In my day, the only video cameras we could use to film our own flying were hand-held devices. Pilots of military single-seat aircraft aren't allowed, for safety reasons, to use cameras or video recorders. If you were flying one of your unit's two-seaters, which you might do once a month or so, and you had a fellow pilot for a back-seater, maybe then ... but pilot-produced cockpit videos were a rarity, and there aren't that many good ones out there.
Until now, that is, thanks to the availability of small high definition cameras you can position here and there around the cockpit and operate hands-free. Like this cockpit video, produced by members of my old F-15 fighter wing at Kadena Air Base in Japan. Click on the image to view the video (unfortunately, dKos currently won't allow me to embed Vimeo videos, so I'm using this as a workaround):
People are always asking me what it's like to fly air-to-air combat in the Eagle. Minus actual missiles in the air, this is what it's like. This is what it looks like, this is what it sounds like. This is just what it's like. And I'm proud that pilots and airplanes from one of my former fighter squadrons, the 44th FS Vampires, are featured here, along with the 67th FS Fighting Cocks, our old Kadena rivals. There's even a shot of a 44th FS Eagle I often flew the early 1990s, the one with the mismatched paint on the radome ... you'll know it when you see it.
The only thing here that's less than realistic is the pilot's view through the HUD, the head up device. In the two brief HUD shots you see in the video the only thing showing is a standby gun reticle, not the array of performance and weapons information the pilot actually sees. That's because the USAF has classified most of the information projected onto the HUD and we can no longer share it. It may also be that with the new JHMCS (joint helmet mounted cuing system) visors most of these pilots are wearing, where weapons aiming and flight information are projected onto the visor in front of the pilot's eyes, use of the HUD is no longer necessary.
Everything else in the video is ... as I may have mentioned earlier ... just like what it's like.