This article profiles Captain Stephen Kane, one of only two Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) pilots to fly the F-22 Raptor and the only Canadian currently embedded in a U.S. fifth-generation fighter squadron. His experiences provide unique insights into the future of Canadian fighter aviation as the RCAF prepares for the CF-35A Lightning II, sharing both his adaptation to the advanced aircraft and the value of his Canadian perspective within the U.S. Air Force.
Republished with permission from the author. Originally published in MHM: RCAF Today 2024 by Chris Thatcher
Riding the Raptor
On exchange with the U.S. Air Force, Capt Stephen Kane is the only RCAF pilot currently flying a fifth-gen fighter jet. By Chris Thatcher
In 2026, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) will begin sending the initial cadre of its fighter pilots to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona to start training on the CF-35A Lightning II. Until then, only a few active Canadian pilots can claim to know what its like to fly a fifth-generation fighter.
“It’s cool to get a preview of what that’s going to look like,” acknowledged Captain Stephen Kane as he settled in for an interview earlier this year.
A West Coast native, Kane is one of just two RCAF pilots to fly the F-22 Raptor, and the only one currently on exchange with a fifth-generation fighter squadron—the 525th Fighter Squadron, known as the Bulldogs, in Alaska.
“It’s worth getting excited about what’s coming to Canada,” he mused.
“I really enjoyed flying the CF-18, and there are a lot of similarities—it felt like a very intuitive shift just based on how the Hornet is designed and built. But the Raptor takes everything to the next level in terms of thrust, manoeuverability, the capability of the sensors and the weapons—it’s definitely jumping from a fourth- to a fifth-gen fighter.”
Like many RCAF fighter pilots, Kane went through the training pipeline in Portage la Prairie, Man., Moose Jaw, Sask., and Cold Lake, Alta., learning on the Grob-G120A, CT-156 Harvard II, and CT-155 Hawk, before transitioning to the CF-188 Hornet at 410 Tactical Fighter Operational Training Squadron.
Posted to 409 Tactical Fighter Squadron in 2018, he gained operational experience conducting NORAD quick reaction alert (QRA) responses to Russian aircraft encroaching on North American airspace, and flying the NATO air policing mission from Romania in 2021.
Flying as an exchange officer with an F-22 squadron was not on his radar. “I didn’t become aware that I was even eligible for [the relatively new posting) until the end of 2021,” Kane admitted.
As a tactical instructor, though, he had a skillset sought by the U.S. Air Force for the position. Kane had completed the tactical instructor upgrade course and had sufficient experience teaching tactics, and how to employ them as a wingman or as the lead of a formation, to newer members of 409 Squadron. He was one of several pilots with the relevant knowledge, and felt fortunate when he was selected after an interview with members of the fighter force leadership.
In April 2023, he landed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on the northern edge of Anchorage to complete the “non-flying” paperwork, before departing for the 325th Training Support Squadron at Tyndall Air Force Base (AFB) on the Florida panhandle for three months of simulator and academic training. From there, it was on to Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, for a month of flying the F-22, before returning to Alaska for tactical qualification.
Though a generational leap in technology from the Hornet, Kane felt “relatively at home in the F-22 pretty quickly.” That was, until it came time to land the fighter for the first time.
“I realized that I was flying alone in this airplane without anybody,” he explained. “I had spent five and a half years flying a carrier-designed airplane and landing it accordingly. Now I’ve got an Air Force designed aircraft [intended] to land only on land. So, back to flaring the jet, judging roundout height, and all those sorts of things. There’s nobody there to help you figure it out the first time. But the training was certainly sufficient to prepare me—that jet is still in one piece.”
The distinctions in landing gear aside, Kane said the most obvious difference as he adjusted to the F-22 cockpit was the far greater thrust in gravitational (G) force. “The Raptor, especially in basic fighter manoeuvres in the visual arena, has got nine Gs available to it a lot of time, and it’s got the thrust to stay up at those higher Gs. That was very noticeable.”
As Canadian squadrons will soon discover, a stealth fighter comes with much greater security and secrecy. There are “some nuances in that area” that affect how he operates, Kane acknowledged, “but the overall intent is for me to be able to serve fully as a Raptor pilot. So I’ve found the procedures and protocols surrounding all of that are robust, and they allow me to do my job and respect the security procedures of the U.S. Air Force.”
In fact, although there were some “translation things” such as terminology he had to learn as the new guy on squadron, Kane has been fully accepted into the 525th.
“It’s all very similar to being on a Canadian fighter squadron,” he said. “I’m basically integrated into the squadron as a line pilot, just like I would have been on a Canadian fighter squadron. I have essentially all the same duties and I go through all the same upgrades.
At the time of the interview, he had about 30 hours of flight time on the F-22. He had recently completed mission qualification training, the equivalent to the RCAF’s combat ready upgrades, and was anticipating an eventual move into tactical leadership upgrades for two- and then four-ship formations.
“I basically go through those first years of a Raptor career just like any other Raptor pilot would,” he explained. “A lot of tactical standards are slightly different, but for the most part you’ve got to qualify physiologically to fly the airplane. In my case, that was the centrifuge. I had never pulled nine Gs in the Hornet, so I had to do a nine-G centrifuge, which was quite the event.”
When Kane arrived in Alaska, the 525th Squadron had weeks earlier completed a five-month deployment to Kadena Air Base in Japan. Where the squadron is assigned next had yet to be determined, but as a newly mission qualified pilot, he recognized he could be among those deployed.
“We’ve seen lots of Western coalition aircraft throughout the Indo-Pacific and Eastern Europe,” he noted. “I don’t know specifically where this squadron will be going next, but the Raptor could be deployed to a series of locations.”
Until then, any operational flying will likely be QRA from the Alaskan NORAD region, a mission with which Kane is very familiar. “I sat lots of days holding alert in Cold Lake and throughout the Canadian NORAD region. The idea is that I integrate into the Alaska NORAD region just the same as I did from Canada. As a Hornet pilot, I even flew with Raptors from Alaska on NORAD missions up in the Arctic.”
Much of what he is learning tactically and operationally applies to the F-22, Kane explained, but there is an expectation he will return to the RCAF fighter force “with a holistic understanding of how fifth-generation aircraft do the job.”
“A lot of things are Raptor specific, and that is not going to be terribly useful to an F-35 fleet,” he said. “[But] fifth-gen tactics were born on the Raptor—this is where it all started—and I think it’s valuable for Canada to have some of those insights as we move into our own fifth-gen fleet. How the U.S. Air Force fights fifth-gen war and how Canada fits into that is valuable, especially the NORAD role as we’re right there doing the same job.”
Kane’s contribution to the 525th and the U.S. Air Force is perhaps more nuanced. There’s no shortage of fourth-generation aircraft combat experience across its squadrons, and the USAF is already well down the road to what comes after the F-35—it recently down-selected five companies for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. But a Canadian perspective can go a long way to a shared understanding, he noted.
“Every country does fighter aviation slightly differently, even though most of our allies do it in a similar way. I [might] notice things and ask questions because we don’t do something that specific way in Canada, and it gives them another perspective to look at what they’re doing,” he said.
“We’re two countries that [fight] alongside each other, so for me it is learning how they do business and making sure that we both understand what that could look like in the fifth-gen realm. Ultimately, it’s a huge privilege to be invited here to do this.”