Congratulations on a great accomplishment. In a world when most high ranking Air Force officers have less than 2500 flight hours Lt Col Michael Brill the first to pilot to fly three, four and five thousand hours in an F-16 has recently surpassed 6000 flight hours during his 3rd combat tour with the 421st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron. There are fighter pilots and then there are political hacks, guess which one wears the stars in the Air Force 90% of the time?
Written on May 3, 2008 – 8:34 pm | by FIDSNS
An US Air Force Reserve pilot deployed in Iraq broke his own world record for hours spent flying the F-16 Fighting Falcon when he surpassed the 6,000-hour milestone on May 2. The photo is :Lt Col Brill touching down.
Lt. Col. Michael Brill, a pilot assigned to 421st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, has been breaking world aviation records since 1993, when he surpassed the world’s first pilot to fly 3,000 hours in the F-16. In August 1998, he became the first pilot to fly 4,000 hours and, in November 2002, he was the first pilot to attain 5,000 hours.” The sustained effort required to spend 6,000 hours flying the F-16 is phenomenal,” said Brig. Gen. Burton M. Field, commander of 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, of which the 421st EFS is a part. “Six thousand hours equates to 250 days in the cockpit — not counting all the time in ground ops before and after the flight. That is an incredible amount of time in a high-G [force], high speed, high-stress arena. Despite the challenges of flying the F-16 almost constantly since 1980, Brill said he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love to fly. I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. There is a communication between me and the machine. Flying an airplane is like being on a roller coaster that you can steer,” said the colonel, who grew up on various Marine Corps bases, but calls Virginia home.
Brill, who is deployed from Hill Air Force Base, likened the evolution of the missions F-16 pilots fly and the development of precision-guided weaponry to the strides that have been made with computer technology over recent decades. Brill has personally experienced these changes while flying nearly 225 combat hours and more than 65 combat sorties. His combat experience includes three tours in support of Operation Northern Watch, two in support of Operation Southern Watch, two in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and one in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. In addition, he led the first F-16 strike into Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001, a 10-hour mission he described as an “eye-opening experience. The more recent combat missions he has flown since arriving in Iraq in March have been a lot “quieter,” because fewer munitions have needed to be dropped — an indication that the global war on terrorism is being won, the colonel said. In 1990, Brill became an air reserve technician, which basically is a full-time reservist position. He has been assigned to 419th Fighter Wing at Hill since then and is chief of the safety Office.
(U.S. Air Force photo/ Senior Airman Julianne Showalter)
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