Most Beautiful Revolutionary Soldier of the New Era | Bu Jiawen, Commander of a Flight Battalion of an Air Force Aviation Unit: Battling the Skies, Writing a Trail of Victory
Climbing into the cockpit, putting on the helmet, fastening the seatbelt… With a series of fluid, practiced movements, Bu Jiawen, commander of a flight battalion of an Air Force aviation unit, taxied his fighter aircraft toward the runway and began another round of flight training.
Ten years ago, Bu Jiawen was already shining in the spotlight — among his cohort of pilots, he set multiple records: the first to solo, the first to complete conversion training on a third-generation aircraft, the first to assume combat readiness duty, and the first to fly a long-range diversion landing on the plateau.
"Some people say pilots need to be 'bold.' The way I understand the path to victory is precisely the opposite — 'timid' — always cautious, always sharp." Countless takeoffs and landings have left Bu Jiawen with an enduring reverence for the sky and a careful respect for the battlefield.
Over those ten years, his assignments changed several times, but his original aspiration to fly in pursuit of combat never wavered. As a squadron commander, he took the lead in deeply mining the technical and tactical performance of new equipment and boldly ventured into the "uncharted territory" of tactics verification. When transferred to serve as a flight instructor, he meticulously refined combat procedures and gave full play to his role as a "seed." After taking up the battalion commander post, he led the way in studying and planning for war and took point on dangerous and difficult missions, personally developing dozens of elite pilots.
In recent years, the battalion welcomed dual-enrollment pilots jointly cultivated by the Air Force and several well-known universities. Bu Jiawen innovated his instructional approach, handing control of the front cockpit to young pilots while he sat in the rear cockpit as an "observer." When problems arose, he encouraged everyone to boldly put forward tactical concepts, tempering their capacity for independent judgment and on-the-spot decision-making. When young pilots asked why he did not simply give them the answers, he replied: "Without independent thinking, you cannot find the direction for improvement."
After one system-of-systems confrontation exercise concluded, Bu Jiawen organized key personnel to conduct a "brainstorming" session around critical metrics, repeatedly refining tactical maneuvers against flight data and exploring how to leverage "digital-intelligence" (数智) advantages to improve training effectiveness. As soon as the discussion ended, he led the team airborne to verify the operational effectiveness of the new tactics.
Ten years of hard flying, tempered into steel. The trail of victory Bu Jiawen has traced across the open sky is not only the growth trajectory of a single pilot — it is a vivid footnote to the new-era revolutionary soldier's mission of strengthening the military and serving the nation. Every time he takes to the air, it points directly toward the future battlefield; every leg of every flight carries with it the mission of winning wars.