Unless you're the lead dog, the view never changes

The WaPo’s Baghdad correspondent, Ernesto Londoño, heard about the things we’ve been doing to get the IqAF Flight School rolling and showed up to do an article. Yesterday. And, as luck would have it, the USAF squadron we’re working for/with is getting a new commander, so Londoño’s getting two pretty good stories for the Post -- if they’ll print them. But the editors seem to like his stuff, so I give it even odds.

So, since I haven’t done any recent updates about schoolhouse doings, this is probably as good a time as any to write one…

First out of the chute is the SITREP. When we first got here, maintenance on the diesel Cessnas was strictly contractor (the honcho is a former IP at Ft. Wolters, where I learned the arcane art of hovering – old home week when we first bumped into each other on the flight line) augmented by four USAF wrench-turners. In between fixing and fueling and fighting the sand infiltrating the clamshell hangar, they found time to train six IqAF maintainers, including a Maintenance Officer. Yesterday, for the first time, the Iraqis ran the flight line unsupervised, marshalling aircraft, coordinating launches and recoveries and returning the aircraft to their parking spots at Down Time. I watched for a bit, and couldn’t tell the difference between how they ran the show and how the US guys did it. Only thing odd about it was the absence of US uniforms.

Saturday, we started teaching the first formal IqAF Instructor Pilot course. The USAF IPs had already started the school commander and his XO before we got here, and *they’re* now teaching some of the senior cadets. Oh, yeah – the Maintenance Officer is now one of the Flight Instructor Trainees, as is one of the Mi-17 guys from Taji I crash-proofed in May. Heh – last Thursday afternoon, he popped into my office with a huge grin on his face (old home week, part two) and asked if I’d made any fresh coffee.

The new kids are doing fine. We’ve got one graduate class going through C-208 training, a senior class going through basic instruments and a junior class still going through ground school in the morning with sim classes in the afternoon. Work on the helipads for the rotary side is getting there, slowly, because most of the construction effort is aimed at building the new Flight School complex. As soon as I figure out which pix to crop, I’ll be doing a Before-and-After sequence as long as our server finds John’s server without burping. And as long as $#@! Vista stops locking up on me.

All of that is what the WaPo reporter came up to check out (okay, except Vista locking up), and there actually *was* an organized plan to show him things in a logical sequence -- until two key players got stuck in Biap last night…

Air Force Major: “Hey, Bill, can you crank up the sim early? We need to jump the schedule around and if you can start early, that’ll really help.”

Me: “No sweat. What time do you want me to start?”

Air Force Major: “Ummmm – in a half hour?”

Me: *gulping a half-mug of coffee and bolting for the door – it takes three minutes to walk to the sim building, two minutes to jigger the locked door open, fifteen minutes to get the computers running and my scenario weather set up and five minutes to shoo the lizards out of the cockpits and back into their crannies*

So, instead of being a sideshow, I was now lead dog in the canine and equine extravaganza. Semper Gumby, that's me.

I had the visual set for Dark-and-Stormy-Night Gloom-and-Doom – first impressions count, ya know – and Londoño seemed relieved that I appeared sane when we were introduced.

I gave him a briefing on the Visual-Only sim, showed him how the controls worked and hovered out for some practice – he must grown up with video games, because he had a decent control touch and was pretty conservative in his movements. So, I showed him how to keep a constant climb rate, gave him the controls, showed him how the instruments complemented each other and briefed him on the instrument flight program and why we started doing it for the current crop of IqAF helicopter pilots. And just as we got to 2,000 feet --

I made the world disappear. Instant zero visibility.

You can *do* that in a sim, you know.

I told him that we’d just been overtaken by a sandstorm, and explained that his unfamiliarity with instrument flight put him on a par with most Iraqi pilots – they know *how* to interpret the instruments, but because they never got to practice actual instrument flight, they’d usually lose it within a minute.

I’ll give the WaPo guy a lot of credit. He didn’t panic and he started watching the instruments right away. Because he was pretty conservative in his control movements, it took a bit longer for him to lose it, but he *did* lose it and started overcontrolling to get back level. I explained what was happening, brought the world back for a few seconds so he could visualize what was going on, then back into the whiteout bottle. I took the controls, recovered while I explained what I was doing, and then talked about how fast the Iraqi helicopter pilots eventually regain control after they practice. And I can get them into some pretty radical aircraft attitudes without coming apart in midair.

Then I brought the world back, gave him the controls and hopped out – at 2,000 feet.

You can *do* that in a sim, you know.

I had one of the other IPs climb in (still visually at 2,000 feet, which can be unsettling) to bring him back to fifty feet and give him some playtime zipping around in the digital trees – I figure he’d earned it. We briefed him on the rotary wing startup in – hopefully – August, and flew the time out until the next act was ready.

Arf.


[End of update, stay tuned for the Change of Command…]