Pacific Air Force Public Affairs

Tech. Sgt. Andrea Posey

RAAF Tindal, Australia —

Interoperability is defined as the ability of military groups to operate in conjunction with each other. When it comes to putting together a 22 day exercise with 20 participating nations, over 140 aircraft, and upwards of 4000 personnel a lot of international teamwork comes into play.

For Exercise Pitch Black 2024 interoperability is vital to the successful accomplishment of future joint, multinational endeavors.

“We’re out here to test our interoperability and integration with numerous Allies and partners in this awesome airspace that Pitch Black has built for us,” said U.S. Air Force F-22A Raptor pilot “Faux.” “We’re going to be executing dogfighting, offensive counter and defensive counter measures to test that interoperability integration and get some great lessons learned from each other.”

Pitch Black is the latest in long standing, multilateral exercises designed to enhance participating countries’ air operations. For the fighter pilots it’s a time to learn from each other and exchange ideas and techniques.

“What I’m learning from these other countries is a new perspective on flying with their unique and diverse backgrounds and their air forces,” Faux said. “When you see a whole new jet that you’ve never flown against before it is one of the most exhilarating experiences I can imagine out there. Then afterwards getting to sit and talk with the other pilots in the other countries and hear what they saw versus what we saw and what we all thought was going on is really cool.”

For U.S. Air Force F-22A Raptor pilot “Dodge,” the best thing about being an instructor during Pitch Black is witnessing young pilots figure out how to work in this unique environment against new aircraft.

“Seeing our guys have the desire to improve and figure out how they can take those lessons forward has really been an awesome experience because I can see over the next two weeks they’re going to try to be the very best they can,” Dodge said. “They don’t want to let themselves down, nor do they want to let their country down as we go into these fights.”

This the first time the F-22A has participated in this exercise presenting many countries with the opportunity to not only see the fighter jet in the air for the first time but fly and integrate with them.

“The F-22 is an important asset to bring out to Pitch Black because it is the first fifth generation fighter,” Dodge said. “We have unique capabilities that the F-35s and other platforms don’t have. We’re going to use that combined team with everybody’s capabilities in order to maximize our potential to win and meet our mission objectives.”

According to Faux, it’s important to bring fifth generation aircraft out to Australia to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific.

“It demonstrates our aircraft’s unique performance capabilities and the advantage and value added that we bring to mission planning,” Faux said. “It also shows we can move jets thousands of miles across the world and execute high-end training in large force exercises and employ with countries that we don’t get to work with every day in a unique and challenging training environment in a very different part of the world than we’re used to operating in.”

For Dodge, the biggest value of training in this exercise is the many different countries participating which includes Australia, Singapore, Italy, Indonesia, India, Japan, UK, France, Germany, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Spain, Brunei, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Canada, and Timor Leste.

“It’s very rare to have such a multinational exercise with this many countries,” Dodge said. “This is an opportunity for everybody to showcase their best capabilities and figure out how we can stack those capabilities up in order to essentially maximize how we’re going to achieve our combined goals. And we have the unique opportunity to see how other mobility, tankers, maintenance and support personnel also work together and what lessons learned we can get from that and what we can share with them as well.”

In the end pilots also feel that the relationships they build these next few weeks is a vital aspect of the exercise.

“The most important thing about Pitch Black and why this really matters is ultimately the relationships that we are building with the other countries,” Faux said. “This is one of the very few opportunities we’ll ever have to shake hands with other pilots, maintainers and support personnel from other countries all over the world. We’re going to never forget this experience. Those relationships will last forever.”