Everyone checking out the damage. You can't really see from this angle but there is a layer of tires on top of the metal pallets that acted as shock absorbers in an attempt to replicate the missing struts.

This is right after they landed on the pallet. The guy running is Ocasio - they came to a hover and threw a mic cord out so he could plug in and talk the pilots down. The trick is to get it centered on the pallet. The aircraft is stable with the rotors turning at 100% but the concern is that when the engines are shut down and the rotors slow the aircraft can start rocking if it isn't centered. It shook a little on shut down but overall it went really smooth.

This is 174 coming in to land back at home base. It was strange looking flying with the aft landing gear removed.

This is Brian showing how high the front of the aircraft was with no back end. The tubes his hands are below should be about head high. He said it was quite a struggle to get in the cabin door.

This is a better view of the damage. The aircraft ended up resting on its landing gear - they just weren't in the proper position. It is designed to collapse like the one on the left. The right one broke away the housing which is going to cause the most problems to repair.

174 sitting a little low in the back end. From a distance it actually looks almost normal.

27 Apr

This seems to be somewhat of a routine. Once again I was supposed to fly and once again we have what is now the worst dust storm of the year. It’s too bad because it would have been a good mission with good crews flying it. I was able to get a test flight in before the dust rolled in around noon. I ended up coming back to the room after lunch since nothing was moving at work and as this is supposed to last for several days I have decided to take tomorrow off. It has been a couple of weeks so it will be nice to sleep in. Aircraft 174 is the other big happening around here in the last week. They managed to land a few feet short of the pad at a FOB near here. Everyone was fine but they hit just right to collapse both aft landing gear. It took a few days to get everything together and come up with a plan. Four days ago they got a crane on site to lift the back end up, remove the damaged landing gear and set it on pallets. Then Brian and J.R. flew it back here and landed on another set of pallets (we are getting way too much practice at that). It is going to be down for a little bit but there wasn’t any major structural damage so it will be back flying. In other news we got three new pilots in from Alaska a couple of days ago. They are replacements that were requested back in September after 171 crashed and CPT Pyun left. At least they made it before the end.
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These pictures look a lot like the ones from Mars. The only difference is that for some reason people live here.

This is what it looked like when I arrived at work this morning. A good day to stay on the ground or as Brian said when he first looked outside this morning -"It's a snow day" and went back to bed.

17 Apr

So much for the end of the dust - the worst one of the year so far rolled in last night. I can tell if the dust is back when I wake up because my throat will be dry and I can taste the dust (not to mention the fact it is all over my pillow). It was that way this morning plus the wind was rattling the windows so I knew it was a good one. Right now I can’t see more than bout 50 yards. I was supposed to fly today but the decision not to was pretty easy. Instead I took the opportunity to finish up fixing the cooling systems in the aircraft. They now work in all the cockpits. The guys in the back have the same setup but they think it is too much of a pain to get it running and not worth the effort. They might change their minds once the 120F days hit and we are staying cool up front. Between the dust and lack of missions there hasn’t been much going on. 081 is all packaged up and ready for shipping so the maintainers are all waiting for us to fly some more hours and drop the next aircraft into phase. The newest fad over here is horseshoes. We have two sets over here (the one that I brought is holding up quite well – thanks parents). Whenever the weather is even halfway decent you can hear them clanking away in the back. The dust does keep the temperature down – yesterday was 106.

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Palmer and Joice are pulling equipment out of the avionics closet. Just about anything that isn't used on a F model and that we can use here is coming off. We figure it is a whole lot better than just crushing it all.

The aft pylon has already been removed (you have to do this to get it inside an airplane) and Donovan is taking off the missile warning equipment.

Here is Askwig removing the chaff and flare buckets off the aircraft.

These next few are some pictures I took of 081. We received word yesterday that it was headed for the new F model line (they aren't going to repair the cracks). Which means it is going to be shipped back to the states, have all the main components removed and crushed into a cube. So of course the first question we asked is -What can we take? They gave us a list and within hours everything was stripped off. It was like watching kids in a candy store.

Back by request - this is a battlefield update. It might be a little hard to see but if you enlarge it it will become clear. Steve went with an insurgents v. army motif. The insurgents are on the left as you can tell by their mis-matched uniforms, use of vehicles and giant animals. They are basically throwing everything they have at us. The environment has definitely been a factor in this battle as we seem to lose men during every dust storm.

This is Rieck heading in to drop off the M-4s after a mission. For those of you who don't know, M-4s are the rifles slung across his back. They are a shorter version of the M-16. All the pilot's are issued one and we carry them with us on missions - something to give us a little more reach than our pistols in case we end up on the ground somewhere we aren't supposed to be.

This is a classic example of the difference between people who know how to grow plants and those who don't. These are three of the trees we received at Christmas. Mine is the one on the right and the other two are being raised by SSG Hunt. She finally decided to rescue mine from in front of my door. I assumed it was too far gone but she thinks she can revive it. I understand water helps these things - who knew?

The one native plant with flowers that I have seen close enough to photograph. It is in one of the dirt filled barricades next to our office. The flowers only open up in the morning and close soon after the sun hits them.

5 Apr

We are pretty much just going through the motions over here. Our flying has developed a pattern with dust storms rolling in every three or four days. The last couple have only lasted for a day so we may be approaching the end. Yesterday was the ninth month mark in our deployment. I read with some amusement that later this summer the Pentagon is hoping to reduce deployments to 12 months followed by 12 months at home. The concern is that the current situation is unsustainable but I don’t see how a year deployed for a year at home is sustainable either. Who would want to make a career of the military when you are going to spend half of it deployed? You are not going to get the best and brightest that’s for sure. I find it just a tad ironic that this is all under the same administration that vowed to not become engaged in nation building like the previous one did in Kosovo. Looking back on my three deployments to that country I can safely say that they kept their promise – this is nothing like Kosovo. These days Kosovo would hardly even qualify as a training exercise. Ah – the innocence of youth – if we only knew what was in store.

Nothing much to report on the flying side. I have done a few long day missions but nothing out of the ordinary. Maintenance is going well and yesterday Brian gave me my MTP check ride, his first as a ME. We were worried about weather rolling in so we did the whole test flight backwards (flight checks, hover checks, and then ground checks). It made it interesting and we figured if I could do it backwards then I must know it well enough :) The test flight was on 081 which we are dropping into phase early because of sheet metal problems. For some reason it is developing a lot of cracks up by the aft rotor head. Rivets are popping out and a couple of stringers cracked in half. All that was repaired and I flew it a couple of days ago on a seven hour mission. After landing we inspected it and the stringers had new cracks, so there is a bigger problem. Rather than limp it along to phase we decided to just drop it now which will give us a few extra days to work on it.

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I caught Jackson mid-way through his breakfast - he looks a little surprised. Speaking of breakfast - I found that these croissants that are wrapped in plastic are a great thing to take on early morning flights. After a couple of hours on the dash they are nice and warm and just like out of the oven.

These Ospreys just beat us into the base so we had to set down and wait until all their passengers offloaded and they departed until we could move onto the main pads, offload our paxs and get refuel. The refuelers at this base are a little out of control with their paranoia about safety but that is a story for another time. It was fun watching the Ospreys depart - they don't look quite right but they work.

Another picture of Marines milling around the back of the aircraft waiting until their bags get loaded so they can load. A couple of months ago they would stand behind the engines to get warm but now they are all packed into the center trying to stay out of the way of the blast. The exhaust is around 1200F so you can imagine it isn't real pleasant on a hot summer day or even a warm spring day for that matter.

I thought this was an interesting picture. In the middle right at the top of the picture you can see a small black dot (if you click on the picture it will expand and you can see it better). This is actually a Chinook. Brian is coming down in an autorotation check. It is fun to watch from the ground because the aircraft pretty much drops straight out of the sky. We do this check after adjustments to the blades to make sure it can still descend in a controlled manner if both engines quit (controlled being relative). It is just about my least favorite thing we do as a test pilot. This picture was taken on the third day of a very extensive evaluation Brian completed a couple of weeks ago. A test pilot from the standardization division back at the home of Army aviation (Ft. Rucker , Alabama) came over here to test Brian and after passing with flying colors he is now the Army's newest CH-47 maintenance examiner (he is like me in that he now gives check rides to other maintenance pilots). So now anything I do to him on his check ride he can turn around and make me pay for it on my ride which I am going to have to take in a couple of weeks.

This is Tony as we were sitting in refuel. It was the first time I have flown with him in a long time. A very good guy to fly with except he always does all the work and makes me lazy :)

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.

This is looking out the side window at Al Asad. In the distance you can see all the large dirt covered mounds that were maintenance hangers for the Iraqi aircraft. We have converted some but most were destroyed so new buildings were built in between the old bunkers.

I am getting ready for our long day mission. It is a little hard to see but there is a hose coming out of the side of my jacket. It is part of a cooling vest that plugs into the aircraft system and pumps cooled fluid through tubes in the vest. Each pilot has a connection and there are three spots in the back for the crew members. All our aircraft were fitted with the system before we came over in '05 but like many good ideas it is almost never used. The crew members don't like it because they have to unhook to move around the aircraft. Since they don't use it they don't have a lot of incentive to keep it working. They are the ones who service the system, repair the hoses and such like so as a result very little works. This is the only aircraft in the fleet that has it working and that is because the FE (Rigdon) knows a lot about the system. It's too bad because it makes a huge difference on long day flights and really helps reduce fatigue.

25 Mar

I finished up nights with a couple of good flights with Eric, followed by my annual check ride. Eric is one of our more experienced PICs so we almost never fly together since we usually combine high and low time pilots to lower the risk (our last flight together was doing HUD training down in Kuwait). He is the same pilot I flew the acft up from Texas with and we fly a lot alike. It’s always relaxing and enjoyable to fly with another pilot like that. I have found that compatibility makes a huge difference on a mission. I can have a good flight with one pilot then do the exact same mission with another pilot and be exhausted at the end of the flight. My check ride went well but like every year I never do as well as I want to. I always end up messing up something that I haven’t had any problems with before. The very next day all our missions shifted to days for awhile. I took that day off then came in the next morning to fly a mission. It was a seven hour mission which made for a long day just coming off of nights. It was a good crew and the mission went smooth so that helped, plus I had a Monster to get me through. A lot of guys over here live on those high caffeine energy drinks – Monster, Redbull, RipIt, ect. I try to limit them but they sure do work. It was Easter Sunday but since we were flying we missed the big lunch spread with all the specialty dishes. It did remind me that last Easter I was sitting in the same chow hall (I was over here for the site survey) thinking that a year from then we would be over halfway through our deployment and here we are. The next day the first group of acft was up at AL Asad to pick up passengers when the trail acft (081) ran into some problems. They were taxing straight down a taxi way when they felt the aft right of the acft drop. J.R. picked it up to a hover and a crew member saw their landing gear lying on the ground. It must have cracked sometime previously and just chose that moment to give it up. They called the crash/rescue guys and within 15 minutes they had crates and mattresses stacked up so they could land the missing landing gear area on them. The other mission finished up, came back here, picked up the repair parts and flew back up. The repair was going to take awhile so they escorted the other acft home. This morning they went back up to Al Asad to do a mission out west but the weather was bad further west so they stayed to escort 081 home. As they were waiting they saw a wall of dust moving in and since 081 still had another hour of work they departed. The weather is supposed to be bad tomorrow so that short mission may turn into a three day stay. The pilot for that mission was slated for a MTP and J.R. decided to take it. Brian and I are so glad he did or else that would be one of us up there. By the way, the heat is back.

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This is looking towards the chow hall which is only a couple of hundred yards away.

This is a picture taken yesterday from up on top of my room looking towards the flight line. The wind wasn't blowing that hard this time but it was hard to breath after being outside for any length of time.