Randall Cunningham: “A pilot is not going to take, generally, I would say 99\/10\ of the time, a pilot, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Army…”

“A pilot is not going to take, generally, I would say 99\/10\ of the time, a pilot, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Army, is not going to take an airplane they feel is unsafe. The airplane is going to have to be up. It may not have some of the systems working. You may fly that airplane without enough radar, which determines the amount and type of training that you can receive. But if there is a doubt in their mind that that airplane is not up to speed mechanically, they are not going to take it. I have seen that as an exception, but we try and do away with that. The second phase is that the more you fly an airplane, the safer that airplane actually is because you are exercising it. With the training cutback and the funding cutback, that becomes deficit also, so your pilots are not getting trained as much. But the morale, knowing that you do not have the up airplanes, like a Navy squadron on a carrier is likely to have 12 to 13 airplanes, with F-18's, F-14's, A-6's, A-7's, but generally 10 to 12 airplanes. If you have eight of those airplanes that are down because you cannot fix them, the pilots will take the two, but what does that mean for the other 20 pilots in that squadron that cannot fly because those airplanes are down? That morale, I sat on the Indian Ocean because we did not have Optar money to fly, and plus our machines were down. We were operating with 20-year-old Phantoms. That is like flying a World War I airplane in World War II. And the morale was terrible.”