Defence Team News | Fuelling partnerships on Exercise COBRA WARRIOR
Video / December 18, 2025
Transcript
Royal Air Force Station Waddington, England
Capt Christopher Tucker
CF-18 Pilot, 425 Tactical Fighter Squadron
Gp Capt Paul Hanson
Royal Air Force, Exercise Director
Canada's objectives with Exercise COBRA WARRIOR is to participate in a multinational large force exercise. We're going to be putting up a lot of aircrafts to participate in an exercise for training with other NATO countries. We've got aircraft from the British Royal Air Force, the German Air Force, the United States Air Force and the Italian Air Force.
Canada is such a great and trusted ally of the UK and also of the whole of NATO and the fact it's got that as such a strong transatlantic connection is, is fantastic. Obviously geography is challenging, so we don't often get to train with the Canadians at all. So to have them across at one of our largest exercises has been brilliant. The fact that Canada has come across with its own air-to-air refuelling asset has really, really enabled so much more of the training. And the F-18 with this new e-scan radar upgrade has performed really, really well and has become a lynchpin of everything that we've attempted to do in a training environment.
I found it quite rewarding participating in this exercise. I'm relatively new to the CF-18 and so just come over here and participate in a large force exercise with all these other countries, 60 aircraft in the air at the same time. I think it's a great validation of the training that we get to be able to integrate seamlessly with them.