 It's a rush. Your heart's pumping, especially if it's for real. Drenaline's definitely pumping as you're running out to the airplane and you're going through your checks and getting airborne. I wonder what might be actually out there on the other end of that intercept. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Todd Pearson. I'm the commander of the 493rd Fighter Squadron from RAF Lakinheath. We're here at Kefalvic Air Station in Iceland to conduct the Icelandic Air Policing Mission. The F-15 was built from the beginning with the ability to kind of sit alert for being able to sit with the airplane ready to go fight. Right away. So prior to being able to run out here and just jump in, you go through a series of checks to make sure everything works right. You set everything up in certain ways so that you can jump in and everything is ready to go. Everything's kind of pre-stage and pre-aligned. So as soon as you put power on the airplane, you get the both motors fired up. Everything is kind of coming online, aligning itself, timing in and you are ready to go. Any time we can be called in and we're ready to go, we know how these jets are. We know that they're prepared. We trust them so that when we get out here, we can just launch them out. No questions asked and we know that it's really good to go. It's awesome because you get to really feel the rush of like alert mentions. You're always training and practicing, but now that you're doing real life, usually it's sense of purpose and helps everyone to learn. Not only that, but it gives our airmen a chance to feel that sensation of doing something for someone. Not just our country, but we're helping out other countries now, you know. It gives new people that haven't done this before a different experience. It gives them more knowledge of how things would go in the real world because then we could take it back to our home base, you know. And they could teach other airmen how we're practicing here and how it's going. You always want to train the person below you, how you want to be, but they want to be better than you. All should be better than you. Everyone always tries to be equal. I think you should always be better. Iceland itself doesn't have a military, but they do have a coast guard and they've got some pretty fantastic facilities for monitoring an air picture. And primarily from their vantage point, it's a search and rescue type operation. But when the Icelandic Air Policing mission goes on, we integrate that into a full mission center and we bring in other assets. We've got Estonians here and members from Aviano that provide kind of that command and control aspect for us, as well as linking back to one of the NATO chaos back in mainland Europe. And that team comes together with the opposite maintenance team here to get airplanes into the sky and intercept anything that's coming at us.