Well I've been told people actually read this page, so I figured I could update it....damn more than a year! Sorry.
Anyway so let's see...I have now been an aircraft commander for a little over a year. It is nice to finally be logging PIC, but it's a lot more work. It is satisfying though when a trip you planned/executed goes really well. I have also been working a lot in our current operations shop. It is fun work since you are pretty much at the controls of the squadron. We are the ones picking which trips to take, and then planning them once we decide to do them. Long story short I get to make sure crews are taken care of (IE pimp hotels at badass locations.) I spend half my day on the phone with hotels but it's worth it when you get to send guys on a great trip (even more so when you are one of em!) So that's the office side of things.
Flying has been going pretty well also. I am on pretty much continuous man-days flying for TACC (Tanker and Airlift Command and Control...I think...) The bummer part of that is that since my family moved to Arkansas (my wife is from there, and she wanted to be with her family when my daughter was born...oh yeah I have a daughter now, Bailey, 3 mos old) so I am basically living out of the Marriott here in the 'burgh. You do what you gotta do to but food on the table I guess...anyway back to the flying.
Coolest trips the past year...I did a rotation in Germany as an AC where we didn't do a whole lot of flying but I did manage to get my tax-free month as well as go down to Israel which was really cool. I also did two Puerto Rico rotations, one as an AC and one as a co-pilot. It was pretty standard flying down there with a few Gitmo-Jamaica runs. Highlights included a Foreign National deciding he REALLY needed to pee on short final and letting her fly all over the back of the plane. I kind of felt sorry for the guy, but he ended up losing his job and we got a funny story out of it. My CONUS flying has been pretty standard, I do a lot of Aero-med training missions (read: droning around for 2-4 hours while the nurses do their training in the back of the plane) but since I have been in current ops we are going to some cool places (all over florida, St. Croix, Texas...) Actually heading down to Florida this weekend for another trainer.
We are flying 1978 model airplanes now in Pittsburgh, as our 1986 model planes went to Pope AFB in NC to the Reserve Unit that is standing up there. They fly pretty much the same, and I am actually having better luck with them than I was with the 86's at the end there...Had to shut an engine down last month for an oversped propellor, that's about the most trouble I've had (knock on wood) It really sucks when your plane breaks, especially as an Aircraft Commander, since it's on you to coordinate the repair. Sometimes it's just a matter saying of "Hey TACC, I'm broke, fix me", but it's usually a lot more complicated and requires MUCHO cell phone minutes. Thankfully the unit bought some AC cell phones, which are great if you remember to take em. It's when you forget one that you break though usually.
I looked at my hours the other day and I have been averaging about 400 hours a year as a C-130 bum, if any of you are heading that way that's probably about what you can expect +/- 50 hours or so.
Anyway so near future I've got another trip to the desert this summer, only for about a month though. I am plugging away in the meantime, trying to get an IP school slot so I can become an instructor pilot (duh). Hoping to maybe go this fall or winter. The sweet part about that school is it's in Little Rock so I would be home with the Fam maybe long enough for my daughter to recognize me! Sweet! I am done with lead upgrade (I can be at the front of an 16-ship of C-130s over North Korea and be the first one to get shot down...Awesome!) so IP school is the theoretical next step. There are guys from my UPT class that have gone (active duty nerds) so I know that I am ready, just a matter of getting the OK back here in the squadron.
Anyway I think that's the big stuff that's happened in the last year. I am about 400 hours more advanced in the Herk, I have 240,000 more Marriott points, I'm about 10 pounds heavier, and I have a daughter that thinks I live inside Mom's laptop! Life of a bum...
Sorry for the typos/rambling, but I'm too lazy to go back over the post!
Just wanted to drop by to comment on the tragic passing of Anna Nicole Smith, a woman ahead of her time. OK done.
So, it's been about 5 years since I started this whole process. I met the UPT board at my squadron 5 years ago next week, and it was off to the races. I actually sat on our squadron's latest pilot board as a board member, so it was kind of cool to come full circle.
So since the last post I have been to the desert again, this time with the Niagara unit this last summer. They fly H3's which are a pretty nice upgrade avionics wise. That trip went well, and now I am back in the 'Burgh on pretty much steady man-days doing TACC missions to take the heat off the active duty since they are pretty much tapped in the desert. We fly random stuff around CONUS/Alaska/Gitmo, as well as doing the HALO and test drop schools in AZ. We also fly wounded soldiers back to their home units, a very satisfying mission. Probably the most satisfying thing I have done in the Herk actually.
As far as my flying goes, I had my Operational Mission Evaluation (OME) for my AC upgrade last week and passed. It took a few tries however. The point of this checkride is to observe an AC candidate on the road as he runs the crew and deals with all the crap that tends to come up when you are off-station. Kind of like an airline IOE trip.
First I had to get Assault landing qualified. This took 6 flights where we went to different assault zones and practiced landing on a 3000x60 foot runway, where you have to touch down in the first 500 feet. I was pretty nervous on the first flight since it was pretty much the only thing I had NEVER done in an airplane so who knew how it would go. My heart was beating out of my chest on the first approach but I made it in the zone on my first try! That was during the day, then I had a few night rights where I did the same thing with normal lights, and then with my NVG's. So once that training was done it was on to my OME.
The initial trip was planned as a 3 day trip to Vegas over superbowl sunday (awesome) to drop army dudes across the border in California. I did all the planning and after mucho butt-pain we were ready to go. We got about 3 hours into our 7 hour trip to Vegas (100 knot headwinds), when the dreaded prop low-oil light came on, associated with the #3 engine. This basically means that the hydraulic fluid that pushes/pulls the prop forward and backward, controlling the torque was low. Worst case is you lose all the fluid and your propellor won't go to feather (perpendicular to the airflow), leaving you with a handfull of airplane. I don't know what it is but in my 2 years in the Herk I have had this emergency at least 4 or 5 times. WTF over. Anyway so we woke the evaulator up (how cool is a checkride where your evaluator can go to sleep!) and worked through the EP (It did feather), diverting to Scott AFB in St Louis. Flipping Scott....We have been there a ton in the last few months and it pretty much sucks since you are stuck on base, which generally blows. So, once we landed everyone ran away and started doing their own thing, leaving me, the "AC" kind of stuck herding cats. I felt like a project manager on "The Apprentice" trying to figure out the best way to manage my time, delegate tasks, etc. So with a correcting phone call from my Commander back home (few people went above me making calls and he wanted to know what the hell was going on...), I got things under control and a new propellor was flown out the next day and we were home the day after that, checkride incomplete since I never dropped the Army. Luckily the Evaluator counted that as my off-station part of my check leaving me with a trip to Pope AFB in 2 days to drop the 82nd airborne on LUZON DZ.
That flight went a lot better (maintenance wise), although we had to hold in SKE formation for 40 minutes once we got to Pope while we waited for an emergency to clear the runway...never done that before, I guess why not have the first time be on a checkride! Once we finally got our landing clearance I was cleared to land on the assualt zone to do my assault landing for my checkride. Again I was pretty nervous, since it was my first time evaluated doing an assault. IT didn't help that the lead airplance landed right in front of us on the main runway so I had do deal with his wake turbulence all the way down final. At 200 feet I got a real big shimmy from lead and right as I was thinking I would have to go around I got her back and we landed right in the middle of the zone. Phew...
So that put us down about an hour late, which left some last minute scrambling to arrange a new block of time over the DZ so we could get out guys out. We finally got airborne with 50 airborne crammed in the back and got the drop off, with #2 pushing their guys out the door 30 seconds before the end of our block time. We were back to pittsburgh at 2am and I was finally done my checkride. I had been dealing with it for a month and it felt pretty good.
So now I am waiting for my certification board on Feb 20th, which is where the wing commander formally recognizes and approves you as an AC. It's only a formality so I'm not too worried about it, although I am going to have to borrow some service dress!
So.....5 years, 3 different airplanes (with 3 different kinds of C-130). Countries in the last 2 years...let's see:
USA Canada Scottland Crete Romania Qatar UAE Jordan Kuwait Bahrain Afghanistan Iraq (duhh) Djibouti Kenya Ethiopia Colombia Jamaica Cuba (Gitmo) Alaska Dominican Republic
Not too shabby, if anyone reading this is on the fence about trying to get a pilot slot, that should be good enough right there! Get your AFOQT and PCSM scores and you are halfway done.
How bored am I you ask? Well I'm updating my blog!
So let's see...where did I leave off. June 05...ok.
Water Survival was pretty fun, especially after the pain of land survival. Basically 3 days of living it up in Pensacola. Highlights were watching the Blue Angels from our little dinghy's (The popped a little smoke over us to say hi), eating oysters, and destroying my personal raft because I forgot to close my riser covers. Was about to sink like a rock before I blew up my backup. AWESOME.
After survival it was back to Pittsburgh and a few weeks of quick training before it was off the South West Asia! Woohoo! 150 degree cockpits, sand, 18 hour days, sand, communal showers, sand, and 3 beers a day, with sand in them.
Start at the start I guess, we left Pittsburgh and made our way over there, I think I have to say to "an undisclosed forward operating base", since I know some of this stuff is classified, better safe than sorry.
Onec we go to our base we had a few days of in-briefings and bam we were flying missions into Iraq, I think 3 days after I got there. You name it we flew there. Really don't think I can say places or dates though. I was over there a total of 60 days or so, not that bad when you consider active duty nerds stay over there 120. They probably do about the same amount of flying as we do in one of our rotations, since we do a lot more flying when we are over there. Prima-donnas. I guess they need more recovery time after carrying 15 bags of gear each out to the airplane every time they go on an out and back. But I digress...
So long story short I made it back in one piece in September and have been doing the reserve bum thing ever since. I have one of those little fundraising thermometers you see on the side of the road in my house where I raise enough dough for rent and truck payment every month before I can take a deep breath. Getting married and Christmas aren't cheap either!
So I figured I would update some pictures on here, starting with let's see, survival school.
First is on the second last day of field training, hiding out waiting for a pickup we had some free time. I carved the old lady's name in the tree behind me.
Next is me prone on a rock recovering from an 18 mile death march through rugged terrain.
Here is my engineer and Nav on the trip over, in Scotland.
Ok here is my hero shot in front of the Mighty Herk, in Balad, Iraq
Here is me at an unnamed forward airbase that rhymes with Maghdad.
Finally me and my crew on the day we left for the States.
Hope you all enjoyed the pics, keep the e-mails coming I enjoy answering em. And if any guard/reserve dudes need a co-pilot shoot me an email! Will fly for man-days! OUT.
Here is my engineer and Nav on the trip over, in Scotland. 
