Wednesday, March 26, 2008

This is one side of a full load of Marines with all their bags. It has to be a pretty miserable flight but most of them are asleep withing 15 minutes.
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2 comments:

DAD said...

About Marines and weapons...certainly not in their packs? Stacked somewhere else in the ship? Hand held?....What do packs contain? Underware I presume? (: Do guys carry own first aid? What about food? boots? These are ENORMOUS packs! Are there questions you can't answer? How does the army do security in blogs? Do they even bother? (assuming overwhelming force is a deterrent to planned operations directly against military) When you let these fellows off (and I am assuming all fellows...no women?) do you just land in a bare spot somewhere? At an airfield? Are your flight plans secret? I remember seeing WWII messages...long lines of censored black "Dear Sally"..blank,blank thanks for the socks and the blank,blank..all fine blank blank, blank, blank...love Tom. (: Are these days gone forever? I had a discussion with someone about CH-47. Embarrassingly ignorant on my part "I am sure the pilots don't wear parachutes" and he said "Of course they do. They just jump out; I have seen pictures of people jumping out." And I thought "You are really dumb!" But I did not say this. Was he really dumb? Or was the dumb guy me? Some people could jump out but I think this person would not be you or Tony or Eric. You would, of course, in a crisis, land safely with only a little sweat. I seem to remember that this was the fail safe plan. (These questions need not be answered quickly if sleep or food or whatever is more interesting (: I'll be around. (:

March 30, 2008 at 1:32 PM
David said...

Wow - that is a lot of questions but I will work my way through them, starting from the top :)
- They always carry their weapons and if you look closely you can see them gripping the stocks. They always point them down on aircraft - much fewer critical parts to hit if they happen to shoot a round off.
- Each Marine has one of those big green bags you see and an equally large backpack that you can't see in the back. It is quite a bit of gear until you consider this is everything they have to live with over the next seven months. We in aviation would never survive.
- I had to register my blog and they say they are checked but who knows. I am pretty careful about what I post and so far nobody has said anything. It is a much looser environment since the enemy isn't really all that concerned about who is where - they have a pretty good idea where we live and how we operate.
- We have carried quite a few female Marines but these were combat units so no females. We take them from the big bases where they are flown into by airplanes and move them out to the smaller outposts around the country.
- As far as parachutes go you both could be right but you much more so. People do jump out of Chinooks wearing parachutes but they are not the crew. We continue to fly and let the infantry have their fun. The experimental test pilots sometimes where parachutes depending on what they are checking but you would have to be very high up to make it worthwhile. The thing about a helicopter is that by the time you decide it is bad enough to get out and against all odds actually manage to, more than likely you and the aircraft are going to end up on the same piece of ground. You might as well just enjoy the ride.
I hope that answers some of your questions but please feel free to ask more:)

March 30, 2008 at 10:56 PM

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