Jet Set

It’s easy to see that the flight suits aren’t just about shtick and selfies. As our group of 21 files into the glass-walled briefing room for our training session, people who were total strangers 15 minutes ago are already chatting amiably. There is something about everyone being identically attired that creates a certain bond between us, and as Kobi Regev, The Squadron’s founder, later tells me, having CEOs and their employees all wearing the same thing is a great equalizer, one that fosters team building.

The easy mood continues as The Squadron’s general manager, Ariel Brikman, a former IAF F-16 pilot and commander with 40 years of flight experience to his credit, strides confidently to the front of the room. His tough Israeli vibe is offset by a dry sense of humor that keeps everyone engaged from the moment he starts our preflight briefing.

Brikman explains The Squadron’s vision and how it can inspire personal, organizational, and corporate excellence. We spend some time discussing the importance of learning from previous experiences, a lesson that applies equally to fighter pilots and businesses of all kinds, with Brikman relating that even disasters can be rife with teachable moments. Then, our introduction completed, Brikman moves ahead into the hands-on part of our workshop, asking if anyone in the room has any experience flying a fighter jet, a question that elicits loud laughter.

“It takes three years to learn how to fly an F-35,” intones Brikman with a smile. “You will do it in 15 minutes.”

The next quarter of an hour passes by in a blur, as Brikman takes us through a “For Dummies” version of flying an F-35. He warns us that our choices will be flying “fast” or “extremely fast,” requiring us to make decisions and perform at top speeds, all while adapting to a new environment. The terms “stick,” “throttle,” “pitch,” and “roll” take on all-new meanings; nothing is simple or intuitive here, not even doing something as basic as changing direction. While commercial airliners make the kind of turns we’re all accustomed to in our cars, fighter jets take a different approach, tilting completely to one side until one wing is pointing straight down at the ground, and then leveling off so that they are parallel to the ground again once they are headed in their desired direction.

“The reason we do it ninety degrees is because unlike a commercial jet, there’s no one here in the back of our aircraft having his coffee…” Brikman explains, miming a cup of coffee spilling all over the floor. We all laugh, and I remind myself that it’s just a simulator, and the floor is only a few inches away.

The mission that Brikman outlines for our brief ten minutes on the simulator sounds like something out of a video game. After taking off in our F-35As from Las Vegas and flying to nearby Lake Mead, our goal will be to make our way through a series of gates, colored shapes of varying sizes that are hovering over the water. Big green squares are worth 25 points, yellow circles are worth 50 points, and red rings are worth 75 points, with a special green gate positioned atop a boat sailing along Lake Mead potentially adding a whopping 150 points to our totals, providing we can clear it without crashing. I send myself a mental note: Don’t even bother trying, that gate is clearly above your pay grade.

As if hearing my thoughts, Brikman confirms my feelings of self-doubt.

“Gamers usually do very, very well,” he tells us, “while perfectionists typically learn at a slower pace.”

I gulp, knowing which of those two categories I fall into. Somehow, the odds of me meeting the mission’s 300-point minimum goal without crashing more than twice just don’t seem quite as likely as they did when I first donned my olive-green coveralls.

In the last few moments of our training session, Brinkman advises us to take risks and not to fall into the trap of playing it safe, telling us our simulators are programmed to bounce us up into the sky when we crash. My mind catches that nuance. “When you crash.” Not if you crash, when you crash.

Being granted permission to crash is pretty liberating, and Brikman tells us to relax and have fun while we’re up there. Still, my earlier reserves of self-assurance have disappeared faster than a charcuterie board at a kiddush.

Good thing this is only a simulator, right?

Up in the Air

The Squadron’s simulators are located in two separate rooms, and since we are a largish bunch, we split up into groups. I head down one of the runways (I mean hallways) to a round room whose perimeter is lined with simulators. It’s dark in the room; the only lights are coming from the hallway we just left, and of course, the glow emanating from the simulators’ large wrap-around screens. I count ten simulators, and we scatter around the room as some of The Squadron’s junior staff start helping people into the cockpits. As the first members of our group don headsets and pull back on their simulators’ throttles, the view on their screens changes from a runway to a cloudless blue Nevada sky, a red dot on the horizon showing them their current trajectory.

That doesn’t look too hard, I think to myself. You can totally do this.

Buoyed with a renewed confidence, I stand next to an empty simulator, reminding myself that the words “Danger: Ejection Seat” are just another decor element intended to enhance the experience. Re’ut, another member of The Squadron team, comes over to help me into my cockpit, handing me my headphones and sliding my seat forward so that my knees are practically touching the instrument panel in front of me. There are switches and dials everywhere I look, and I can’t decide which looks more intimidating: a cluster of black, yellow, and white diagonal lines surrounding a dial bearing the word “jettison,” or a plain red button that is simply marked “stop.”

I deliberately avoid looking at the digital display filled with colorful outlines, numbers, and words like “BOMB-C,” “G-LIMIT,” and “TRIM RESET,” which I know are there to add authenticity to the experience. Brikman had been clear that the simulator’s only operational controls are the throttle and the flight control stick. I replay his instructions in my head: Pull back on the throttle, and when the speed hits 160 knots (just over 184 miles per hour), the laws of physics will have the F-35 taking effortlessly to the sky.

I put my left hand down on the stick and pull back, expecting to see the black and white lines bisecting the center of the runway disappearing quickly under my F-35 as it roars toward takeoff.

But that’s not what happens. Instead, my runway disappears and I see buildings in front of me, as well as a few cars. Is that the control tower? An airplane hangar? And why are they there instead of my runway? Thankfully, my fighter jet isn’t moving at all, so I probably won’t make history by crashing into the airport without even making it off the ground. Re’ut appears magically at my elbow, pointing at my left hand.

“That’s the stick,” she tells me. “You need to pull back on the throttle, on the other side.”

Just slightly mortified at having turned around instead of taking off, I can only hope that none of our group members are standing behind me and witnessing my ineptitude. With Re’ut’s help, the runway appears in front of me once again, and I put my hand down on the throttle for real this time and pull it back. My F-35 starts hurtling down the runway until I am (omigosh, omigosh!) airborne and I am rewarded with images of the beige sands of the Mojave Desert below me, as a blissful blue sky beckons invitingly ahead. The euphoria of having actually taken off is diminished somewhat by a jumble of numbers overlaid on the screen, presumably indicating my speed, altitude, and a zillion other important details. I have no idea what most of them mean, but Re’ut encourages me to just focus on the little red dot that is dead center on the horizon and to ignore everything else, at least for now.

The first batch of gates appears in front of me, and I make it through one of them, albeit with some help from Re’ut. There are plenty more green squares for me to conquer as I get to Lake Mead, and I keep Brikman’s words playing on repeat in my head — “Roll 90 degrees and then level off” — as I make my way through the gate, but the maneuver isn’t going well for me. The images on the screen that wraps around my cockpit dip side to side in some kind of crazy dance that has Lake Mead’s waters appearing first to my left, then to my right, and then even on top of me, which probably isn’t a good thing.

Sky on top!! I yell at myself. Sky goes over you, not under you!

You know that feeling when your chicken soup is boiling over, the smoke detector is going off, the landline and your cell phone are both ringing at the same time, one kid is crying while another one has a gushing nosebleed, and you literally have no idea what you need to do first? That pretty much sums up my ten minutes on the simulator. My hands aren’t responding fast enough to the instructions that my brain is firing off, and I can’t seem to keep up with my F-35’s voracious appetite for speed, because there are so many new concepts here.

For a split second, I wonder if I should be spending more time playing video games to boost my eye-hand coordination and my response times, but then I snap back to looking for more gates and focusing on flying through them. I hear the words “pull up, pull up,” coming through my headset on multiple occasions as I get too close to the water, just in time to save my $100 million jet.

Sidling over to my simulator, Omer, another staff member, sees my progress (or lack thereof) and offers a helpful suggestion. “Maybe just try for the green gates and forget about the yellow and red ones,” he advises. His advice feels kind of like getting a chesed laugh for a joke that falls flat, but I can understand why it makes sense to find the easy targets and skip the ones whose proximity to the water require a level of skill that I clearly don’t possess.

I would love to be able to tell you that I managed to get the hang of my F-35 and figured out how to get through all those gates, but I would be lying. I’m disappointed when my flight time ends, and as my simulator shuts down, there’s good news and bad: I made it through eight green gates, two yellows, and one red for a total score of 375 points, but my three crashes exceeded the allowed limit for our mission. I utter a silent prayer that I am not the lowest scorer in the group, and am relieved to see seeing someone else ending their flight with fewer points than me. The good feeling dissipates a minute later though, when someone else across the room completes her mission with a total of 950 points and zero crashes.

“You’re a natural,” I tell her laughingly. “Looks like you could have a career as a fighter pilot.”

Me? I’m thinking that maybe I shouldn’t quit my day job.

Mission: Possible

Kobi Regev, The Squadron’s founder, currently a brigadier general in reserves and the former commander of two F-16 squadrons, is on-site for his monthly visit. He tells me about the process of fulfilling his dream to draw on his decades of experience in the Israeli Air Force to create a model for businesses to cultivate a culture of excellence. Clad in an official Squadron windbreaker with his name embroidered in white, Regev fits the image of a miliary man to a T. He looks far younger than his 57 years, and his approachable vibe doesn’t match the stiff profile I’d envisioned. The fact that he’s a classical pianist who at one point in time was one of Israel’s top ten pianists only makes him more intriguing.

After officially retiring from his career as a fighter pilot with 32 years of experience under his flight suit some nine years ago, Regev spent a year working in several defense-related technology companies, as well as the air force industry, but his heart was elsewhere. He firmly believed that the tools elite pilots employed in their high-stress and even higher stake missions transcended the military and were equally applicable in the business world

“I had always said that what makes the Israeli Air Force so special is its organizational culture, and the tools that really allow people to excel — the way they do debriefings, how they work as a team, the decision-making process, how they lead and execute and plan — and I wanted to pass those tools along,” says Regev. One morning, he woke up, and turning to his wife Idmit, he announced that the time had come to bring to life an idea that had been percolating in his mind for more than 15 years — to use flight simulators and military expertise as the ultimate business tool.

The words pop out of my mouth before I can stop them.

“And she told you you were crazy, right?” I guess.

Apparently, I have completely underestimated Idmit, who urged her husband to follow his dreams. Both Regevs quit their jobs and dove full-time into bringing The Squadron to life. It was a half-year-long effort that involved creating a business plan, raising capital, and building a high-tech facility from the ground up, a process that included modifying eleven flight simulators ordered from Europe for civilian use.

“I slept two hours each night,” recalls Regev. “My heart was pounding for six months, and I know how to handle stress.”

In 2018, The Squadron opened to the public in Tel Aviv. It was the epitome of a family business: Idmit worked the reception desk, Regev was doing the preflight briefings and postflight debriefings, while sons Ilay, Itai and Alon (all teens or preteens at the time) joined him in assisting visitors on the flight simulators. It didn’t take long for the concept to take off, and over the next four years, nearly 1,800 companies availed themselves of The Squadron’s proprietary methodology for acquiring personal and organizational excellence, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Google. In 2022, The Squadron welcomed its first visitors to its US location, on the 10th floor offices of the rebuilt World Trade Center, located in the heart of Lower Manhattan’s financial district.

From Play Station to Aviator Nation

Regev is understandably proud of The Squadron. Its Manhattan location is home to the world’s largest flight simulator center, with double the number of flight simulators than any other location on the planet, and it is the only place where civilians can fly F-35 simulators. The Squadron builds its own military-grade flight simulators, which run on Lockheed-Martin software, and while the company may be founded on a military model, none of its simulator missions involve bombs, guns, or missiles.

The Squadron’s full roster of simulations are deliberately planned to focus on navigating various challenges that are tailor-made to achieve specific goals, whether clients choose the three- or five-hour workshops, the full-day flagship experience, or the more intense leadership academy course that can span two to five days. Depending on the scenario, pilots may fly solo missions, or team members can work in tandem on linked simulators. Simulations can be experienced remotely on devices as small as a tablet or a cell phone (albeit without the cockpit experience), or live in Lower Manhattan, with two handicapped-accessible simulators ensuring that people of all abilities can participate in its missions.

On some level, my visit to The Squadron has the feel of the ultimate video game experience, and when my grandsons hear about my escapades, they jump up and down asking me to take them to pilot an F-35. But the simulator experience goes so much deeper — while it is truly amazing and totally exhilarating, it isn’t an end goal — instead it’s a key component of a quest to create a culture of excellence.

Brikman tells me about a Harvard Business School survey that polled 500 CEOs in the United States for the five skills most needed for success in the business world. The skills that ranked highest were adaptability, agility, curiosity, creativity, and resilience. Fascinatingly, those are the most essential skills for fighter pilots as well, which is why learning to master the F-35 simulator can translate into significant achievements in the business world. While The Squadron may tweak its missions to match their clients, focusing on sales for a sales team and analyzing campaigns for a marketing team, the underlying principles are pretty much the same across the board.

“We focus on many skills, but these five are the main ones,” says Brikman. “Most people have no clue how to fly, but we teach them, we send them to fly, debrief them on their mission, and discuss how to do better.”

Like in the business world, the goal at The Squadron is constant improvement. No matter how well (or poorly) someone does on the F-35, the goal is to see improvement on every simulated flight. Consequently, debriefing is such an important part of the process, because taking a deep dive into what happened in the air is the best way to define a new and improved plan for the next mission.

“The main idea here is that you cannot change the past, you just have to focus on doing better in the future,” observes Brikman.

The Squadron’s team building exercises use something called a managing cycle — defining goals, coming up with a plan, devising a backup plan, and making sure that everyone is on the same page. The process doesn’t end after a single flight in the simulator — a thorough debriefing lays the groundwork for the next mission to be even more successful.

Aiming High

The Squadron’s client list is like a who’s who in American business, with well-known names including American Express, Dell, Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, Reddit, and Samsung among the 1,700 unique visitors to its management training center, which has conducted thousands of workshops over the past three years. Law firms and representatives of the financial sector have been among the heaviest users of The Squadron, with a solid showing from real estate management companies as well.

While The Squadron prefers not to share much information about its clients, several have recorded video testimonials about their experiences on the F-35 simulator. Eran Gilad, CEO and president of Fuel Cycle, a market research cloud platform based in California, brought his team to The Squadron to focus on collaboration, teamwork, and execution.

“If you want to be a market leader, you have to work on building the right team, with the right team members, who can execute in real time, in the very agile, very complex environment that we all live in,” said Gilad, who described being able to review a previous flight and set the bar higher for the next mission as one of the best takeaways from his Squadron experience.

Those thoughts were echoed by former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, who relished the idea of giving people wings to fly, quite literally, as a means of achieving excellence. It’s “not just the exhilaration of flying and how cool it is to control an aircraft,” observes Massimino, “but what you learn while you’re doing it and what you learn about yourself after.”

Given the strong Israeli vibe at The Squadron, I ask Regev if the rise in anti-Israel sentiment has in any way slowed things down at the facility. Regev tells me that he hasn’t seen any backlash since October 7, although he has been careful to portray the company as an American entity.

“We have US pilots, there are flags of the US, and we are fully American,” says Regev. “What’s going on in Israel is a challenge, but we try to keep Israel out of the center…. [F]or now, it’s smarter to keep a low profile.”

In fact, Regev is looking ahead to The Squadron taking off in new locations, with a Las Vegas facility open soon, and Madrid and London on the company’s European to-do list.

“The Squadron is… bringing a new training concept for the world of core skills, and we believe it’s relevant all around the world,” says Regev. “We’ve just started, and we have big ambitions.”

Regev doesn’t hesitate when I ask him if he finds that there is one particular skill set that is his clients are most commonly aiming to develop.

“The debriefing and continuous improvement mechanism,” says Regev. “We see the lack in a lot of companies, even in successful ones, where people keep repeating mistakes.”

Excellence isn’t about complacency, Regev notes, it’s about continuing to set the bar higher and higher. “You might be number one in the market today, but without continuous improvement mechanisms in your organization, in two years you will be number five,” warns Regev.

Regev shares how debriefing turned out to be a transformational tool for the IAF, drastically slashing its fighter jet crash totals.

“Thirty years ago, we lost 25 aircraft a year,” he says. “We didn’t have debriefing methodologies, but once we put on the VTR — a video recorder — in the aircraft, [it]… gave us the ability to analyze and reflect. We developed the methodology and culture for debriefing, which allowed us to reduce the number of annual crashes to almost zero.”

Could the debriefing process really be that valuable? I was more than happy to take Regev’s word for it, but I was about to find out for myself as we head back to the briefing room after my less-than-stellar flight.

Briefly Speaking

The Squadron’s briefing rooms are glass walled by design, with Regev emphasizing the importance of a space that offers complete visibility.

“We believe that to have a reflective learning experience, everything needs to be transparent,” Regev tells me. “If you make a mistake, put it on the table and deal with it openly. Don’t hide anything. Keeping everything transparent really allows the effective learning mechanism to flourish.”

After a simulation that involved three crashes, and barely making the 300-point goal, I have plenty of mistakes to put on the proverbial table.

Brikman starts the debriefing by posting a chart on his smartboard that shows our scores and, thank You Hashem, while I am near the bottom, I’m not the low man on the totem pole. Scanning the names on the smartboard and the faces in the room, I realize that between me, the three guys in yarmulkes, and the many Israeli names on the chart, half the people in our group are Jewish. I can’t help but smile as I see that our leaderboard’s high scorer is Yisi Fehler, a Chabadnik from Crown Heights, whose total of 2125 was nearly six times higher than my paltry showing. Taking second place? His older brother.

While I would have assumed that our short debriefing session would focus on the underperformers among us, Brikman turns his attention to Fehler, who is clearly our ace pilot. Yes, Fehler tells Brikman, he is a gamer, and he later tells me that his company, TorahVR, creates educational virtual reality simulations of Jewish history and Tanach. Both those factors explain how Fehler managed to top the leaderboard by such a significant margin.

Congratulating Fehler on his success and jokingly offering him a job as a fighter pilot, Brikman pulls up video footage of his flight on the smartboard. The simulator’s video recorder gives us all the opportunity to watch Fehler gliding effortlessly through the sky and gracefully maneuvering his F-35 through a multitude of gates. While it is clear to everyone that Fehler had mastered our mission, Brikman challenges him on several of his in-flight decisions. After all, The Squadron is all about cultivating excellence, which means that every decision, good or bad, can become a valuable learning experience.

The first item on Brikman’s agenda? Fehler’s deliberate focus on snagging the top prize — the elusive 150 point gate. While Fehler explains that he knew that he had the skill to get that gate, Brikman questions that approach, drawing the obvious parallel to the corporate world.

“You were chasing the most valuable target, the largest deal you can close, but there were many small deals you decided to ignore,” says Brikman. The lesson here is clear — whether flying through gates on a flight simulator or running a business, several smaller wins can be worth more than one large score, no matter how enticing that bigger target may seem.

Brikman also takes Fehler to task for not taking enough risks, reminding us all that crashes were an expected part of our mission.

“Nobody likes to crash, but just realize that we never know what we are capable of until we try, and if you don’t try, you’re never going to know,” says Brikman, offering up another valuable nugget of business advice.

Brikman reminds us of the importance of appreciating everything we did, whether right or wrong, and not to waste time or energy on things we could have done but didn’t. Instead, he counsels us to come up with specific action items for our next opportunity, whether a flight, a project, or a deal.

“It’s not about what you say,” Brikman tells us. “It’s about what you do. And if you want to be number one, you need to do better every day.”

Do those words make me feel better about coming in with a score that is less than half of our group average? They actually do, and I find myself appreciating the concept of a culture where mistakes are seen as a mechanism for improvement, which, all in all, is pretty encouraging.

The Sky’s the Limit

While groups that come to The Squadron follow up their debriefing with another simulator mission and new goals, my fellow wannabe pilots and I are done for the day with our mini workshop. We place our flight suits in special bins so that they can be washed, dried, and hung up neatly in size order for the next group, and we make our way back from The Squadron’s 10th floor offices to the lobby.

As I inch my way through Manhattan’s ever-present traffic and head north on the highway to home sweet home, I can’t help but wonder what I could do to up my score if I ever have another turn on the simulator, a thought that leaves me smiling. After all, isn’t not being content with the status quo and challenging yourself to do better what The Squadron is all about?

Maybe all those flight instructions were a lot to handle in a short amount of time, but the takeaways are very real and very practical. Set priorities. Create goals. Make changes. Learn from every experience. And always strive for excellence. To me, that sounds like a doable mission.

And you don’t even need to put on a flight suit to make it happen.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)