According to a study by the Californian Institute of Cool, the long revered job role of fighter pilot is to become uncool by 2025. This alarming development is the result of the increasing safety of the role and the supremacy of digitalisation.  

The paper highlights several alarming historical trends, one being the changed nature of the fighter pilot’s lifestyle. In 1917 many fighter pilots flew while under the influence of cocaine, while from an open cockpit firing two machine-guns, wearing a fur coat and facing mortal danger every day; in 1943 things were equally exciting and the jackets were really cool — however by 2019 fighter pilots spend an estimated 43% of their time looking forward to software updates and 4% Googling jobs in civil aviation.

The study is sending shockwaves throughout the fighter pilot fraternity who have been forced to stop speaking in cliches and reading car magazines long enough to read the 80-page paper. One fighter pilot we spoke to on condition that we mentioned his name and the size of his watch* commented, “If I’d known I’d be using middle management jargon, talking about nodes, hubs, situational awareness and software iterations I would have become a firefighter. I feel like a boring guy who just happens to be able to travel really fast to blow up goatherds. I also spent too much of my time killing one AK-armed teenager with a $200,000 weapon dropped by my $65 million jet – with the support of a vast, errrr infrastructure. I mean the optics on that are not great, right?” Another pilot, who insisted his callsign was CobraSword, noted that – “We’re not even allowed to blow shit up anymore – we ‘administer kinetic effects’. I don’t even have a jet these days – I have an ‘ISR platform’. If we’re not considered cool anymore they’re going to have start paying us properly. If I can’t pull a girl in a Cardiff pub off the back of my job, then what’s the point?” 

*Col. Gary ‘Splat’ Doberman, 4-cm wide and 1-cm thick