked up with some security. Finally, we actually saw some men who were in the hospital from that troops in contact situation that we had just been in. They had been medevaced that quickly from where they were in the mountains to Bagram. And I am not kidding you. One of them had a bullet through his head. And he was walking and talking to us. So it had it had just grazed, but a bullet in his head, right? And this man, I will never forget, he said, I I recognize your voice. I know you were overhead today. I said, Yeah, that that was us. There aren't many women who talk to the JTACs, right? So it was definitely us. And he said, Thank you so much for what you did for us today. I am alive and my friends are alive because of you. And I get so teared up thinking about that and those missions and that we did that we were never able to talk to the men and women on the ground who we supported. So I really liked to to remember that during my service and the why behind what we were doing. All the time we spent in Afghanistan, our mission was to protect the men and women on the ground. And that's what we did that day.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

That's a hell of a day. So was there ever a moment when you were flying when you realized that you or someone else in your flight had just broken the accident chain, and that if you hadn't, it would have meant somebody would have crashed?

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Thank goodness I was still a first lieutenant and very green, and I had no idea what was going on. But yes, it was in a air combat maneuvering sortie. For those who aren't familiar, it's usually three aircraft. There are two aircraft executing maneuvers close to each other, and then I'm using my hands, and then someone else coming in from the outside to try to shoot. And what happened that day is I was one of the jets who was in the close maneuvering uh circle. And my number two was trying to come in to shoot who we were fighting with. Unfortunately, we were both pretty young and inexperienced, and he didn't see us. He was only tracking that red player that he was trying to shoot. And by the time he saw us, he had to negative over G to not hit us. And we came within 75 feet of each other at high speed. So who broke the accident chain that day? It was his backseater, the instructor weapons systems officer, who immediately took the controls and did what he had to do so that none of us would crash. We didn't recognize it early enough to be able to do anything until the very last minute. I still I can still feel it. When things like that happen to you, you feel that forever in your body. And there was no way we could do anything else in that sortie after that happened. Your your body is like, I need to be done. And so we just went home and land and debriefed it. And thank God everybody came home alive that day.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

So, Jen, are there any sorties you wish you could erase from your logbook?

SPEAKER_01 18:21

There was a sortie during my most recent deployment, which was now 10 years ago, in Operation Inherent Resolve, where we were carrying GBU 54s. And those are laser-guided JDAMs, and they're pretty awesome because how big is that?

SPEAKER_00 18:37

A 2,000 pounder or 500 pounds.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Mm-hmm. And those are pretty awesome because if something starts moving, then you can actually laze the GPS guided weapon as the thing starts moving. So you shouldn't drop them on things you already know are moving. Um if you have laser-guided bombs. But in this situation, uh, we had a fast moving car. This was a rock on a highway, and the target was a fast moving car. We knew that we had to drop the GBU 54 because it would actually it was better at tracking fast-moving vehicles. So we did. I, as a WISO, my actions are fire the laser, make sure I'm in primary designated target, full action trigger, right? That's that was what I was supposed to be doing. But unfortunately, I was not in the right mode of the uh the sniper pod to be able to accurately target this weapon onto that fast-moving vehicle. So because of that incorrect targeting solution, the weapon did not follow my laser, that was perfectly on that vehicle. My weapon dropped exactly where I told it to. And it stayed as a a standard GPS guided 500-pound weapon.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

So, in other words, it just fell ballistically to uh its natural trajectory as opposed to uh being guided to your reflected laser energy from the sniper pod.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Exactly. I wanted it to follow my laser energy, but I told it to do something different. I recognized it immediately, but you have to keep going when you're in that situation. When I landed, I had to debrief the director of operations, I had to speak at a Friday all call. I learned a lot from that situation, but as far as I can remember, that's the only weapon I dropped in combat that was incorrectly targeted. And and so that sticks out for me as something I I wish I could do again if I had the chance.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

But let's put that in context for a moment. That's one weapon out of how many that you dropped over all those years.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Hundreds.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

I'd call that a damn good track record.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

But you know, in the fighter pilot world you have to be perfect. And and high risk. It's high risk, high stakes. One wrong tactical move could mean a strategic loss, and that's something we were taught from a young age. We all make mistakes. I understand that. But you take it very seriously.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I think if we didn't take it seriously, that would be that would be the warning sign.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

So, Jen, what's the coolest thing you've ever done in an airplane?

SPEAKER_01 21:50

I think some people would say going upside down, going up to really high altitudes, going over the mock, the sound, breaking the sound. Barrier, right? But there are very few people who get to say that they flew when they were pregnant with their son or daughter. And they dropped bombs on the range while they were pregnant. And so I always tell my daughter that she's already flown a fighter jet and she's dropped bombs.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

How old is she now?

SPEAKER_01 22:26

She's almost nine.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Almost nine.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Nice. I like it. So if there was any sortie that you've ever flown that you could refly again because it was just so perfect, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 22:38

It was my Finny flight. I was fairly sure this was going to be my last flight in the F-15 ever because I was moving to the Pentagon. And I got to choose who was going to be in that flight. And so I chose somebody who I flew with in my first fighter squadron to be the flight lead with me. So we were number one. But I also got to fly with my husband as number four Bravo. He was active duty at the time. He was the director of operations for the operations support squadron at Mountain Home Air Force Base. So it was all very legal. And for him, it was a fam flight. And he got to experience the strike eagle for the first time. We flew a low level from Idaho to Washington State, where there are these beautiful snow-capped mountains and big valleys and rivers. So I I got to experience that beautiful last flight with him as number four.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

We know flying can be a dangerous business and all of us have lost friends along the way. Are there any aviators you've lost that you want to remember today?

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Thanks, David, for asking that because I think about it often. Definitely every year on July 17th or 18th, depending on what time zone you're in. But in July 2009, we lost Dude 1-4 in a training accident over Afghanistan. And they were practicing night strafe on night vision goggles, and they impacted the ground without pulling up. And so we b we lost both aviators. The pilot of Dude 1 4 was Mark McDowell. He had a wife who was also deployed to Iraq at the time. And the WISO was Tom Gramith, and he had a wife and twin baby girls at home. And doing the math, those girls are probably adults now. But I hope they know that we'll never forget their dad. We'll never forget Dude 1-4 that we lost from the 336th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron over Afghanistan. And we remember them every year.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Thank you. So, Jen, I want to pivot now from your flying in the Air Force to what you've been doing since then. I know you're very involved in uh space. You got your your doctorate in space policy. So tell me, what's the most exciting thing going on in space right now?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Ooh, thank you for asking. There's so much going on right now. Recently, I hope everyone watched the Artemis II mission. We had four astronauts go around the moon, saw the dark side of the moon for the first time in a long time. NASA especially is doing a lot right now for human exploration. And what I love to talk about is cislunar space, lunar exploration, and how we are getting the next generation excited about space exploration and working in space. Those four astronauts that were part of that Artemis II mission had a job of not only being amazing engineers and pilots and scientists, but diplomats. They are the ones that have gotten me and others excited about what NASA's trying to do right now to potentially put a nuclear-powered nuclear-powered source. Um we NASA is working to put a nuclear-powered source on the moon, which is something that we've been thinking about potentially, but nobody has put the energy into. And so that's what I'm excited about right now.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

You have to expend a whole lot of energy to get out of the gravity well, into orbit, and then start your way to your destination, wherever that might be. But then once that's done, you've also got to expend a lot of energy to decelerate in order to, you know, get into orbit or potentially land on whatever your destination may be, an asteroid, a planet.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Yeah, and think else, perhaps. If you if you need to maneuver, if you're in orbit, you have a limited amount of fuel. If you have different types of fuel, you'll have the capability to maneuver a little bit more. And I'll say that if you don't know yet, you should know that space is a contested domain. There are competitors out there who are working every day to try to deny capability from space. We see it in the public at the unclassified level. We see GPS jamming in locations that we expect over Iran where the current war was is happening. And commercial aircraft are being affected by this part of contested space. As we've been saying for nine years now, since 2017, space is the newest warfighting domain. That is why I like to tell people who have been operators, like me, like you, that we need you to work in the space community. If for some reason you're ready to change your career from fighter aviation or tactical air control party to space operations and strategy, there's a role for you. We also need operators to understand policy. We need the people who are using the systems to be writing the policy that will dictate how those systems are used for decades to come. That's the world that I'm working in right now, and why my tactical experience, flying fighters, using all those systems, understanding how what I did affected national security at that level, translates to the space domain.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

So, with all this talk about space, tell me, how close have you been to being in space?

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Well, I would say I would love to take one of those spaceships where you go just above the carmen line, above a thousand kilometers, you get your astronaut pin, and you come back down. But unfortunately, uh I'm not an astronaut at this point. So the closest I've been is 50,000 feet in an F-15E over the mock. I think we got to, we might have gotten to 1.5 in the descent from 50,000 feet. But that was on my last flight leaving Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

You've been about 15,000 feet higher than me, so there you go.

unknown 30:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

It really the difference between 40 and 50 is pretty big.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

In what way?

SPEAKER_01 30:51

You can start seeing some layers of atmosphere. And you see the curvature of the Earth. Earth is round, for those who are denying it is, I've seen it. And it's quiet. People think that when you go over the speed of sound, just because there's a sonic boom, that it should be loud, you don't even know it's happening. You have to look at your head up device or your instruments to know that you've gone over 1.0. Because it is so quiet, especially up there.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

And thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Thank you for offering to have me on. I always love talking about the experiences that I've had, especially supporting the troops on the ground in combat zones. And if we can document the stories that we have even more of old fighter pilots who want to tell their stories, I think that is a great endeavor.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

I quite agree. I quite agree. You've been listening to the Flyboy Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by our parent organization, the Flyboy Lab. The mission of the Flyboy Lab is to elevate awareness and appreciation of aviators, their service, sacrifices, and contributions. Hopefully, we've fulfilled that mission today. New episodes of the podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com. Until our next sorting, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.