I wrote this a couple of days ago but i was too tired to get here and put it out on the web. so i am putting it out now! sorry about the delay between posts!
Hello all,
Things are going well here. Uncle Gary asked a few questions that I thought that I would try and answer so that you can understand without being too specific so that I don’t say or give away anything that I shouldn’t. First, most of the flying that goes on here is done at night. There are a few missions that go out during the day, but most of the time they are specific missions with very little flight time, just moving someone important from one place to another. I have already accrued about 20 hours of night flight and I have only been on about 8 flights with 3 of them being during the day.
We take precautions when we fly that we start long before we start flying. Even the missions that have the same basic principal keep changing so to stay a step ahead of the enemy. Once we have a mission in our hands so that we know what we are going to be doing, the pilots plan out a route, avoiding all sorts of known bad areas and entering high traffic areas differently each time. Once that planning is done we get the whole crew together and we do a mission brief. Walking through what we will be doing and where we will be going. One of the things that happens is we get a brief from the intel guys about what has been happening along our route to keep up on our toes when we go into an area where we know that bad things could happen.
Once we get out and flying there are a lot of different things that keep us safe. For one we never fly the same route twice. We don’t take a canned route that has been planned and just go the same route over again. We also do what is called three dimensional flight, moving left and right, up and down so that we aren’t an easy target going across the sky. Now this doesn’t mean that we fly like Tom Cruise in top gun, just simple altitude changes or direction changes that keep out flight path moving. All of our night flights are done under NVGs (night vision goggles) so that we can see in what would be almost pitch-black conditions. The helicopter has different countermeasures both passive and active that keep us safe from some of the bigger weapons that could be used against us. It has a system to dissipate heat from the engines. Different IR sensing equipment and flares to thwart off missile attacks. The flares go off right past the crew chief windows, and though I had seen them go off before in the daylight, last night was the first time that I had it happen under NVGs and it was quite an experience. They look like fireworks that don’t go off with a bang at the end.
With all of these things going on before and during a flight I feel pretty safe. I doesn’t make me feel like I am not threatened, because I know that every time that I get into that helicopter there could be a chance that someone is going to try and shoot at us, but with all of the precautions that we take things are pretty safe up in the air.
Just last night was a good example of the reason why we can’t get complacent when we are flying. Everything is ok and nobody was close to being hurt but it was just the idea behind what happened. We were flying out of Balad when someone on the ground decided that they wanted to shoot at us. Now, you have to understand the people who are trying to hurt us sometimes aren’t that smart. When we fly at night if you look out under the NVGs it is pitch dark, so they can’t see anywhere near where we actually are, but they can usually hear us. We can’t hide that, so they shoot at our sound. The guy probably unloaded a mag of AK rounds up into the air, but he had no chance of even coming close to hitting us.
Well, it is getting late here; I have to get some sleep because I have to fly tomorrow. I hope that everyone at home is doing well and staying safe. Gary, I will try and answer some more of your questions when I get a chance if i didn't already answer them. If anyone else has any questions feel free to ask, and I will do my best to answer them.
Signing off