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!