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Chapter 68, “Stories That Peg Has Never Heard” #2

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If you’ve flown long enough you learn that, although all crews are “safe”, some crews are safer than others.  A mix of experienced and inexperienced crewmembers is usually best since half of the crew is watching the other half to glean knowledge from the old guys and the other half is in “instructor mode”.  It’s a dynamic mix that results in great attention to detail and enhanced alertness.  The opposite ends of the scale are where you have to be a little more careful.  It’s obvious that a crew made up of all inexperienced crewmembers could be problematic but, conversely, a crew made up of all highly experienced members can be just as tricky.  If you’re not careful it’s easy to get lured into the false security that the other guy must know what he’s doing because he’s been doing it for so long.  I know I’m preaching to the choir for you flyers out there, but I’m not sure your average layman will understand.  Anyway, I found myself on a crew made up of members that fall into the latter category.

I was, at the time, the chief of Stan/Eval.  The aircraft commander was the Wing Commander, the navigator was our highest time nav, former AATTC instructor, and the engineer was a flight examiner.  You couldn’t ask for a more experienced crew.  And, on this particular mission, for good reason.  It was after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the US was trying to cash in on the “Peace Dividend”.  Our enemy was vanquished and the world would be at peace at last.  We can see how well that worked out!  But I digress.  To meet what we saw as the new paradigm, the Army was downsizing and consolidating.  To that end, a Special Ops unit in New York was being decommissioned and we had volunteered to help in the ceremony to celebrate their long and distinguished history.  We were going to drop them on their final jump mission and then attend the formal ceremony retiring the unit.  Kind of a big deal and a lot of pressure to get the mission off on time and on target.  High visibility and lots of DVs.  The kind of scenario that can quickly go sideways.

You always hope that the weather is either beautiful or total crap.  It makes decisions easy.  Sadly, that’s rarely the case, and that morning was the worst case scenario.  The weather at the airfield was marginal, at best, with 3 miles of visibility and ceilings ragged at 1500ft.  Along the route the weather was even more questionable with limited information available.  We looked at the low level route we were scheduled to fly and decided that we could delay our takeoff for awhile, hoping the weather would improve, and shorten the route to just enough time for the jumpers to run their checks and for us to get our checklists done.  We sat down with the charts, eliminated some legs, cut off some turns, added new points and headed out to brief the jumpmaster.  There were over 40 jumpers in the back including all of the senior leadership of the unit being decommissioned.  They all wanted to be a final part of their units history.

At our scheduled departure time, the weather hadn’t improved at all.  But it was, technically, VFR so off we went, hoping for the best.  It didn’t take long for us to realize that the weather observer at the field was, shall we say, an optimist.  We almost immediately found ourselves “scud running”.  For you non-flyers, that means flying just below the bottoms of the clouds trying to stay as high above the ground as you can without popping into the clouds.  Not really legal by the regulations!  Trying to stay out of the clouds was just the tip of the iceberg.   Because we had shortened the route it meant that we had multiple checklists to run, I had to backup the nav, I had to get in contact with the Drop Zone Officer, and I had to work two other radios to advise New York center and the control tower of the progress of the drop.  We reached the IP (Initial Point, the last point before the drop) on time and, because we had shortened the route, had to make a huge 150 degree turn.  We were now 15 miles from the drop, about 5 minutes.  When we rolled out of the turn, I looked at my chart and I thought the heading on the INS was 5 or 6 degrees off of what I thought it should be.  When you make a large turn, if your angle of bank isn’t constant, it’s easy to roll out either wide or inside and that can have a large effect on your heading to the next point.  I didn’t see it as a problem and by that time I was concentrating on getting clearance to drop and worrying about what I saw ahead.

The biggest danger in scud running is if the bottoms of the clouds start getting lower or if the elevation starts rising.  You find yourself in a squeeze play and that’s what was happening the closer we got to the Drop Zone.  The Wing Commander in the left seat was concentrating on staying out of the clouds and not hitting the ground, I was trying to get the Drop Zone Officer to give me some idea of the weather ahead, and all of time we were getting closer and closer to terra firma.  We ran the slowdown checklist, lowering the flaps and opening the paratroop doors.  There were very few ground references from which to navigate, but the INS showed us right on course.  We should have seen some farms along the way, but I was only seeing more and more forest.  Finally, a mile from the drop zone, with nothing ahead but clouds and trees, I said, “Let’s get out of here, no-drop, climb!”.  The pilot started an immediate straight ahead climb and, since flaps were already at 50%, did it at 150 knots.  I began retuning the radio to New York center but was interrupted by the flight engineer who said’ “What’s up with the radar altimeter?”.  I looked down and noted that we were climbing at 500′ per minute, but the radar altimeter was decreasing rapidly through 1000′.  The terrain along the route was pretty flat and rolling and the only high terrain was 5-6 miles west of the drop zone and it was a huge sheer cliff that the locals used for parasailing.  I checked our heading.  It hadn’t changed, but instruments don’t usually lie so I pulled back on the yoke, but the throttles to the wall, and asked the AC to slow to 130 knots.  We all watched as the radar altimeter finally stopped decreasing at 168′.

It was a very quiet flight back to the airfield.  The jumpers were disappointed, but the ceremony went on.  They would have been much more disappointed if we had splattered the aircraft on the ground.  But I was still confused.  Had the radar altimeter malfunctioned or had we really been that close to the ground?  I sat down with the nav to review what had happened.  In our hurry to get the mission off on time and make the whole thing work, he had entered the wrong coordinates for the drop zone.  It was a 6 mile error which headed us directly at the massive cliff to the west.  I hadn’t checked his entries prior to takeoff like I should have and when my spider senses went off after the big turn I had ignored them because I was busy with other things.

Lots of lessons learned that day.  You need to have a clear idea of when to say, “enough is enough”.  You need to never take things for granted.  You need to trust, but verify.  You need to speak up when things are going right.  You need to listen to that “still small voice”.

Chapter 67, “Stories That Peg has never heard” #1

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…..He asked, “What’s the highest peak in the rest of the route?”, and the Navigator answered, “Just under 10,000 feet”.  “We’ll fly the rest of the route at 11,000″……

Let’s start at the beginning……..

My first operational assignment was flying B-52s.  I had graduated #2 in my class and somehow I was deluded into thinking the higher you graduated the better chance you had getting the aircraft you wanted.  The problem was that I wanted a C-130 or C-141 but I was FAR (Fighter, Attack, Recce) qualified and, unbeknownst to me, that combination set you up for the venerable B-52.  It all worked out in the end, but I found myself at the most northern of SAC’s (Strategic Air Command) southern tier bases.  Only in the Air Force would South Dakota be considered a “southern” base!

After a year in the buff my first Aircraft Commander, a crusty old LtCol, was moved to a staff job. We ended up getting a brand new, straight from upgrade, AC.  With an experienced AC you usually got the “good” deals but once you got a new guy you were stuck with the less than desirable duties.  In this case, we were doing a practice ORI (Operational Readiness Inspection) and since our new AC wasn’t fully trained yet the rest of the crew was stuck flying as safety observers.  This meant that I would sit in the instructors seat, which was no more than an aluminum box with space for size 10 boots, I wear a 13, with a parachute on my back and no ejection seat, for a 10 hour mission, at night.  But at least I was flying with the S-01 crew.  They were the number 1 crew in the wing and the “S” meant that they were a Standardization/Evaluation crew.  The creme de la creme.  I figured I could at least pick up some new techniques.

The route we were flying was a brand new route that no one in the wing had ever flown.  It snaked its’ way through Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska  and a bit of Colorado.  Three hours of low level flying 300′ above the ground at 350 miles per hour in extreme mountainous terrain.  SAC’s idea of a good time.  To truly appreciate the hazards of this type of flying you have to understand that this was long before the days of NVGs (Night Vision Goggles).  The aircraft had two cameras mounted under the nose.  A FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) and a Low light.  The Low Light was an early generation night vision system but required some pretty significant moonlight or starlight to give even a grainy image.  You could select which camera image you wanted to be presented on your screen in the cockpit.  Along with the video presentation the screen also included a ribbon radar altimeter (height above the ground), airspeed, a little cartoon airplane in the center and, what I called, the “squiggly line”.

The squiggly line was a continuously updated presentation of the highest terrain in front of you at either 3, 6, or 10 miles.  The shorter the distance the more aggressively you would fly the route.  Theoretically, if you kept the cartoon aircraft above the cartoon squiggly line you would miss the, not cartoon, mountain by 300 feet.  All of this at night, with no moon, in unfamiliar terrain.  To add to the fun on this particular night, the gyroscopic stabilization of the squiggly line was malfunctioning.  This meant that the line was totally unusable unless the aircraft was straight and level.  Good times!

Now that I’ve set up the scenario, and given you way more information than you really needed, let’s proceed with the rest of the story.  So there I was, at 1:00AM( 0100 for those in the military), sitting on the little aluminum box, parachute on my back, helmet on my head, in the mountains, a lowly 1st lieutenant, flying with the #1 crew, 300′ above the ground, 350 miles per hour, a less than stellar terrain avoidance system, peering into the blackness.  We had just crossed over a 9,000 ft mountain peak and had started a large left, descending turn into a valley.  The squiggly line was useless and, since there was no moon, the cameras showed nothing.  There was that odd silence that occurs when an entire crew is unsure of the situation.  It’s a very unnerving silence that, once you’ve flown long enough, sets off a little voice in the back of your head.  At that point, inexplicably, I did something that you normally wouldn’t do while flying low level at night, I looked up.  On the B-52 there are two windows high up in the cockpit.  They’re used during air-refueling to see the tanker.  Otherwise you rarely use them.  What I saw, through those windows, were stars but the stars ended in the blackness of the silhouette of a mountain straight ahead and thousands of feet up.  I reached forward, pushed all 8 of the throttles to the wall, pulled the yoke back into the pilots lap and screamed “Climb!”.  Once the AC realized what was happening he took control of the aircraft and all I could do was watch as the airspeed bled down to 200 knots and the radar altimeter descended through 500′, 400′, 300′, 200′ and then started climbing again after it bottomed out at 134′.  After what felt like an eternity, someone finally spoke.  It was the AC.  He asked, “What’s the highest peak in the rest of the route?”, and the Navigator answered, “Just under 10,000 feet”.  “We’ll fly the rest of the route at 11,000”.  It was a very quiet flight home.

Chapter 55 – Charlatorn

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Let’s start off with a little self-promotion.  If you live in the Pittsburgh area, or will be in the area sometime in the next month or so, here’s the latest Carnival of Souls schedule for those who appreciate Celtic music:

22 February, 8:00 – 10:00  – “565 Live”, located in beautiful downtown Bellevue, PA at 565 Lincoln Ave.  It’s a brand new venue so come out and support the local music scene.  There is a cover and, since Bellevue is “dry”, you’ll have to BYOB if you’re into that sort of thing.

2 March, 7:00 – 9:00 – Sacred Heart church on Rte 65 in Emsworth, PA.  Great Irish food.  We start playing right after evening St Patrick’s day Mass.

17 March, 7:00 – 10:00 – “Mogies” in Lower Burrell, PA, 3210 Leechburg Rd.  We’ve played there every St Patty’s Day for at least 13 years.  Reservations required. There is a cover.  724.339.6904

Hope to see some of you!!

 

For some strange reason, throughout my Air Force career, I was usually paired up with folks of, shall we say, diminutive stature.  Now it could be that, since I’m tall, lots of people seem short to me, but I think it’s a little more than that.  I’m convinced it’s either height karma or folks in leadership positions who think it’s really funny.  Either way it doesn’t really matter to me it’s just made for some odd photo ops over the years and more than one awkward situation.  Here’s one.

When I left active duty and the venerable B-52 and came home to the C-130 I, of course, had to attend school to learn the new airplane.  “New” being relative.  Off I went to beautiful Little Rock, Arkansas where generations of C-130 pilots from here, and around the world, have trained.  And it truly is an international training program.  I flew with fellow students from at least three countries including Zaire, Great Britain, and, the subject of this story, Thailand.

The Royal Thai Air Force had finally decided to retire their old C-123s and purchase a small fleet of brand new C-130s.  Now there are several ways to train your pilots in a new aircraft.  You can either send them all to school, in this case overseas, or you can just send a small cadre of your most experienced and then let them trickle down the training to everyone else back home.  The latter is usually the most economical option and that’s what the Thai’s decided to do.  Here’s where I fit into the story.

After you finish the classroom portion of the training they pair you up with another pilot for simulators and flying.  When I showed up at the school they told me that I was 20 hours short of having enough time to train directly into the left seat as an aircraft commander and that I would have to go through the school as a copilot.  I wasn’t bothered.  I was transferring to a new mission in  a new aircraft and I saw great value in sitting in the right seat and learning the ropes before being the guy responsible for everything.  Besides, I’d have to go back to Little Rock for aircraft commander upgrade and that meant more paydays.  When you’re a reserve bum it’s all about manday/payday management!  So, I finished classroom training and was introduced to my partner for the next two months.  His name was Charlatorn.

Charlatorn was going to be the first Thai pilot qualified in the C-130.  So he had been sent to Little Rock to attend every C-130 school available.  He had already been through the copilot training course and was starting the aircraft commander upgrade class after which he was going to go right into the instructor training course and finish with the flight examiner class.  All told, it was going to take over a year!  He was a great guy but, like many Thai’s, he was very short.  I’m talking 5’2″ short.  Which made reaching the rudder pedals and seeing over the dash a bit of a challenge.  They scheduled us for our simulators and I was thrilled, not really, to find out that all of our sims would be from midnight to 4:00 am.  I have never been a all nighter kind of person and I quickly learned that Charlatorn wasn’t either.  At around 2 AM he would magically forget English and revert to running checklists in Thai.  After about thirty minutes of me just guessing what he was trying to say and running the proper emergency procedure, he would just go catatonic and stare straight ahead.  For the rest of the sim I would just fly solo and react to all of the emergencies on my own.  Good times!

We finally started flying and things got even more interesting.  As long as there were no clouds my little partner did great but as soon as we entered the weather all bets were off.  He could fly on instruments if you gave him a heading, altitude, and airspeed but the subtleties of instrument approach procedures were lost to him.  After five flights our instructor recommended us for a checkride.  Frankly, I was shocked.  I took the instructor aside and expressed my doubts about the sanity of throwing Charlatorn to the Stan/Eval wolves.  He told me that in Thailand they rarely flew IMC (in the weather) they were almost exclusively fair weather fliers and all they needed Charlatorn to demonstrate was basic knowledge of instrument procedures.  And he had a plan.  He told me to finish my checkride and then to get into the navigator seat and talk Charlatorn through all of the approaches.  Tell him what heading to turn to,  what altitude to maintain, what descent rate to set, what airspeed to fly, when to lower the flaps, when to lower the landing gear, when to look out the window and land, and run all of the checklists for him.  So that’s what I did.  It was like flying a voice controlled airplane.  We flew procedure turns.  Entered the holding pattern.  Flew an ILS.  And he wired everything I told him to do.  After we were complete and taxiing in, the flight examiner, who hadn’t said a word through Charlatorn’s entire checkride, turned to me and said, “Nice job, you passed two checkrides today”.  Charlatorn just smiled.

I’m not sure I’d be interested in catching  hop with the Thai Air Force!

Chapter 40, “A New Chapter Begins”

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It has finally arrived.  Effective today, I have been permanently promoted to “civilian”.  We don’t often put it that way, but it is the constitutionally correct description of what I am today.  As a result, I now have constitutional rights which I abrogated on 7 May 1978, and I intend on exercising them, especially the most important, starting today!

It’s not really accurate to say I left the air Force today because, in fact, my air force left me a long time ago.  It wasn’t a sudden thing, like being thrown from a moving truck, but a slow insidious almost methodical breakup.  Like buying a new car and as the years go by, and the rattles start, and the suspension begins to creak, and the radio cuts out, eventually you realize it’s not that fun to drive it any more.

No organization is perfect, but when I went on active duty, I felt like I was a part of something so much bigger than I could comprehend. It had a clear mission, an obvious mission and, at least from my perspective at the bottom, leadership with direction.  Maybe I’ve just been in too long, but I’ve seen the air force take on a personality more like an inside the beltway politician than an organization sworn to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States”.  For example, this years’ FSA (Force Structure Announcement).  You didn’t have to be a genius to see that the only decision-making filter used was “What can we do to circumvent congress?”  You can have as many folks sign non-disclosure agreements as you want, but the truth always gets outs.  Not using any sort of cost benefit analysis to make informed decisions was the first mistake, but then to continue to stonewall the public by not responding to FOIA requests and giving inaccurate data to congressmen and staffers moves it into Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals” territory.  Just repeat the lies often enough and they will become the truth.

It is the responsibility of the military to rise above the political fray and tell the truth.  If we’re asked to find ways to cut costs and make us more efficient, integrity demands that we set aside parochial arguments and execute our oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of the office to which we have been appointed.  And that’s just the beginning.

Political correctness has infected the air force.  We are not airmen and airwomen, we are airmen.  Let’s stop driving wedges between people by feeling the need to he/she, him/her everything the we put in print.  Grow up, get over it.  We need to be blind to gender, race, religion, shoe size, and whatever else the left comes up with to Balkanize us.  We can’t afford to waste the time and manpower.  We need everyone who is willing to commit themselves to defending this country and we need to put to good use all of their talents.  My first assignment was in SAC (Strategic Air Command) flying the venerable B-52 and I eventually was in TAC, MAC, AMC, ACC, and AFRC.  But looking back, SAC was the command where I learned how to take care of families.  Every commander I had back then knew that the mission was tough and that families were an integral part of making it work.  There was no formal organization to send families to Disney world, but commanders were, well, commanders.  When you deployed, someone from the squadron would just show up at your house to mow the lawn, or shovel the snow because they knew your wife was home with a new baby or just had surgery.  It’s what commanders did and taught us to do.  Programs, especially government programs, can’t and shouldn’t replace people who really care.  I could go on, and in the future I will, but I want to close with something that happened yesterday as we all waited for Frankenstorm to smash the east coast.

We got a call from TACC with an interesting request.  They asked if they could start sending C-130s and C-17s to The 911th to begin a 24 hour airlift staging operation to support the impending relief efforts on the east coast.  The answer was, of course, yes and we would be able to begin receiving aircraft immediately.  Then we asked the question to which we already knew the answer: “Why did you pick Pittsburgh?”.  They answered: “We were sitting around trying to figure out what would be a strategic location within easy reach of the east coast with access to recovery assets, open 24 hours, and near other transportation hubs and Pittsburgh and the 911th was the obvious choice”  Shazzam!  A room full of Majors and LtCols took five minutes to figure out what a Pentagon full of generals couldn’t.

 

To Tina, Aazita, Diane, and Tracey;

I miss you all already!

Chapter 39.5

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Here’s a first for Hovering Over Send!  Guest blogger Mark Ables weighs in…….

 

Cultural change is a confounding challenge.  Let’s look at how far we’ve come in one area which I see no turning back on now.  I don’t know which CSAF (Chief of Staff of the Air Force)  decided that unmasking education in officer PRF/OPR’s  would promote airmen to continue pursuing higher education which nobody can argue isn’t good.  But when that happened, officers could no longer assume they’d make rank without PME or higher degrees.  Continuing education is essential, no dispute.   However, for our junior officers, when did outside education become more important than their Primary AFSC?  How many of you commanders have witnessed a young Lieutenant or junior Captain forging off getting higher degrees at the expense of their primary job?  Can you honestly say that today’s Air Force pilots (I can’t speak for other career fields) are as proficient, skilled or as immersed in their craft as we were 20 years ago?  Good or bad, I don’t know but it’s quite clear that command leadership has set in motion a trend which I think will pay dividends however we are experiencing some unintended consequences.  The Air Force isn’t a private corporation and our challenges are different than GE, Ford or Verizon.  Can someone answer this question;

Who is our customer?  and I don’t mean the military’s customer; the American people, I mean you the plodders, the AF workforce, who is your customer?? And for gosh sakes, not everyone is destined to be a commander.  There is honor in being the very best cook, civil engineer,  wrench turner or pilot!

Today’s  Junior Officers know that  in order to remain competitive for retention, being the best at whatever their AFSC won’t be enough, they’ll need to complete not only PME (Professioanl Military Education) but higher educational degrees.  Problem is, they’re off and running getting useless masters degrees before they are good at the jobs they were originally trained  to do and the reasons they joined the AF to begin with in many cases was to do that job.  General Welsh made a comment about this topic in a recent forum and I wonder what kind of detour the cultural shift will experience under his leadership, should be interesting.

Thanks Mark!

Chapter 38, The Beaver

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First of all I’d like to thank everyone for a fantastic retirement event this past weekend.  You don’t know how much it all meant to me.  I was overwhelmed!  A special thanks to my girls.  My biological ones and my fellow Air Force ones whom I will miss every day.

 

I’ve been an Operations Group Commander for a really long time.  When you add it all up it comes to nearly ten years.  I’ve worked with many Mission Support Group commanders, but I’ve always thought the most important relationship for an OG was with the Maintenance Group commander.

I think I learned the lesson while watching an old TV show called “Baa Baa Black Sheep”.  It starred Robert Conrad as Pappy Boyington and it only ran from 1976-1978, but it left a lasting impression on me.  There was the crusty old crew chief always complaining about the “flyboys busting up his airplane”, but it was all bluster to cover up the interdependence of flyers with their maintainers and the mutual respect they had.  I’ve always tried to nurture that relationship but, oddly, the three best MXGs I’ve worked with haven’t been crusty at all, they’ve all been women. (Although I’m not implying that women can’t be crusty!)

All three have had completely different leadership styles but this week I’m dedicating my story to Anna.  She was my first……MXG and when she came to Youngstown I thought she was rather, shall I say, stiff.  Let me explain that.  It was in no way a bad thing.  She was all business, and I’m not sure if she got my sense of humor or my whimsical way of looking at life.  As a result, I was determined to “loosen her up’ a bit.  Months went by and I wasn’t really sure I was making headway so when this incident occurred I wasn’t quite sure how to take her .

The AOB or Airfield Operations Board is a meeting held quarterly and chaired by the OG, me.  Every organization that has any part in running an airfield attends so at an active duty base it would be a meeting between a lot of military organizations discussing issues with runway construction, and grass mowing to keep the birds away, and airspace issues around the field, and base operations manning, RAPCON issues, you get the picture.  But at a reserve base, there are many civilian organizations involved since we don’t really own the airport. It makes for a much more interesting and engaging meeting and it helps build a strong relationship between all parties involved.  One meeting ended up being much more interesting than most.

We had all gathered in my conference room.  All told, almost twenty people.  We had folks from the Port Authority, civil engineering, base ops, approach control, safety, airspace manager, tower controllers and, the lone woman, Anna, the Maintenance Group Commander.  We followed the agenda for the meeting and everyone had a chance to discuss their particular area of expertise and how it could affect the flying operations at Youngstown.  We had gone around the room and the last one to speak was Jack.  Jack was “the guy”.  By that, I mean he was the guy that had been at the airport forever.  He worked for the Port Authority and if you wanted to know anything about the history of the airport or how and why decisions had been made about anything, he knew the answer.  He is a very quiet man and unassuming, but if Jack said that there was a problem you’d better believe it was serious.  On this particular day, we had a problem.

I asked, “Do you have anything for us Jack?” and shaking his head slowly from side to side he said, “We have a serious beaver problem here on the airport”.  I was truly surprised.  Finally something interesting to discuss at an AOB!  I never suspected that beavers could be a problem at an airport, but he went on to describe how the diligent critters had built a series of dams along the creek at the southwestern edge of the airport and the water was actually backing up and submerging the end of the small runway.  Who would have thought?  So I asked them how they were dealing with the problem and he said that they had hired a local trapper to kill the beavers and they had already killed three with one weighing in at nearly 75 pounds.  I thought we were finished but then Anna broke in, she calmly turned to me, looked me straight in the eye, and simply asked, “Can you eat beaver?”

Time stood still for an instant while every head in the room turned to me.  I knew what they wanted.  I knew what they expected.  They wanted me to take the slow curve and swing for the fence.  But being the sensitive, politically correct person that I am, I simply paused, turned to her with a straight face and said “I suppose so, if you’re into that sort of thing”.  She seemed satisfied and I asked if there were any other questions or comments. With every eye still fixated on me we finished the meeting. As everyone began to push back from the table, Anna hopped up and announced that she was late for another meeting so she bounded out the door and was gone.  The second her footsteps went silent down the hall, the room erupted into laughter, like I had never heard before.  Grown men with tears streaming down their cheeks.  Faces red as apples, and it went for a good 15 minutes.  We had a million one liners that popped into our heads that day, but not using any of them, in the moment, made it all the funnier.

I never found out the real reason Anna asked the question.  Was she lobbing me the slow pitch so I could hit it out of the park?  Or did she really want to know  what culinary delights could be created from rapacious rodents?

When she transferred from Youngstown we threw her a going away party and I told this story.  After telling it I answered the question by presenting her with a stuffed toy beaver on a platter, apple in its mouth, on a bed of plastic vegetables and lettuce.

Chapter 30, “If a Girl Asked Me….?”

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I’ve been an Operations Group Commander for nearly 10 years and there’s a lot I love about the job.  There’s one thing in particular I really enjoy and it’s attending Review and Certification Boards.  For you non-flying types, it’s a periodic meeting we have to review evaluation issues and to “certify” new aircraft commanders, instructors and flight examiners.  Basically we review their training and evaluation folders, bring in the “certifyee”, and we all get a chance to utter some words of wisdom for them to carry into their new responsibilities. I especially like doing new aircraft commanders.

These are guys that have been sitting in the right seat for 2-3 years chomping at the bit for a chance to be in command and run things their way, and I like to take the time to let them know that, when you’re in charge, things can go pretty bad pretty fast.  I have several stories I like to tell, but my favorite I call; “The worst question anyone has ever asked an Aircraft Commander”.  My apologies to those that have heard it, but here goes.

I’ve known a lot of crewmembers over the last 34 ½ years and the guys that are most memorable are the ones at either end of the spectrum.  The really bad ones because, well, that’s where good flying stories come from, and the really good ones because they make flying a joy.  Fred, and Fred isn’t his real name and I’ve never know a loadmaster named Fred, is one of the really good ones.  He’s the kind of guy everybody likes.  All of the kids whose parents are in the squadron know him by name and give him hugs when they see him.  He’s conscientious, professional, an outstanding instructor and an all around great guy.  So when I signed up for a weekend cross country I knew that things would work smoothly in the back of the airplane.

It was an Aeromedical training mission with the unit over at Wright-Patterson AFB and from the pilot perspective it’s about as vanilla a mission as it gets.  You pick up a bunch of Flight Nurses and Med Techs and they spend hours in the back of the airplane working on pretend patients while we bore holes in the sky.  It sounds like a waste of money and time, but I don’t want someone sticking a needle in me or, heaven forbid, a catheter while I’m being AirEvac’d who’s never done it while bouncing around in a moving aircraft.  On with the story.  We spent all day Saturday flying them around so all we really had to do on Sunday was fly the one hour back to Pittsburgh, park the airplane, fill out the paperwork, and be out the door by noon.  Saturday night we stayed at the Hope Hotel at Wright-Pat and we all agreed to meet in the lobby for dinner at 6.  6:00 came and went with no Fred.  We called his room and he said to eat without him.  After dinner we were walking through the lobby and ran into Fred.  He obviously had other plans.  He was freshly showered and shaved.  He had some “bling” around his neck.  He was obviously on the prowl.  We administered the appropriate amount of ribbing and reminded everyone of the morning bus time of 0715.

At 0715 we were all sitting in the bus, ready to go, except for Fred.  In all the years I had known him he had never been late so I gave him the benefit of the doubt but when he still hadn’t shown up at 0725 it was time for the phone call.  The phone rang 10 times before he answered it and it was obvious that I had awakened him from a deep sleep.  After apologizing profusely, he said he’d be down in five minutes, and he was.  Normally being late will get you a thorough tongue lashing, but seeing as Fred was obviously very upset with himself I figured the abuse he was getting from the rest of the crew was sufficient punishment.  We dropped the loadmasters and flight engineer at the plane and headed into base ops to check the weather and NOTAMS and file a flight plan.  Now for the bad news.  There was a wide area of rain with imbedded thunderstorms between Dayton and Pittsburgh and it was going to be a bumpy ride.  We rushed out to the airplane hoping to get going before the heat of the day pumped more energy into the storms and took off into a darkening sky.

It turned out to be as bad as we feared.  The Navs face was buried in the scope and he was calling out the headings fast and furious.  “40 degrees for 3 minutes and then we’ll come back 60 degrees!”  The hour flight was turning into an hour and a half as we zigzagged our way to Pittsburgh.  Finally we got the handoff to Pittsburgh approach and the controller told us something I’d never heard a controller say before.  “Do whatever you have to do to get through the last line of storms, call me when you’re clear, and good luck”  It was the “good luck” that got me worried.  The nav tuned up the old APN-59 and tightened up his shoulder harness and just as we started to squeeze between the two airplane eating cells a quiet voice came from the back of the airplane over the crackling interphone. “Hey Daryl, this is Fred.  Can I ask you a question?”  First of all, we don’t use names on the airplane, only crew positions.  It would normally have been “Pilot, Loadmaster, I have a question”.  Secondly, we were pretty busy.  But, I thought, something serious must be happening if he was calling me now AND using first names, so I said, “Sure, it’s a little busy but go ahead”.  There was a pregnant pause and then, ”If a girl asked me to spank her, and I did, could I get in trouble”.

You know how they do it in movies when you come to a really intense action scene and they switch to slow motion and it’s like time expands.  At that moment, hanging in space between two thunderstorms, with lightning flashing all around and continuous moderate turbulence forcing us to strain at our seatbelts, time seemed to stand still.  The copilot rotated in his seat to the left and stared at me, the navs head slowly came up from the scope and turned to me with eyes as big as saucers, and the engineer’s jaw dropped to his chest.  I’m usually pretty quick with a response, and maybe I was, but it felt like an eternity before I heard myself say:  “It depends.  Did you leave any marks and does she know who you are?”  Not really a good answer, but it’s the best I could come up with at the time.  He answered “No on both” and I said “We can talk about it when we land” and then time simply accelerated back to its normal inexorable rate.

We had a talk when we landed about boundaries and girls in bars.  And, although I know nothing about the latter, I think I covered the subject pretty well.  As much as you think you’re ready for anything and you’ve seen it all, you haven’t.  The message to the new aircraft commanders; flying is the easy part, it’s the people that will never stop surprising you.

 

My apologies to “Fred”, I’m sure he’ll be mortified when he gets this!