The December 2018 flight was part of a week of hastily planned exercises that would test how prepared Fighter Attack Squadron 242 was for war with North Korea. But the entire squadron, not just Resilard, had been struggling for months to maintain their basic skills. Flying a fighter jet is a highly perishable skill, but training hours had been elusive. Repairs to jets were delayed. Pleadings up the chain of command for help and relief went ignored.
“Everyone believes us to be under-resourced, under-manned,” the squadron’s commander wrote to his superiors months earlier.
And now, in perhaps the world’s most volatile theater, a Marine Corps general had ordered up a rushed set of exercises. The aviators in the air over the Pacific, investigators later found, had been given so little time to adjust their sleep schedules in order to fly at night that inside their F/A-18D Hornets that night it was as if they were legally drunk.
“Don’t have a good feeling,” Capt. James Wilson, the pilot of the second Hornet, had texted to his wife before taking off that night. “Love you.”
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