Trevor "Hoover" Smith

I'm a retired F-15E Strike Eagle pilot and current First Officer for a major US-based commercial airline. I founded Pilot Debrief in 2020 to do one thing: take the way fighter pilots learn from mistakes and bring it to general aviation. I have over 5,000+ hours flying fighter jets and modern airliners. I have an Airline Transport Pilot certificate and I am a former F-15E and F-18 instructor pilot. I've spent decades running formal debriefs on combat sorties, training flights, and operational missions. That discipline became the Pilot Debrief Method. On Pilot Debrief, I review NTSB accident reports the way I'd debrief a wingman: not to assign blame, but to find the decision point where the flight could have gone differently. The Pilot Debrief YouTube channel has grown to over one million subscribers because that approach, applied to real accidents with real names and tail numbers and real consequences, gives pilots a structured way to learn from someone else's worst day. The Pilot Debrief Method, the case study archive, the Pattern newsletter, and the Pilot Debrief app all extend that same idea: a fighter pilot's debrief framework, applied to general aviation, every week. The reason why this matters is because every year, roughly 300 people die in general aviation accidents in the United States. Most of those accidents repeat patterns the NTSB has been documenting for decades. Pilots who really study those patterns, the way fighter pilots study tactics, fly safer. That's the whole bet behind Pilot Debrief.