Tag Archives: ORI

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 60, The Wedge

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Time for some more shameless self promotion.  We’re less than a week away from St Patty’s day so if you’re in the Pittsburgh or Youngstown area you have two chances to celebrate with Carnival of Souls.  We’ll be performing at Lincoln Hall in Foxburg, PA this Saturday night, the 16th, from 7-9 PM.  Just take I-80 east to exit 45, turn right on to Rt 478, drive 1.9 miles, turn right on to Rt 58 and drive 1.9 miles to Foxburg.  It sits right on the Allegheny river, you can’t miss it!  Then, on the 17th, we’ll be at Mogies in Lower Burrell from 7-10 PM.  You’ll need reservations. http://www.mogiesirishpub.com.  See you there!

 

What I miss most about retiring isn’t the flying or, certainly not, the endless meetings, but the daily talks with people I truly love and respect.  You take those conversations, even if they’re just a passing few words, for granted and when you’re not there every day you realize how much those relationships really mean.  I’ve worked with a lot of folks over the years and some are, shall we say, quirky.  Now when I use the word quirky, I don’t think of it in a bad way.  I would describe those kinds of people as “odd”.  Quirky is endearing and funny, odd is; hide the sharp objects, duck into your office, turn the lights off and be very, very quiet.  I think ya’ll know what I mean.  I’ll tell stories about the quirky but not about the odd.  They might know where I live.

So, for anonymity’s sake, let’s call him Fred.  Fred is my favorite anonymous name since I’ve known very few Freds over the years and, for some reason, it makes me laugh.  Fred is a flight engineer who is very passionate about his job.  He has very high expectations for his own performance and expects nothing less of everyone else and, as a result, is a great instructor and friend.  He’s the kind of person I can always count on to give honest feedback and not be shy about giving his opinion.  Some people don’t like honesty, I’m not one of them.  It’s a rare commodity in a world of political correctness and caring more for feelings than doing the right thing and potentially saving an airplane and crew.  Fred is also a very tiny man.  I’m not just talking about height, I’m talking width and breadth as well.  he can’t weigh more than 100 pounds soaking wet.  I’m surprised they make flight suits that small and I’ve accused him of wearing a new size which I call 32T (toddler).  His size is what makes this story funny.

Years ago we deployed to, I think, Volk Field for an ORI (Operational Readiness Inspection).  I’ve been on so many ORIs the locations all seem to run together and my brain tries to purge the bad memories, so I think it was Volk but it doesn’t really matter.  Anyway, when we arrive, the first thing we always do is stand in line. We stand in line for mobility processing.  We stand in line to be assigned quarters.  We stand in line to get issued linens.  We stand in line to get issued MREs for the week.  The first day of any deployment is pretty much standing and waiting.  So after a day of standing in line, Fred found himself in the last line of the day, the chow hall or, the politically correct name, DFAC (Dining Facility).

Now, to those of us who are a little taller, people look a little different than the way Fred sees them.  It’s something you don’t really think about.  When I’m in line I can see what’s going on ahead.  How long the line is.  How much longer it’s going to be.  Who’s up there ahead of me that I can talk to once we get through the line.  But to Fred, everyone over about 5’10”, just looks like the back of a green flight suit and if you’re over 6’4″ it’s even a lower view of a green flight suit.  So Fred found himself in a very long line, after a very long day, looking at the back of a very large flight suit.  And it occurred to Fred that the very long flight suit in front of him must the his very tall friend Daryl.  So in a moment of, shall we say, whimsy Fred decided that it would be funny to give ole Daryl a wedgie.  To this day he hasn’t been able to explain why he thought wedgies were still funny past about the 5th grade but he thought it would add some levity to a long hard day.  So he reached up,  grabbed the waistband, heaved it high, and let out a Luilliputian laugh.  The line turned to see what the commotion was all about and what they saw was  a very tall African-American,  Higher Headquarters Inspector Colonel with an odd look on his face and his waistband in the hands of a tiny man with an even odder look.  Fred released his grip and, not quite knowing what to say to each other, the odd couple continued to wait in line without a word being spoken.

That night, at the daily inspector outbrief, the team chief made a remark about “the incident” but, at that point, we had no idea what he was talking about but, whatever it was, he thought it was pretty funny.  We passed the ORI in spite of the massive wedgie and, since then, I’ve never turned my back of Fred.

We often assume that everyone’s perspective is the same as ours but our place in an organization can give us a completely different few of the future and the past than those at higher or lower level.  The challenge is to be willing to either modify your opinions by taking into account others perspective or do a better job of communicating yours to get everyone moving in the same direction.

Chapter 51, The ORI

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It’s been ten weeks since retirement and I’ve had some time to reflect on the things I miss and the things I don’t.  At the top of the “don’t miss” list is the dreaded ORI.  For those of you who aren’t, or haven’t been, in the military, an ORI, or Operational Readiness Inspection, is a process devised to determine if an organization is capable of executing its war time mission.  It sounds pretty simple in theory but somehow they can never seem to get the process quite right.

When I started out in SAC (Strategic Air Command) it was all pretty straight forward.  During the Cold War our mission was to nuke whoever decided to attack us back to the stone age.  We had to be able to accomplish this at a moment’s notice with no opportunity to spool up prior to employment.  Launch within minutes, fly for a very long time, and drop/launch a bomb bay full of crowd pleasers.  Pretty straight forward.  And that’s the way the ORI happened.  The inspection team would arrive with no advance notification and we would generate all of the aircraft on base and fly them all on a mission simulating the end of the world as we know it.  You either dropped the bombs on target or you didn’t.  Pass or fail, it was pretty clear-cut. That was then. Now things are a little more complicated.

The world changed and the ORI process tried to change with it but it became mired down in everything but evaluating the primary mission of a flying wing.  It became more about operating in the, never seen but much feared, chemical warfare environment and bureaucratic minutiae than in the reality of how we’ve operated during the last three wars.  It hasn’t really kept up with that paradigm shift. There have been some efforts to fix the process but little success.  The best example, in my experience, was back in 1999.

I had just arrived at Youngstown as the new Ops Officer of the 773rd Airlift Squadron.  It was my dream job.  I had always loved being in the thick of things and the Ops Officer gets to run the day to day operations of a flying squadron.  There were new challenges, new problems, new taskings every day.  It never stops and that’s what I loved about it. Several months after I arrived on base, the senior leadership attended an Air Force Reserve Command Senior Leaders Conference down in Georgia.  It’s a weekend of briefings, networking and getting to know your counterparts around the command.  One of the briefings was from the newly appointed IG (Inspector General) at Headquarters Air Mobility Command (AMC).  He stood up and boldly described his vision for the new ORI process. His new construct would be centered around mission execution.  There would be a small chemical warfare exercise in the middle of the three days but after several simulated attacks over a 8-12 hour period we would pack up the gas masks and move on to other, more timely, scenarios. The crowd was thrilled.  Finally someone with half a brain and some common sense was in charge of the process.  My wing commander stood up and volunteered the 910th to be the canary in the mine.  We were ready and willing to try out the new improved process and maybe even having a say in working out the bugs.

We prepared for months.  We practiced with our partners, the active duty guys out of Little Rock, and when the day of deployment arrived, we were more than ready.  But that’s when things started going terribly awry.  As soon as we arrived at the inspection site, the scenario put us into a potential chemical warfare environment. It was a little odd since you would usually have 12 hours or so to build bunkers, unload cargo, and set up operations before having to suit up in chem gear but I concluded that they were just going to get the chemical exercise out of the way early.  That concept worked for me.  I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

For the next three days we did little else but dive into bunkers, put on our gas masks and trudge around the base like space aliens.  At one point we had the masks on for nearly 8 hours straight and as we were packing up to redeploy we were still in chem gear.  We even had to react to a chemical attack while we were in the passenger holding area waiting to get on an airplane to go home.  I wasn’t happy.  I took some time to cool down, but the next week I wrote an after action report which I upchanneled through 22nd Air Force to AFRC.  As you all know, I’ve never been one to hover long over send.

A month later we flew to HQ AMC at Scott AFB for a face to face sit down with the IG to discuss our thoughts on how the new system worked.  When it was my turn to speak I simply passed out my report and said to the O-6: “What you told us at the AFRC Senior Leaders Conference was the exact opposite of what actually happened.  I can come to only two conclusions.  Either you lied to the faces of 300 people or you are incapable of managing your staff and are incompetent.  Neither speaks well of you or the United States Air Force.”  I sat down and the meeting continued.  Maybe not the smartest thing to say to an O-6 as an O-5 in front of your O-7 boss.  I guess I needed more time to cool down.

Years later I was talking to one of the ancient civilian, former military staffers in the IG office, a guy that had been there for decades, and in a moment of accidental honesty, he told me that; “We get these new bosses all of the time who come here with new ideas.  They try to rock the boat and change things but we know if we just slow roll it they’ll be gone in two years and we can just keep doing things the way we know how”. And that’s it.  That’s the problem with all bureaucracies. The inertia of “the way we’ve always done it” prevents real change and real efficiency.  What was the last problem a government bureaucracy solved?  What’s the motivation for any bureaucracy to fix a problem?  Altruism?  You know better than that!  We’ve spent trillions to eliminate poverty but the poverty rate is unchanged.  We just make staying in poverty more comfortable.  Throw more money at a problem, you just get more of the problem.

One more thing on ORIs.  I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in the Air Force.  Some people seem to get stuck with ORIs more than others.  I know an O-6 who, in over 30 years in the air force, has never been through an ORI.  He has either transferred from a unit just prior to one or to a unit right after they had one.  On the other hand, some of us get just the opposite.  In the first case it could just be that all of his bosses were wise enough to hide him!