air time and down time

so the last three days have been pretty interesting. wednesday was pretty nice because even though i wasn't flying i had all of my work done by 3 so i was able to get away from the hanger and get some things done. i had some things sown on one of my uniforms and picked up a few more essential things.
yesterday was my RL progression flight. i have been waiting on that flight since i was going in on orders about a month before we left. we tried 3 times while we were there and it was canceled all three times do to weather or maintenance. because the flight that i needed was at night we didn't have to be anywhere until lunch time when we needed to be out at formation. from there we went to the hanger, and waited. all the dailies were done and the aircraft were on the flight line. so all we could do was wait. we waited and went to supper and then came back to the airfield to wait a little while longer. at 7:30 we had our mission brief and got all of the pre-flight stuff done. we went out to the aircraft to start up the aircraft for the mission. the aircraft was on a fly-over from earlier in the day so we only had to do certain checks while starting up. we had both engines started and at idle and then we had a generator failure. it blew the #1 & #2 converter circuit breakers. that was a red x condition no flight for me. :(. oh well the commander has already scheduled me for another night flight for sunday. i will be RL 2 then. after that i get to start flying NVGs; i am excited for that. we waited for everyone else who had flights last night to get back in so we could help them take their stuff in and get home faster. so we were out at the airfield til midnight anyways.
today was a lot of fun for me. I had some real world tasks that i got to perform. I was supposed to fly at 2. we had a briefing on Arabic and the Iraqi culture in the morning and that went on til about 12:30. around 12 the first seargent walked in and asked for the crew of the two flights going out at 2 to come with him. there were two pilots and me who were already in our flight uniforms so we went straight to the hanger. the others went back to the barracks to get changed. when i got to the hanger i found out that i wasn't going to be doing the training that was originally planned. we were going to be doing a real search and rescue mission. apparently there was a retired general who liked to fish on a little lake down on the western side of Fort Sill, and he hadn't come home the night before and his wife reported him missing. the crew of my helicopter was going out to see if we could help find him. the commander had to talk to D company to get an aircraft assigned to this mission. when he told me the tail number i was suspect about being able to use that aircraft because i remembered it being used the night before and it hadn't gotten it's daily done yet. so i went and got the log book and double check and sure enough it didn't have a daily and it couldn't fly. so i had to go get another logbook (by the way a log book is a laptop in a huge protective case) for the bird that we ended up taking out for the mission. we were in the air 30 minutes from when we started planning for the mission. we flew out to the site where the general was fishing and we picked up a few policemen to come up to help us scan the lake. we made 2 slow, low passes side to side on the lake looking for anything important that might give us a clue. on one of the first passes we found a hat that probably belong to the general or his fishing buddy. we didn't find anything else in our sweeps. from there we dropped the policemen back off and went searching in the surrounding areas. we went a klick and a half in every direction searching for the general or his buddy, but saw no signs. we searched until we were close to our reserve time with fuel and then we had to go back. they had quite the ground crew out there. we were not going to be much more help so we didn't send out another helicopter after us. as of right now they have not found him, which is too bad. they will find him soon i am sure.
I hope that everything is going well at home!
Signing off