At 13, Dave Berke watched “Top Gun” and decided he wanted to become a fighter pilot. Decades later, he was teaching at the real TOPGUN school and had flown in the cockpits of four of the most capable fighters ever fielded by the US military.
He flew combat missions from aircraft carriers, served as a forward air controller in Iraq, taught strike-fighter tactics at TOPGUN, and eventually became the first operational commander to fly the Marine Corps’ F-35B.
Over the course of his career, Berke piloted the F/A-18 Hornet, F-16 Fighting Falcon, F-22 Raptor, and F-35B Lightning II, and estimates he accumulated about 3,000 flight hours.
“I’m pretty sure no one else has flown those four jets,” Berke said of his time in uniform. “During my time in my career, I was definitely the luckiest guy.”
After spending 23 years as a Marine Corps fighter pilot before retiring in 2017, Berke says each aircraft excelled in different ways, but one still stands apart from the rest.
The Raptor is hard to beat
Berke said people often ask him which fighter was his favorite. “The short, easy answer is the F-22 Raptor is a unique aircraft,” he said. “Getting to fly that was amazing, and it really doesn’t have a real equal in the world that it operates.”
However, he was careful not to dismiss the other planes he flew.
The F/A-18 was Berke’s first operational fighter and the aircraft he flew the most. He described it as his “first love,” praising its versatility as a fighter and attack aircraft capable of performing nearly every mission in the Navy and Marine Corps arsenal.
The F-16, which he began flying as a TOPGUN instructor, offered more power and performance than the Hornet and served as the aircraft that ultimately helped qualify him for an exchange program flying the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor.
The F-35, meanwhile, changed the way he thought about air combat altogether. Rather than emphasizing speed or maneuverability, the aircraft’s strength lies in its ability to collect, fuse, and share information. Flying the F-35 convinced Berke that future warfare will be defined by information dominance and situational awareness.
Still, out of all four aircraft, the F-22 impressed him most. He described the Raptor as a jet with “no real equal,” pointing to its speed, stealth, thrust-vectoring engines, and ability to perform maneuvers that seemed to “defy the laws of physics.”
The moment he realized the F-22 was different
Berke vividly remembers his first flight in the F-22.
At the time, he had already accumulated years of experience in the F/A-18 and F-16. He arrived at Tyndall Air Force Base as the first Marine selected to fly the aircraft.
“The way it felt, the way it sounded, the way it moved, it was very obvious this was unlike anything I’d ever flown,” Berke said. “I fell in love with that jet from the second I climbed into that thing.”
What impressed him most was the aircraft’s maneuverability.
The F-22’s thrust-vectoring engines allow pilots to point the aircraft in ways that conventional fighters cannot. Berke described performing maneuvers that would be impossible in the F/A-18 or F-16.
“The first time you get a sense of what we call the super maneuverability of the Raptor,” he said, “you just can’t do that in a fourth-generation airplane.”
The aircraft combines that maneuverability with stealth, powerful sensors, and extraordinary speed. According to Berke, the result is a fighter that feels fundamentally different from anything that came before it.
“Once you feel that, you really get a sense from the cockpit this is a different machine from anything I ever flew before or after,” he said. “There’s just nothing like the Raptor.”
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