Ground Fire

Two of our crew chief trainees get familiar with the M-240H in its aircraft configuration.  Zeus, the company mascot supervises.

 We've started the training of a new group of crew chief hopefuls this year.  For the January drill we went to the Florence Military Reservation to do the primary introduction and ground fire portion of the machinegun training.  It's a lot easier to get familiar with these weapons on the ground before taking them out in a noisy, vibrating helicopter. 

Primary Marksmanship Instruction and safety brief

 Everyone has at least been exposed to the M-240 in basic training, but that tends to be a short session and is using the M-240B ground version.  Instruction is provided on the specifics of our weapons, how to strip them down and clean them, and how to convert them from aircraft to ground use.  The finer points of aerial gunnery will wait until our air training later this year.  This drill they engaged targets from 100 to 800 meters away.  Each person had 400 rounds for familiarization, and another 400 for the qualification exercise.

The Battalion Commander gets a turn on the line as well.

 Once we had all of our guys taken care of, we still had a little ammo left, so our assigned medic (the Army always has one assigned for a live fire exercise) got a chance to shoot, and the Battalion Commander also took a turn on the line.

A range day is one of the training sessions that everyone enjoys, even though there's a lot of work involved setting it up.  Our full time staff did a pretty good job on the prep work, so even with the minor issues that always pop up on this kind of thing everything went on schedule and good training was had.