7 Nov

I haven’t been doing much of anything except a few maintenance flights the last couple of days. I did the pre-phase test flight on 168 on 1 Nov and started the post-phase flights on 5 Nov. Our maintenance guys are getting really good – our goal is to do a phase in 7 days and these guys are pushing them out in 4-5 days. I was really hoping to get the entire post-phase completed in one flight but one of the engines failed its checks and the autorotation was out of limits. I finished the test flight today and now we are just waiting for the next one. The day missions are starting back up but now that we moved more pilots to days I am only on the schedule about once a week. Some of the other PCs are getting tired of flying so I may be able to take some of their flights. Things have been a little less mundane on the night side. A few days ago we had a big mission to pick up troops after they had completed a raid. Right as the first acft was touching down there was an explosion off the front side that damaged some of the cockpit windows and pushed out all of the side windows. It turns out explosives one of the soldiers was carrying detonated in his backpack. They put all the injured on the acft and flew them to the hospital in Baghdad. The next night we sent parts and maintainers over to fix the damaged acft. Everyone is back now but it shook the crew up pretty good. I really feel for the infantry unit – they are only a few weeks away from going home.

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