TIE pilot



TIE pilots served the Imperial Navy by piloting the various TIE starfighters.

The pilots wore black uniforms and a black helmet and life support ches piece with breather tubes to provide necessary gases.

An elite corps, only 10 percent of TIE pilots successfully navigated the intense training and testing of the Imperial Navy. Drawing from the graduates of Imperial academies, the fleet conditioned their best prospects to be fanatically loyal to the Emperor and willing to sacrifice their lives to complete their assigned missions. To engrain the concept of placing mission and Empire above self, TIE pilots' names were replaced with identification numbers and were subjected to continual reminders of their craft's lack of ejection seat, integrted life support sytsem and deflector shields.

The need of the Galactic Empire to recruit and train pilots suggests that either few clone trooper pilots survived the Clone Wars, that the needs of the Imperial Navy rapidly outgrew the supply of clone pilots, or both.