10 Aug

The last few days have been a little crazy – I haven’t had more than a few minutes at a time to sit down. My night mission on the 6th went as well as could be expected. The radios are crazy – we did a lot of short hops and you hardly have time to change frequencies before you need to be talking to someone else. To make it worse the lingo is different from Army talk. I was flight lead and felt like a new pilot trying to communicate. Radio calls are a fine art of saying just what is needed and in the right sequence so when the other guy can only hear part of it (which is often) he knows what you said. At least we have the second aircraft to divide up the calls but then you’re not sure what they coordinated. I found out the Marine -46s have double the radios we have which is the real problem – our communication package is from the 70s. A couple of months from now it will be second nature – at least it is a great learning experience for our younger pilots. After this flying back home will be a cake walk. Another thing we have learned early on is that we spend between 1/3 and ½ of our flight time on the ground loading or unlading. The passengers are fast but for all the cargo they use Triwalls (heavy duty cardboard boxes with plastic tops and bottoms). They work fine on Marine aircraft but they won’t slide across our floors without catching on everything. Our big advantage is being able to carry more but the longer load times cancel that on these short flights. We are already one aircraft short – 174 chewed up a hydraulic pump and sent the parts throughout the #1 flight control system so it is now a static display at Al Asad. The same thing happened to 167 back in Alaska but at least this time they didn’t send me to fly it home. I never really understood that decision except that it gave the higher ups a good feeling knowing a test pilot was flying – if the flight controls lock up I would do what every other pilot would – crash. So now we have to replace all the hydraulic components on that flight system – at least we get parts faster here. We moved into our rooms the evening of the 7th. It was a lot of hot, sweaty work but worth every minute of it just knowing this was the last time for awhile. I still haven’t figured out how I want my room set up but I have nothing but time :). I finally paid the guy for the internet system they have here – it’s nice to not have to carry all that cash around any more. Tony and I plotted out how we are going to run all the wires and now it’s just a matter of pulling the old cable out and re-running it all. We turned the old system off until we get it set up which should be within a week. Our second system should ship out Monday so things are coming together. People are still coming up and asking if they can join which is a little frustrating since I have been asking since April to see how many people are interested.
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