A Ft Sill Update

"Rock Drill" map on hanger floor

It's kind of funny with my background being in Field Artillery that our mobilization site is Ft Sill, the Army's home for all things artillery. I was last here a couple years ago for annual training with A Battery, 2-180FA. While the facilities and support are OK, we are kept fairly isolated from the main portion of the base and have limited transportation. I also have to admit to being confused as to why this is an aviation mob site. The area is not particularly well suited to training for either the desert (Iraq) or mountain (Afghanistan) environment, and aside from the fact that there is an airfield here there doesn't seem much to commend it. There are quite a few ranges, but most are dedicated to howitzer and rocket fire. It seems to me that Ft Hood in Texas, Ft Carson in Colorado or Ft Rucker in Alabama would make more sense since they actually have the infrastructure built in. This is particularly evident for terrain flight and air assault training where the area available is limited. The aerial gunnery options are also tight compared to the Barry Goldwater range in southern Arizona that we're used to. This is not to say that the training is ineffective, it's just somewhat limited by the environment. Of course, we also don't have the same preflight hazards here as back home.

I think this guy wanted to go for a ride

Once we leave the military reservation for cross country flights the local area does work well for us, although I'm not used to having the machine guns out when flying over civilian populations. We don't carry ammunition on these flights, but I really don't like training the weapon anywhere people might be even unloaded. We have flow several missions to local airports practicing what are called ring routes where we deliver people and cargo where they're needed. These flights usually consist of three to four hours of flight time with landings at several fields and are used to evaluate our ability to execute missions on time with minimal notice while having to deal with real and "notional" maintenance and scheduling issues. Our evaluators also throw in simulated mortar attacks and other environmental problems to stress the system. While is seems trivial, just the mechanics of getting helicopters, weapons and crews all together and ready to go at the right time takes some practice. Once all the pieces are in place the crews are evaluated during the flights for their ability to perform the various crew functions, communicate effectively and operate as a team in simulated combat conditions.

As a crew chief once we're on our mission profile the primary responsibility is maintain airspace and surface surveillance, sometimes referred to as looking out the window. Most of the area we fly over is farm country, and from the air it's beautiful country - one can see how a farmer gets so attached to their land. It's also a nice break when we get to talk with some of the locals during fuel stops. The high point for me so far was a stop at Duncan (waving to Bag Blog) where we were met by three local children who were clearly excited by our arrival, but demonstrated excellent airport manners by staying well away from the ramp area.

A photo op with our young visitors

Even when we invited them to come look at the helicopters they ran off and got permission from their father first, and asked very politely if it was alright to take pictures of us. I'm not sure who enjoyed the experience more, them or us.

Once the flying and maintenance for the day is done, we've still got things that need to be done. Nearly everyone has responsibilities that need to be taken care of in addition to our primary work. Safety, hazardous materials handling, training - lots of little behind the scenes things that can be tedious, but need to be done.

Tommy working on driver training documentation after hours

This coming week we'll be doing night missions so I'll be back on the night vision goggles. It will be interesting to see what kinds of missions we get.

The Mob Station

We've wrapped up our state training time now, and are officially mobilized on Federal orders. The last month has been busy, occasionally frustrating, but mostly productive. From a practical standpoint a National Guard aviation unit can be broken down to three type of soldiers. What most people think of for the Guard are "M-day" soldiers. These are the one weekend a month, two weeks annual training guys. The next group are AGR. These are full time National Guard soldiers in key positions. They can be thought of as kind of a cadre responsible for most of the organizational and planning tasks necessary for the unit to make their training time as effective as possible. Finally there are the technicians. While it's not a requirement for the job, many technicians are M-day soldiers whose full time jobs are maintenance and support government positions. When the unit is between drills these are the guys who do the work to keep the helicopters flying. Now that we're on an active duty status we've been working on two major tasks - first integrating the M-day soldiers into the full time maintenance process to clear as many "gripes" as possible on all the aircraft, get all the inspections coming due soon done so as not to interfere with our training requirements at Ft Sill, and to make sure all the helicopters are ready to go. The second task is to get the air crews current. While the Guard provides for additional training periods for aircrew, due to their full time jobs not everyone can take full advantage of the opportunity. These soldiers have been the priority for flights. Of course we've continued training on mobilization tasks, qualified everyone on aerial gunnery, had a PT test, etc. We also had the opportunity to spend a little time with family before leaving for Ft Sill.
The flight out was unremarkable taking about eleven hours of which about seven hours were actual flying time. (The video above of our departure was put together by Her Accuracy. Nice job, Sweetee!) We did stop a couple of times for fuel and lunch along the way. Unfortunately when we arrived we had to immediately proceed to an in briefing. I guess it's good to get it out of the way, but I'm pretty sure none of the flight crews retained any of the information. In addition to the thirty Blackhawks of our battalion there are a half dozen or so Chinooks from Ft Eustis here that are mobilizing for northern Iraq.
Our first few days here consisted of verifying paperwork, which went quickly, getting our RFI (Rapid Fielding Initiative) issue of flight suits and enough cold weather gear to keep us toasty in the outer reaches of the solar system. This confirmed to me that we are indeed going to the desert. My last deployment was to an area where "cold" meant 50 degrees, and they issued us gear better suited to the arctic.
The weather at Ft Sill didn't cooperate for the first week we were here, severely limiting our flying. This week the skies have cleared up and we've resumed crew training flights. Since I'm already qualified I'm only flying at night with the night vision goggles supporting pilot currency flights. We'll be starting our mission and evaluation flights before too long, until then I'll be doing a fair amount of maintenance work. We still have some ground training to do yet as well. Much of it is of limited value to an aviation unit, but after some regrettable training deficiencies that became apparent early on in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Army has decided that every one gets additional training on common soldier tasks prior to deploying.

Channel 3 news coverage of the departure.

Work Ups

The whole pre-mobilization thing is kind of an interesting experience. We are now on active duty on state orders preparing to depart to our MOB station. This is somewhat new to me as for my last deployment we were only on state orders for a couple of days. Since then Arizona has developed a pre-mob team whose job it is to provide the training required by 1st Army for deploying troops. In theory this means that we won't have to do these particular briefings and tasks at Ft Sill, but frankly I'll believe that when I see it. That being said I have very little in the way of criticism for the training team. They're currently working Aviation, Military Police, Engineering and Administrative units all of which have their own specific requirements. They've clearly worked to provide us training in areas useful to our mission while acknowledging that some of the required tasks have little application for us. The training actually started the weekend before our activation with a three day "Combat Life Saver" course. This is an advanced first aid course that I had before the last deployment, but was happy to get again. (It requires annual certification to remain current.) The course has been adjusted continuously as dictated by the current situation and covers initial first aid, assessing and stabilizing the injured soldier up to and including starting an IV. The last time I took this course there was more emphasis on chemical agent treatment since that was a current threat at the time. While it made for a long weekend, it was a good class and well presented. The following Saturday we began our active duty with a day of last minute finance briefings, administrative processing and generally practiced standing in line. Complain as I do about the admin stuff (see my last post) it was actually pretty painless. That Sunday we began three days of classroom briefings and training. Twelve hour days of briefings causes more fatigue than you would expect. Still, we were in nice, air conditioned facilities... Thursday morning at 4:30 found us at our facility drawing our personal weapons and protective masks for a few days of field training and qualifications. Thursday and Friday morning was spent at the Florence Military Reservation near Phoenix qualifying with the M9 pistol, zeroing the M4 carbine, familiarization training for the M-2, M-240 and M-249 machine guns and several training lanes covering employment of grenades, Claymore mines, individual movement and IED recognition and response. Friday afternoon we moved up to the Flagstaff area for M-4 qualification (day, night and with gas masks). There were also classes on the Chemical Protective suits and a class on combatives, however our command decided that air crew would skip that due to the possibility of injury. Our aviation medical staff take their jobs very seriously and we've had people taken off flight status for seemingly minor injuries and conditions. For those not familiar with military jargon combatives is what used to be called hand to hand combat and consists of beating the daylights out of each other. It's a good workout, fun, and I usually recover in a week or so, but as much as I enjoy it I can understand the commands position on the subject.
Hat tip to FuzzyBear Lioness for the timely YouTube pointer...

An aside to all the weapons qual is that someone somewhere has decided that the crew chief and gunner in a UH 60 must be under gunned with only a .30 caliber machine gun and a 9mm pistol, and that we needed an M-4 for protection. Right. So now I carry get to carry 36 pound of weapons, plus ammo, plus all my other gear in the event of a forced landing. I guess they want us to stay put...

SRP

An interesting tidbit about the process of taking a National Guard unit from its normal drill status to mobilized and deployed is that the closer you get to your mobilization date the less useful training you are allowed to do. This weekend was the last drill prior to our mobilization date, and it was consumed by SRP - "Soldier Readiness Processing." Admittedly having all of the paperwork in order is necessary, but since the process is repeated several times - once when you get the word you're on deck at about a year out, again when you go on alert about six months out, just before you mobilize at about a month out, and just after you mobilize since the mob station doesn't trust you any further than they can throw you one has to wonder if the real driver is the admin types have heard that paperwork is secondary during combat deployments and it causes them to succumb to a panic attack. So in spite of the fact that we have crew that still need to progress in their qualifications and a whole herd of gunners to train up, (actually we decided that rather than herd, flock or gaggle they should be referred to as a murder of gunners) our helicopters sat on the ramp all weekend. Oh, well... Once we go on state orders our schedule is going to be a lot more mission oriented.

Air Force Museum AAR

Being an Air Force brat I grew up around military aircraft. As such I've always enjoyed going to air museums and shows, but having never lived near Dayton, Ohio I've not had the opportunity to make it to the Air Force Museum. Since Her Accuracy and I were over due a vacation, we decided to stop by for a couple days on the way to visit my parents. There's a lot of history to be seen there, and rather than trying to describe it all go here for some photos.

Summer Doldrums

The summer heat is finally here and I'm going through my annual slow down as I acclimate to the higher temperatures. Lots of progress to report but the clock keeps ticking and our deployment will be starting before we know it. Currently we're still working on getting all of the qualifications we can taken care of, since the more we do now the less we need to worry about as we mobilize. I've progressed to RL1 day/night meaning I'm a mission qualified crew chief for day and unaided night flights. I'm still working on my night vision goggle progression, I'm flight qualified (RL2) but not yet mission qualified. Since it doesn't get dark till relatively late that limits the number of flights I can do to once a week. I still have to work during the day... I should be RL1 NVG in July if all goes well.

Update: Got surprised with an evaluation flight - Now RL 1 Day/Night/NVG.

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In the civilian world I've now got my flight instructor certificate for Rotorcraft/Helicopter so that's another major milestone out of the way. I was hoping to get my Instrument Instructor Certificate before the deployment as well, but with all the things I have scheduled for the next two months there's no way I could complete it before we left, so that will be my first project when we get back. Until then I'll be getting current for my instrument rating and getting a little more practice in the R44. I may also be able to get some ground instructor certifications knocked out as well.

* * *

This weekend we had our annual aviation safety day, a requirement for all flight personnel. Safety training is important, but all too often it is brutally boring. I'm happy to report that this year the Brigade did a fine job. Our keynote speaker was Astronaut Mike Mullane who provided us an excellent insight on some of the issues NASA faced during the shuttle program, and talked frankly about some of the institutional problems that contributed to the Challenger and Columbia losses. As a space flight geek for as long as I can remember I found his presentation fascinating. His book "Riding Rockets" is pretty damn good, too. The Army Safety Center was out and discussed some recent accidents and the Flight Surgeon an interesting presentation on the Swine Flu. No, really... He was good!