Air Superiority

A Fighter Pilot's Perspective

By Eric Scott

“All I wanted to do was fly.”

It’s safe to say that as a youngster, Chuck Blank had his head in the clouds. Growing up in a U.S. Air Force family, he dreamed of flying fighter jets. On the way to achieving his dream, he saw the world before he ever strapped into the cockpit.

Chuck was born on an American military base in Japan and traveled the world with his family as his father served Air Force assignments in Taiwan, Greece, Turkey and Alaska. His family later settled in Mississippi, where he went to college and earned a degree in computer science while also embarking on pilot training through the Air Force.

“Half way through pilot training, I was designated to be in the fighter track. I finished second in my class and got an F-16 assignment,” said Chuck, who currently serves as manager of business development for Northrop Grumman’s Fast Jet Team.

Known by close colleagues as “Ogre,” his fighter pilot call sign, Chuck served in combat, fighting adversarial forces in the Middle East. He tallied 140 combat hours of flight time in the skies over Iraq, helping enforce a no-fly zone established by U.S. and international allies in the late 1990s.

During his time in the region, he experienced terrorism up close. On June 25, 1996, Chuck was stationed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia when terrorists bombed the Khobar Towers housing complex where his unit and others were housed, killing 19 U.S. Airmen.

“Our squadron was there when it happened,” Chuck recalled. “It was a huge, deadly blast and some of us there were awarded the Purple Heart for injuries sustained. Fortunately, I’m okay today, but the bombing is a reminder of the constant danger we faced in combat areas.”

Pivot to Performance Proponent

After retiring from the Air Force after 30 years, Chuck looked for a new career opportunity where he could bring his F-16 experience to the defense industry table. That brought him to Northrop Grumman just over two years ago to advocate for the game-changing electronic warfare (EW) system he said he wished he had when flying combat missions – the F-16 Integrated Viper Electronic Warfare Suite, better known as IVEWS.

“With IVEWS, you gain survivability without losing lethality and you can’t put a price tag on how important that is” Chuck said. “Now you have a completely integrated system that detects the full spectrum of current threats and tells you what it sees and what it’s automatically doing about it. Today’s threats are so far advanced, pilots can’t afford to be distracted by pushing buttons or messing with anything in the cockpit.”

Chuck said that he never wanted to be a salesman, rather a proponent of a product that he truly believes in – from a fighter pilot’s perspective. He says that when he briefs government customers making business decisions about acquiring resilient aircraft capability, he realizes he’s also staking his personal reputation on the line to deliver, in addition to the company’s.

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Credibility is Everything

“If you lose credibility with the government, you are done! You must have faith in the product you are presenting,” Chuck said. “Right now, there are F-16s in theaters of operations that can’t be flown because they’re not capable of protecting pilots against such high threat levels. With IVEWS, you can confidently deploy F-16s anywhere in the world."

Chuck also points to a strategic decision Northrop Grumman made when developing IVEWS that makes it a true technology differentiator when compared to competitive systems.

“Our IVEWS engineers went above and beyond to make sure the entire spectrum of EW was covered on the first day, not an upgrade later on. Nobody else is doing that,” Chuck said. “We made a big investment in IVEWS up front, avoiding multiple upgrades over future years that customers would pay for later.”

Chuck knows that as a combat-experienced Air Force fighter pilot, he has full confidence when delivering a very convincing line about the dominance of IVEWS.

“Here is the system that protects pilots and ensures mission success now and in the future.”

Learn more about Northrop Grumman’s AN/ALQ-257 IVEWS – the only electronic warfare Program of Record for the U.S. Air Force F-16 fleet – and its pulse-to-pulse interoperability with the AN/APG-83 SABR AESA radar.

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