Editor’s Note: In the summer of 1967, 20-year-old Zvi Kanor earned his wings when he graduated from the Israeli Air Force Academy. One month after graduating, however, the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War broke out, thrusting him into his first days of combat. It would prove to be the opening salvo for a 27-year-long aviation career in the IAF for now-retired Brig. Gen. Kanor, who would go on to serve as a Wing Commander at Tel Nof Airbase. He retired from service in 1993.

Kanor recently sat down to discuss his early days as a fighter pilot, and the importance of transparency and accountability throughout ranks of the pilot community. Here are excerpts from that conversation, lightly edited for space and clarity, as told to FLYING.

I have to go back to the ’67 War, which was the Six Day War. I was a young pilot who graduated from the Air Force Academy about a month and a half before this war erupted. I was only 20 years old, and my experience was with the Fouga [CM.170] Magister, which was a [French two-seat] training airplane. It wasn’t a combat aircraft. 

The whole country was on alert for three weeks before the war started. 

We moved from the training school, we moved to a Dassalt Ouragan, which was a[nother] French airplane. The first one that looked like a fighter aircraft. But because we were not experienced enough to fly this aircraft, the Israeli Air Force decided to open a new squadron for reserve pilots flying the Fouga Magister.

You should keep in mind that Fouga Magister had only a very small gun—7.62 mm—which is nothing. It cannot do anything to any tank. And the only real ammunition [we had at the time] were 75 mm rockets.

We graduated the fighter pilot [course] with only nine [in the reserve squadron]. At the time, nobody knew what’s going to happen. We had three weeks to be trained on the aircraft, which was for training, but we used it as a fighter.

So we had about three weeks to really train for a different war, for stationary targets. What we could do is use the rockets against the tanks… and the radar. Against other targets, we didn’t have the appropriate ammunition. 

• READ MORE: Navy Combat Aviator Chuck Sweeney: ‘Timing Is Everything’

The war started at 8 o’clock in the morning. I was in a formation and each formation consisted of four aircraft. Nobody could speak over the radio because we kept silent, without anybody hearing what’s going on. 

During the first flight on the way to the targets [in Egypt], we lost the leader of the formation because we flew at a very low level above the ground forces that had AAA [anti-aircraft artillery]. They hit him and he fell down. We continued… and we completed our mission. 

During the rest of the war, we flew in Egypt and in Jordan. You should keep in mind that we were at the time 20 years old. At this age, you’re afraid. But, you’re not married. You have just started your life, and you are very devoted to whatever you have to do. 

Because this [aircraft] setup didn’t have any way to enhance the way to [fire] on the target, you had to do whatever you did from a very close range. 

For instance, in order to attack a tank, we used to shoot from… a very, very low level. Very close to the tank. You could see the people from the tank jump out because you were so close.

We flew at 100 feet, which is about 30 meters, in order to launch the ammunition. This was the first time that we flew like that—in war—because during the training you never fly at such a low level. The minimum level is 100 feet or 300 feet, but during the war, you had to fly and to get down to 30 meters. Even 20 meters. 

During this war, by the way, my squadron lost six aircraft. You couldn’t eject from the aircraft because there were no ejection seats. You just couldn’t eject from the aircraft. So if you’ve been hurt, you couldn’t get out of it. We had about 22 pilots in the squadron and we lost six of them during this war.

It was not an appropriate aircraft to fight with, but we had to fight against three different countries—in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

This was my first experience as a pilot, which happened all of a sudden before we were ready to do something like that. It was a tough war because the Israeli Air Force lost a lot of aircraft and pilots during this war, even though the victory was a huge one. 

I was prepared for the next one. 

There is something that is very important for me to tell you. I do believe that the big difference or the big advantage of the Israeli Air Force is the ability to debrief. What does it mean, debriefing? Debriefing means that when you are going to any sortie—any mission—that you are going to bring everything on the table. 

One of the things that I think influenced the Israeli Air Force to be what it is, is the fact that from the very beginning, we used an 8 mm camera. Whenever you launched a rocket or bomb, it took the picture of whatever your eyes saw. 

Then you come back to the ground. For the 8mm camera, you had to go to develop it and it took time. But our air force decided that we don’t believe anyone, we just believed what the camera sees. What the camera sees, no one could manipulate. Nobody could tell stories. 

Before the camera, we realized that pilots make a lot of mistakes. 

During the years when video took place, all our airplanes used video cameras. …You hear everyone at the same time. You see each one of the cameras at the same time. You see and hear everything that was happening during the air combat. 

Put Everything on the Table

I graduated from the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. I respect very much the U.S. Air Force. It’s very good. But there is one difference, which makes the Israeli Air Force a little bit different. I was the base commander of the biggest base in Israel, Tel Nof. I was, at the time, Brigadier General. In the Israeli Air Force, you used to fly every morning in a different squadron than the position in your base. In my time, there were six squadrons. I used to fly every day in a different one. 

When I would come to fly, I was positioned within a formation of a two-against-two. My leader could be a lieutenant. The base commander, which is a brigadier general, led by a lieutenant, and this lieutenant is impacted by whatever the base commander recommends or says about him. 

You fly with him and, because he’s the leader, you know, if you do something wrong, he could say, “Did you see everything on the video?” Everybody sees everything. The leader can say, “Okay, you made a mistake here. You went under the minimum altitude, so you pay $100.” In Israel, it’s the shekel, but you have to pay. His future depends on the base commander, but nobody took into consideration the fact that he is a lieutenant. As long as he is the leader, he decides.

No matter whether you are in a civilian company or in the service or wherever you are, in order to change things that are wrong, you have to put everything on the table and to say, “Look, even though I am the general, I made a mistake.” 

This is the only way that you can change and become better than it was two days ago. 

• READ MORE: Tenacity Helped This C-130 Pilot Earn Her Wings

The post How Combat Forged an Israeli Fighter Pilot appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Navy Commander Chuck Sweeney began his Naval career as an engineer, testing electronic equipment but quickly became interested in flying. He set his sights on becoming a tailhook pilot, and while in Naval Postgraduate school, applied to fly the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk. It was a fortuitous career goal. In 1972, Sweeney was awarded three Distinguished Flying Cross medals for strikes against the North Vietnamese, all conducted in the span of a week. The DFC citation is awarded to members of the U.S. armed forces for acts of heroism or extraordinary achievement during aerial operations. Here are excerpts from a recent conversation with Sweeney, who is the current president of the Distinguished Flying Cross Society, lightly edited for space and clarity, as told to FLYING.

I was determined I was going to get into a jet. [The Navy] sent me to Naval Postgraduate School, trying to make me smarter. I tried avoiding that, but they said no. But while I was there, I applied to go fly the A-4 Skyhawk. My wife said, “You’re too old. They won’t take you.”  I said, “Yes, they will.” I was 33 at the time. But they were losing so many pilots that they took me. I said, “They were looking for cannon fodder, and I can do that.” That got me into A-4s.

[In late summer 1972 during the Vietnam War, Sweeney was abruptly reassigned to a carrier to replace the executive officer of Attack Squadron 212, who had been shot down and was listed as missing in action.]

I was out there, probably two weeks or so. We had had a storm. We were launching the aircraft, and it was the last flight of the day. I was leading three other airplanes, and then we broke off. Two went one one way and two the other. We were looking for targets. 

The other two found targets. They found some trucks. They did a no-no and they made multiple runs. On the third time they went to bomb the trucks, the wingman got hit. It was dusk, it was a heavy overcast. It was the last flight of the day—it wasn’t dark but it wasn’t light. And you could see his plane was on fire. It looked like a Roman rocket coming out, and it was climbing, trying to get altitude but also trying to get over the water. He managed to get maybe 3 miles offshore. The plane’s engine had quit and so he was losing altitude but when he felt he was overwater, he ejected. It worked perfectly. 

He landed in the water. I became what they call the on-scene commander. The SAR—search and rescue commander. I was in charge of getting him back. 

The rescue helicopter had shut down for the night, but they launched it from the destroyer. And I sent two A-4s to escort the helo up to where we were.

I assigned four other aircraft to go after—I knew there would be some [North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery] sites. I assigned my wingman because I figured there was a coastal defense gun that would open up some time, and I assigned him to take that out. But I was doing all this, writing everything down on my keyboard, just a 5-by-7 piece of paper, trying to keep tabs of everything.

The helicopter finally shows up. They flew over and they went maybe 1,000 yards, and then they dropped their smoke light. Usually the helicopter drops a smoke light so that they can get the direction of the wind down at water level. 

When they went over him, the swimmer jumped out of the helicopter and landed in the water with the survivor. He’s only 2 and a half miles offshore of Vietnam. That took guts, that really did. 

They finally picked him up. I was circling, all of us, we’re orbiting out over the water. One of the times, I guess I wasn’t paying attention, and I got a little too close to land. One of the AAA guns opened up on me. [They had figured out] who was in charge. And I thought, “I still have my six bombs, maybe when this is over, maybe I’ll find a place to get rid of them.” It was kind of a dumb thought, but I thought it.

[The rescue helicopter] picked up the swimmer and the pilot. They reported that they were in the helo and they were on their way back to the destroyer. So I reported [that back] to the admiral. I thought, everything’s hunky dory. Nobody’s been hurt. It’s time to get rid of my six bombs. And I started heading to work. I was only maybe 3 miles from the AAA site. And this voice came up on the radio. It was the deepest voice I had ever heard. And it said, “Flying Eagle 312, this is Jehovah. Report all chicks feet wet.” Well, Flying Eagle 312 was my call sign. Jehovah is a personal callsign of the admiral. And he was asking for me to report that everybody was out of the water and that everybody was safe. I thought, “Should I drop my bombs?” In microseconds, I processed it. He can’t see me. He only knows what I’m telling him. So I went in and dropped my bombs, got some secondaries and I actually saw the gun barrel come up. And then I got back over the water and reported, “all chicks feet wet.” 

So it was a very successful rescue. I was awarded the DFC for it. The pilot of the helicopter was awarded the DFC, and the swimmer was awarded a DFC. That was my first DFC. I basically didn’t know about any of these until once we got back after the end of the cruise. 

• READ MORE: Tenacity Helped This C-130 Pilot Earn Her Wings

Alpha Strike

A couple of days later, they assigned me to lead what was called an “Alpha strike,” which I called a gaggle. It’s about 35 aircraft going after a single target in North Vietnam. It was the first time I had ever led one in combat. I’d say it was a successful mission, we got pretty good coverage on the target. I can’t say we got it all, but they weren’t going to be operating for quite a while. 

Then the next day, I led another Alpha strike. I had three other aircraft with me, but we were on the very left side of the whole flight. We were headed in, and then we were supposed to make a right hand turn. About that time, SAMs—surface to air missiles—we got signals that they were launched. And you could actually see them take off. And you couldn’t tell for a while who they were tracking. You just knew it was coming toward our group. 

As one got closer, I realized that it had my name on it. The rule with how you handled that was—back in those days, and they still do it against that particular missile—was when it looks like a flying telephone pole, you do a barrel roll around, and it can’t follow you. 

[In training] I kept asking, “I’d like something more definite than that.” They said, “Trust us. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Sure enough, this thing came up, and by this time it was close enough, I could tell we were the target. The four of us. When it looked like a flying telephone pole, I did a barrel roll to the left and the other three planes stuck with me. They knew that was their salvation too. And the missile didn’t hit us.  

• READ MORE: ‘Thunderstorm of the Worst Case’

It went somewhere and probably blew up, or maybe went up and then came back down and blew up. I don’t know. Once it passed us, I didn’t care. 

In the meantime, the whole rest of the group made their right turn, so now I had to catch up. I did just as they were turning in toward the target. We had some more SAMs and AAA come up. We got to the target area and our target was actually underwater so had to pick it out on another target. We hit a couple of trains and we got some secondaries and survived, and came back out. I was awarded another DFC. I ended up with three of them in a week. I wasn’t bored.

Timing is everything.

The training kicked in, absolutely. The rescue went smoother than any of the rescues I had done in training. All my training kicked in. I’m no different than anybody else. I’m no more of a hero than anybody else. The junior officers in the squadron on the flights with me, I feel they all should have gotten DFCs. But somehow the decision always seemed to be the more senior people got them. My training kicked in, and I did exactly what I was trained to do. 

To me, it didn’t change anything. I was very, very glad I kept my squadron mate out of the Hanoi Hilton. That was a big thing to me. I was just glad everything worked out. We were able to do that. But everybody else that was on that flight with me did what they were trained to do. 

The post Navy Combat Aviator Chuck Sweeney: ‘Timing Is Everything’ appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Editor’s Note: In October 2010, Sgt. Jonathon Blank of U.S. Marine Corps 1^st Force Reconnaissance Company lost both his legs in an improvised explosive device blast while deployed in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Blank recently obtained his Skydiving A License, the certification required for jumping without supervision, through a program offered by non-profit Operation Enduring Warrior in partnership with AXIS Flight School in Eloy, Arizona. FLYING recently spoke with him about his skydive training and how he’s adapted to jumping out of airplanes as a double amputee. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for space and clarity.

I was in the U.S. Marine Corps. I was a Force Reconnaissance Marine, which is Special Operations, and so a lot of our training is specialty schools in certain platforms, like freefall. So I’d been trained to jump before. It was something I really wanted to get back into, kind of as a tie to what I used to do. 

[In the Marine Corps] I was a low-level static line jumper and also a high-altitude static line jumper with performance canopies, meaning that we jumped the square shoots that we see in skydiving, except I didn’t actually go into a freefall. You jump out and a static line pulls to deploy the parachute for you. 

I lost both my legs in an IED blast in Afghanistan. One of my legs is amputated above the knee, pretty far, and I’m missing my other leg completely. They took my femur out of my hip, but I still have my hip. 

I really enjoyed [jumping] during my military career. I had always dreamed about getting back into it but didn’t quite know how. It’s been just really amazing to have that connection back to something to my previous self, and what I used to do. And also, I guess I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and it just makes you feel alive.

I think for a lot of injured guys, it’s also important to just dive into your recreation and set goals, mainly to set goals in life. And always be challenging pushing yourself because it gives you a really great sense of accomplishment and is just overall great for mental health. It has been just an awesome sense of accomplishment that I had to drive and push myself to get. 

An A-level license is just your beginning license. It’s your first stage. It’s basically like your first step, and it’s your license to learn. That’s what my instructors call it. They train you enough that you can go up there and they know that you’re going to be safe, and that you’re going to be safe with other jumpers, but it’s just the beginning of the sport. 

• GALLERY: A Double Amputee’s Journey to Freefall

It’s exhilarating. It’s also a new experience with the freefall portion of it. It felt like riding a bike, but it was really exciting because I hadn’t done that in a while. A lot of memories came back to me with my first jump. I was also really nervous, because I had two buddies die in training accidents in the Marine Corps in freefall parachute accidents during training. And also, after having been so significantly injured myself, I didn’t want to do something wrong and end up back in the hospital. 

It is a great exercise in mental health. If anything, it’ll definitely boost your confidence, give you a sense of accomplishment. Physically, it’s very demanding, and you’re actually just increasing the odds of hurting yourself and getting injured if you don’t do things correctly. Accidents happen all the time in the sport.

I had been keeping my eye out for it. Then I learned that a recon Marine that was deployed with me that I watched get blown up the day before I was injured, I saw him skydive. I had been thinking about it so heavily, and then suddenly, I saw pictures of him flying through the air. I was like, where is he doing this? And I learned that was Operation Enduring Warrior.

[Operation Enduring Warrior does] a crawl, walk, run kind of approach. It’s really well structured. First they assess your injuries, and learn what you’re dealing with as far as physical limitations, and what you’re potentially risking. They also go into what kind of pain you experience on a normal basis, and they ask you what you think you would feel comfortable with. They let you know that it’s going to be at your pace, but also that they’re going to set down expectations and goals to reach, and that if they see that you don’t make progress, then they will drop you on the program. There’s a demand there to perform. 

They sent me to a parachute expert who got a rig for me. The guy went over it with me and made adaptations to the chute to make sure that I would not come out of it and I would be safe wearing it. They modified the parachute harness to fit me–to my body, to my injuries–to make sure that I’m safe in it. [When training started,] they explained the flight of your body and how, basically, wind affects it and how movements will affect you in flight. We covered the basics of body positions… Then, they take you to the wind tunnel. From there, you just complete hours and hours of wind tunnel training. They teach you how to fly your body, over and over and over again, so that when you actually do start falling through the air, everything becomes instinctual. 

Once they feel that you’re pretty solid in the wind tunnel, then they move you to ground school.

In ground school, they start covering canopy manipulations and safety rules, and identifying malfunctions and immediate action to correct that. Once they cover the ground school, they’ll take you up for a jump. With us, they have two instructors so they can observe you and someone can cover you and make sure they’re watching you and are ready to deploy the parachute if something goes wrong. Then you have another instructor watching you and giving you commands, different things to execute different things to execute in the air. 

They’ll give you the command to pull, or they’ll want to see you pull at the right altitude and then deploy a parachute. It’s very basic. But from there, after you complete your first jump, and every jump after that, they’ll just add more stuff to it. 

Eventually you’ll graduate to one instructor, and then they’ll make you do a solo jump all by yourself.

Since I have no legs, my landing has to be spot on. With the timing of my flare, it has to be just right. For me, my goal is to land like an airplane, come into a glide and then you kind of flare it nice and you just slide in. I used to come in and try to time my flare just perfectly where I’d stand it up. I would actually just come to a nice soft landing and stop, and kind of sit down or just land right on my leg, like stand it up. But I was thinking to myself, even when I do that perfectly there’s a little bit of an impact and over time that may build up… you’re kind of setting yourself up. What if I don’t do everything correctly and I’m setting myself up to kind of fall or actually impact? I figured that the best way for me to reduce that risk of having an impact on my tailbone, on my lower body, was to come in like a slide. If I do that correctly every time, I can land like a plane. There is no bump, there’s no bounce, there’s no impact.

I’ve been trying to jump a couple times a month because not only did I want to keep progressing with it, but I joined my company’s parachute team. I work for Black Rifle Coffee Company. We just started it. That’s a big incentive to keep progressing in the sport, but also, it’s just really enjoyable. I was really proud that my instructors were proud of me, that I did really well, that I accelerated really quickly and that I performed above what they expected. You know, I just want to keep making them proud. I want to pay back all that instruction with an active member hitting the parachute community.

The post Double Amputee Vet Dares To Freefall appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Editor’s Note: In 2010, U.S. Navy aviator Lt. Cmdr. Brynn Tannehill made the very personal and arduous decision to begin the gender transition process. Like other service members dealing with acute medical concerns, she entered the Individual Ready Reserve until she was ready to return to service. While in the IRR, however, she was considered to have failed to be selected for promotion twice for O-5 (Commander). This prompted her separation from the Navy in June  2017 at the 20-year up-or-out mark, forcing an end to her military aviation career. 

Tannehill was later offered a path to return to the cockpit as a UH-60 Black Hawk pilot for the California Army National Guard, which was in need of pilots to help combat wildfires in the state. The blemish of timing out through two-time non-selection in the IRR on her military record, however, became a barrier to her service in the National Guard, despite an impeccable service record, high-level clearances, and personal endorsements from members of Congress, a former undersecretary of defense, the assistant adjutant general of the California National Guard, the major general serving as the special assistant to the secretary of the army for manpower and reserve affairs, and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

In late 2020, she appealed to have her military record expunged, citing that “it has been demonstrated that my non-selection for O-5 was ultimately due to discrimination based on gender identity.” The window for an appeal, however, is nearly closed.

She recently spoke with FLYING about her experience and love of flying. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for space and clarity.

I was deeply, deeply in the closet. This is right around the 9/11 time frame. I was kind of even in the closet to myself. I was still presenting as male. 

My life was coming apart because the untreated gender dysphoria was affecting me and my family a lot. Imagine if you had chronic back pain, and it was just excruciating, and you found yourself snapping at your spouse and snapping at your kid, and you’re just desperately unhappy and miserable. But the choice was between getting surgery to alleviate the back pain, even if your employer said if you take time off to get your back taken care of, you’re fired. At some point, you would say to yourself, you know what, it’s worth losing my job rather than losing my family and living in constant agony.

That’s kind of the best analogy I can give.

I had gone into the Individual Ready Reserve in 2010 to start my transition, and I legally transitioned in early 2012. The IRR was set up for people who are in the reserves or go to the reserves, who want to be able to come back, but they’re having some kind of acute medical problem. I used it the way it was supposed to be used. It actually worked against me. I’d have been better off if I left the Navy entirely. So I tried to use the system the way it was intended, and it bit me in the ass. 

Sorry, I still swear like a sailor.

I lost both my jobs. I had to give up my spot in the reserves and I got “laid off” from a defense contractor, which is ironic because the instant I came out, all my work dried up. 

Was it worth it? Well, I guess so. I’ve still got my family. I’ve still got my kids. But, there was a heavy price to pay for it. It cost me an opportunity to go back to doing the job I loved the most, the job that I’ve wanted since I was 6 years old while growing up next to Luke Air Force Base [in Arizona]. 

My mom was a teacher out there. In the mornings, back when it was a training base for F-15As, I watched the F-15s doing formation max power climbouts at dawn, in the cool morning desert air in the fall. Sixty feet of blue and orange flame shooting out the back, rumbling and making noises that you can just feel your chest reverberating from the most powerful fighter jets in the world. And I got a front row seat, just off the runway.

All I ever wanted was to fly. That’s why I fought for years to put up a path for trans people to serve in the military.

I still dream about flying all the time. It’s been hard, you know. I fought the good fight and I lost.

I tried to get back in and the timing did not work out. The short version is that I got stuck in the Individual Ready Reserve, and they didn’t create a pathway to get back in until it was too late [for me]. Now it’s proved impossible for me to get back in even when I had a billet waiting for me with the California National Guard to go fly Black Hawks in a critically undermanned billet. 

And I had support from the governor of California, and the assistant adjutant general of the California National Guard lobbying for me, but I never got to get back in the cockpit after I left to transition.

That’s one of my life’s great regrets is that I never got a chance to be in the cockpit again, as much as I loved it. And as much as they need Black Hawk pilots.

They would rather stand on bureaucracy, than take back in somebody who’s got 1,250 hours to go fly for the Army National Guard. They cannot produce them fast enough to catch up on how far they are behind on pilots. From my perspective, I’m manna from heaven. I’m an experienced pilot who says, “Hey, I’ll go fly for you for free,” if that’s what it takes.

It’s always hard when people in the military discover that you love the system way more than the system will ever love you.

I’m on the process of, probably within weeks, of exhausting my administrative remedies [through appeal], but I’m coming up on the maximum age that I could be to get back in. So I think a legal challenge would probably be moot because I’m too old. Basically, I think what would happen if we took it to court is by the time the court dealt with it, the military would just turn around and say, well, she’s too old anyway. And the court would throw out the case.

There’s not a lot of people caught in my situation. If the dates changed, even a little bit…like if we had an open trans service a year earlier, we wouldn’t be having this problem. If [former President Donald] Trump hadn’t gotten elected, I probably would have found a way to get back in, or get back into the Naval Reserves or something. It’s just a matter of bad luck, bad timing, and a system that’s completely inflexible.

Going back to a time when LGBT people weren’t allowed to serve just inflicts needless misery on service members, families, and it deprives the service of people that they desperately need. 

The Army desperately needs pilots. And guess what? Here’s a pilot who’s medically fit and can’t get back in the cockpit. It doesn’t benefit our military to exclude people who desperately want to be there and to do their jobs.

The post Grounded: Transgender Naval Aviator’s Quest To Return to Service appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Editor’s Note: When pilot Maj. Kristin “Beo” Wolfe finished F-22 pilot training in 2013, she became the second-generation U.S. Air Force fighter pilot in her family. Trained to fly both the F-22 Raptor and the F-35A Lightning II, she now sets the bar for flying the service’s single-seat stealth combat aircraft as commander of the F-35A Demonstration Team, 388th Fighter Wing based at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Her aerobatics were featured in the service’s “Own The Sky” commercial, which is paired with Top Gun: Maverick in theaters. She recently sat down to chat with FLYING, recalling her first flight in an F-35, what it’s like being a female fighter pilot and how the reality of flying fifth-generation fighters differs from cinematic portrayals. Here are her words, lightly edited for space and clarity.

I flew the [F-22] Raptor first. That airplane’s a little more impressive on takeoff. The first time you take off in those airplanes, it’s you alone in the cockpit. They don’t have any two-seater models. I think flying a really advanced, powerful fighter for the first time, especially by yourself not having an instructor inside with you—they’re actually in another plane, on the radio with you—is a pretty cool experience. 

We, of course, have a lot of emergency procedures, training and the simulators prior to being allowed to, you know, step foot, or even take off in one of those airplanes. Generally, you’ve got at least a handful of takeoffs and landings under your belt before you’re allowed to do it in real life. So that training just takes over. And it becomes, you know, very focused on habit patterns and stuff, you’ve learned to bring the airplane safely back. It’s kind of a whirlwind. And then every time after that, you know, you get to enjoy the moment. It feels like you’re flying a roller coaster sometimes, taking off and landing at 150 miles an hour.

Anytime you fly an airplane for the first time, the whole purpose is to get the lay of the land and feel what the airplane feels like. The profiles and anytime we go out in an airplane—in at least a military airplane—we have very specific what we call learning objectives for that day. So that includes, you know, doing some advanced handling with the airplane, just seeing basic turns, loops, how the airplane feels and flies at different altitudes, low speed, high speed. So that’s generally your first take flying the airplane. You come back over to the field, you know, doing some little approaches before you’re actually allowed to, you know, land it for the final time. That’s a general profile with the instructor alongside you leading you through it.

The acceleration isn’t like getting shot off an aircraft carrier, so it’s not that aggressive. It’s not like zero to 150 in a couple seconds. It’s definitely an acceleration, you know, pushed back in the seat a little bit. But, you’ve seen the sight picture and done it, you know, like I said, 10 to 20 times in that simulator, so you’ve seen what it feels like. But you add in the noises and the feels and the rumbles. It’s probably what you would assume is going from—in a racecar—going from zero to 150 to take off as well. So, there’s definitely the acceleration, you feel the power of the motor right under you.

How does the reality of flying a fighter jet differ from the Hollywood treatment?

I haven’t seen Top Gun: Maverick. Hopefully, they’re trying to make it as realistic as possible. But you know, there’s a lot more than just dogfighting other airplanes and wildly maneuvering the airplane. That makes for good TV, [but] there’s a lot of different things that go on, you know, in real life. … The fighting in relation to other airplanes is more a thing of the past, at least for the fifth-generation fighters that I fly. Our goal as a fifth-generation fighter is to be stealthy, which means you’re detecting and shooting missiles at people way before they even know you’re there, way before they can even target you and shoot back. That all happens basically in straight-level flight. You know, getting high and fast to shoot the missiles. It’s not as wildly aggressive of maneuvering that makes for good TV. So that’s a lot of what people don’t see. 

What was it like to film the commercial?

It was a good time. We had all four demo teams out there to film together. [We were] working with a civilian production company in an airplane, which is a little bit difficult to get on the same terminology when you’re talking about civilian and military flying. They’re talking about, you know, cinematography, things that they want to see and what they want to, they want you to do and try to translate that into military terms, to both, you know, comprehend that, tell them what we can and can’t do, what would maybe look more realistic than what they’re trying to get. But ultimately, I think it turned out some really good footage of all the airplanes showing off what at least the fighter side of aviation can do.

Your dad was a fighter pilot. How did that inspire your career choice?

I was born on an Air Force base and moved around throughout his assignments. So [after] moving around every couple of years, I was very used to that military lifestyle. As a kid running around through fighter squadrons, at all the social events, it was just a thing that me and my siblings did. It was a very normal way of life, of being involved in like that, that Air Force fighter pilot, fighter squadron mentality. That was a familiar thing for me. I honestly didn’t think about joining the Air Force or even being a pilot till much, much later in college. For me, it was you know, very familiar with moving around, it was something I actually enjoyed versus living in one spot for an extended period of time. I figured, you know, the military might be a right fit for me. I started researching options from there, and eventually found my way towards the Air Force and then applying for a pilot slot. There wasn’t a “must fulfill this legacy of being a fighter pilot” sort of thing. That was never pressured from myself or for my parents. It’s just something that seemed to fit my personality and lifestyle the best as I found my own path later on.

What’s it been like as a female aviator in a male-dominated career field?

It’s honestly a non-event. It’s a very rank-based structure, it’s very skill-based. Obviously, we’ve been opening up more and more jobs to women as we go along, but the standards are exactly the same. As long as you can do your job, fly the airplane, know the tactics, you know, perform exactly as well as the men, that’s all anybody cares about. Because they want to take the best people to war. Everybody wants the best wingman beside them. They really don’t care what they look like, what they sound like, where they came from, or you know, what they’ve been through. It really just matters if you can perform at the end of the day.

What did your dad say when you told him you were joining the Air Force?

I think he was probably excited, just to be able to talk to someone about the military and aviation and fighters and all that. That’s something that he enjoys. And it’s a common ground that, obviously, we can talk about now—how things have changed and how things are exactly the same. 

What’s the demo team pace like?

In the Air Force, people are mostly familiar with the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels. Those are multi-ship, they’re flying up to six airplanes at a given time very close together. The Air Force also has four single-ship demo teams, where we fly one airplane at an air show in about a 15-minute routine. We do 15 minutes, all to narration of music. [We] travel around the country, sometimes internationally to air shows, to really show off the airplane.

Our whole mission of demo teams and air shows, in general, is to recruit people to take our place one day. There’s one pilot flying at a time, but there’s also a team of maintainers behind me, making sure the airplane is safe and ready to fly. It can be a quick pace kind of thing as you’re going from airshow to airshow to airshow three weekends in a row. It’s a lot of traveling. But it’s also a lot of fun to get to see different places of the country.

We don’t listen to any music while we’re actually flying because I’ve got earplugs in and because the airplane’s pretty loud in there. We’re listening to about three radios up at any given time. I’m either talking to who we call the air boss who’s running the air show. I talk to my pilot on the ground, who’s called my safety officer. And then I can talk to a warbird, a World War II or similar airplane that we fly with, as well. So, I’ve got those frequencies up. My maintainers on the ground do run a soundtrack to the airshow, and each maneuver gets its own given song to a variety of different types of music, depending on what fits with the maneuver or fits into the local airshow vibe of what people want to hear.

What you see at airshows is very different from what the rest of the combat Air Force is doing every day when they start training for threats. My squadron just got back from Germany, [after being deployed] for three months doing the whole Russia-Ukraine sort of thing. So what they’re doing every day is extremely different from what I’m doing in front of an airshow doing aerobatics very close to the ground. They’re doing very serious things.

The post Flying Fancy: USAF Fighter Pilot Demos F-35 Aerobatics appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Editor’s Note: When U.S. Air Force C-130 pilot Capt. Thessa Washington became the first female Black C-130H pilot in the 165th Airlift wing of the Georgia Air National Guard at Savannah Air National Guard Base last year, she said she never imagined being the first of anything. In fact, there were moments in Washington’s journey from sheet metal worker through Undergraduate Pilot Training where she questioned if she was meant to earn her Air Force wings at all. Here is her story, lightly edited for space and clarity, as told to FLYING.

I wasn’t one that always knew I wanted to fly. I actually didn’t think of that as an option at all. It just never even came into my mind as a thing. I was enlisted first, in college with the Georgia Air National Guard. I wanted to become an officer once I graduated college. I wanted to travel more because my position in maintenance was not giving me the opportunity to travel as much as I wanted to, and that was one of the main reasons I joined the military. I also wanted to stay with the Savannah unit because I enjoyed the Savannah area and the unit itself. 

There were only two options with that unit—either pilot or navigator.

One of my sergeants at the time said, “Hey, let’s go see what it takes to be a pilot,” and I thought she was crazy. She took me to the commander at the time. The process for becoming a pilot is pretty similar to any officer position, at least in my unit. It’s pretty similar [to] most other units. You fill out applications. There is an Air Force Qualification Test that you have to take and there’s a [Pilot Candidate Selection Method] PCSM test that you have to take. It’s basically like a video game to overly saturate you with a lot of tasks at one time to see if you can multitask. Then, you know, transcripts, resumes, letters of recommendation, all the other things that you have to have for any job, really, and any officer performance report (OPR) reviews.

Our unit wanted people to have private pilot licenses. It’s not a requirement, but it’s suggested. They do that because they want to make sure that you know that you want to be a pilot, that you’ve actually tried flying and you’d like it, which makes sense.

At the time of me speaking with my commander, I had no experience flying at all. But afterwards, that’s what I went to do. I was like, “Okay, I’ll go to a nearby school. And I’ll see what it’s like and see if I like it.”

I did what they call a discovery flight. That’s about 45 minutes at a local school in Ridgeland, South Carolina, called Atmosphere Aviation. They took me up and let me control the plane a little bit, and flew me over the marshes toward Hilton Head. I fell in love with it. I said, “This is amazing. This is awesome. Let’s do it.” That’s how I got the itch. 

In 2015, I started working on my private pilot’s license and building my package to apply for the next board. And the next board was actually happening on my first deployment. I actually did my interview over the phone in the base library in the little phone booth. And I did not get the slot that year. I was put in as a backup, so in the case that someone else didn’t make it through or something happened, then I would be pushed through the line to hopefully get in. It took a few more years before that happened.

• MORE FLYING FOR THE COLORS: ‘Thunderstorm of the Worst Case’

In 2017, I finally got called up. I went to [Officer Training School] OTS in 2017, graduated [Undergraduate Pilot Training] UPT at Columbus Air Force Base in April of 2019, and finished all of my other training for the C-130 and returned to Savannah in February 2020.

If I’m being honest, there were plenty of times that I honestly wanted to quit [UPT], I wanted to go home, tuck my tail, you know, and, and take the shame. But I had so many people in my corner. It was almost like a Catch 22 sometimes. I had all these people who were rooting for me, so there was pressure. At the same time, I had all those people rooting for me, who were there holding me up. I have my faith, and that really helped push me through. 

For one, I was the oldest person in my class. I was the only Black person in my class. And I was one of three females. Because I had been in the military the longest, they made me class leader. I had to relearn how to learn again, because I’ve been out of college for eight years at the time. So studying at a fast pace, and things like that, taking tests all the time and being evaluated every moment—that was not new, but it was definitely brought back with a fire hose. 

It didn’t come naturally to me. I’m an athletic person. I catch on to things really fast. I’m a quick learner, and so most things I can just pick up. Being that I wasn’t able to do that as fast as I wanted to, that hit my pride a little bit. It’s not easy to fail, you know? There were times that I felt like I was failing and it was a very hard pill to swallow because I had a lot of people who were pushing me through and backing me up.

There were people telling me, “Hey, you may say and think that you’re failing, but did they send you home yet? No, they didn’t. Well then, obviously you’re doing something right.” 

I even called my maintenance commander back home and told him “Hey, before they call you, I wanted to call you and let you know that I don’t think I’m gonna make it. You know, I want to be the first to tell you that I let you down.” He was a pilot before and he talked me through the pattern, which is what we fly around the airport before we land. He talked me through the procedures and said, “Sounds like you got it. You just have to have the confidence.” 

That’s what I was really lacking, my confidence that I belonged there. 

• MORE FLYING FOR THE COLORS: Trust is the Cornerstone for This Alaska Air Rescue Team

There was nothing about me that was similar to anyone else in my class. When it came to age or the fact that I hadn’t always wanted this, the fact that somebody in my family was a pilot before. I wasn’t an Academy graduate or ROTC graduate. There was a lot of me putting myself down before I gave them the chance to put me down. Those people in my corner, they were really the ones who got me through. So I pretty much vowed to myself that the only way I would go home was if they sent me home, whether it was at graduation, or I failed. Either way, it wasn’t on me. I gave it my all and I tried. 

And I graduated.

As an African-American female pilot, I am one of two in the Georgia Air National Guard. It’s kind of a big deal, and I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was until it happened. You know, when I got back, I was the first for our unit. Our unit only has two African-American pilots, period, including myself and my commander. So we are the first. He’s the first African-American [pilot] ever, and then I’m the first African-American female. And we’re the “onlies.” And there was a 17-year gap from him getting hired, to me being hired. 

It was kind of a really big deal when I got back [from UPT] and the first thing he said to me was, “I’ve been waiting for you for 17 years.” That hit.

And then immediately, you know, after that, lots of other African-Americans that were enlisted in our unit that knew me when I was enlisted, the look in their eyes, of like, “We’re proud of you. This is a win for all of us,” kind of thing. 

I love the C-130. Working on it and knowing the mission and the capabilities that we have. It’s so versatile. It’s a crew plane, so I get to fly with other people. I’m not just by myself. We deploy in good and bad places, not just bad, not always fighting. Sometimes I’m helping and saving. We get to fly low levels, which basically we fly like 300 feet above the ground over rivers and in between mountains. It’s a really cool way to see the world. 

I really love the aircraft itself and the mission that’s attached to it. Also, it’s a good transition plane if I ever decide to go to the airlines or cargo. I’m not interested in them as of yet, but I do have that option. 

My first flight [in the C-130 after UPT] was with the commander, the other African-American pilot. It was a Friday flight. We really didn’t do much, we just went over to Hunter [Army Airfield] and what we call “beat up the pattern” where we do a bunch of pattern work, such as a bunch of touch-and-goes. It was just really cool to finally be flying the planes that I used to fix, in my city and with my crew. It was awesome.

Know someone we should profile in a future edition of ‘Flying for the Colors’? Tell us about them!

The post Tenacity Helped This C-130 Pilot Earn Her Wings appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Every year, more than 450 search and rescue (SAR) operations are conducted in Alaska, according to Alaska State Troopers, the statutory lead in all SAR efforts in the state. For more than 20 years, the Alaska Army National Guard has been one asset troopers have relied upon for assistance in remote SAR operations.

Last September, troopers turned to Alaska Army National Guard’s Golf Company, Detachment 1, 2-211th General Support Aviation Battalion, 207th Aviation Regiment for help. Medevac Commander and UH-60 Black Hawk Instructor Pilot Capt. Cody McKinney, along with flight medic Sgt. 1st Class Damion Minchaca and helicopter crew chief and hoist operator Staff Sgt. Sonny Cooper were part of a four-person team dispatched to try to rescue a sheep hunter who had been stuck on a ledge for two days. A snowstorm was moving in, and time was running out.

The rescue earned the team the 2021 Rescue of the Year by DUSTOFF Association. Here is their story, as told to FLYING, of that day, how they performed the daring rescue in their UH-60 Black Hawk during treacherous whiteout conditions, and the teamwork and trust it required among the crew. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and space.

Capt. Cody McKinney, Medevac Commander and UH-60 pilot

In this [rescue], particularly, they called us, and I think it was 2 in the afternoon, and said: “We have a hunter—he was hunting sheep—and he got stranded on a ledge that we think is about [a slope of] 60 degrees, and he’s up at 5,800 feet. And he’s been up there for at least two days. He can’t move anywhere. We don’t think he has any injuries. But he may have cold-weather injuries, given how high he was, and it had snowed the last two days.” 

When we received the mission, the first thing we did was we started flight planning. We knew that he was at 5,800 feet, and we knew that he was on super steep terrain, so we kind of knew what kind of hoist it was going to be. But then, when we started looking at the weather system, they were showing a broken ceiling somewhere in the 4,000s [feet]. 

• READ MORE: ‘Thunderstorm of the Worst Case’

We had an idea that we weren’t going to be able to get up to him, but with a broken ceiling, we figured we would try. 

We launched pretty quickly after receiving the mission. We were going toward Knik Glacier, I think it was a 30-minute flight. 

We climbed as high as we could, and we started bumping up against the clouds. I want to say we were [at] 4,500 feet or so with a broken layer. As we were doing that, we’re like, “We’re not going to be able to get to this guy. So what can we do?”

We called back to our boss and asked her to get the Alaskan Mountain Rescue Group on the phone and pre-position them in Palmer [Alaska], which is about 15 miles away from the rescue site. 

Our plan was, we’re going to go out there. We’re going to try to see if we could get to him, kind of anticipating that we couldn’t. [If so,] then we would swing back, try to find a good place to land up there as close to him as we could get. Then, we would come back and pick up Alaska Mountain Rescue Group guys, put them in via hoist as high as we could get and let them climb up to him. Then, they could bring them back down and we would hoist them out, you know, so we weren’t trapped in that cloud layer.

What we didn’t want to do was leave him up there for another couple days because he would have died. 

We’re coming up with this plan, and what we try to avoid is a quiet cockpit. So one thing we’ve kind of learned over the last three or four years working together is when a cockpit gets quiet en route, we just try to start talking about things that maybe we’re forgetting. 

So, we said, “All right, we know this guy’s been up there, he’s hunting, he’s got a lot of money. I bet you this guy isn’t gonna want to get on the hoist without all of his gear,” which is a thing. These guys get all combative and weird because they spend thousands of dollars on that gear, which we’re not interested in at all. 

So [Staff Sgt. Sonny Cooper] says to [Sgt. 1st Class Damion Minchaca], “Hey, I’m going to hook you up with extra carabiner. Like, we’ll get you the two-up device from Air Rescue systems and we’ll have everything in place in case this guy refuses to leave so that we can at least do a quick pick.” 

When we got around the corner to start looking at lower elevation places we could land, we found an opening in the clouds that we thought we could punch up to. When we saw that, it was kind of like a reality check between the crew. Do you guys want to come up to this and actually do this? We’re surrounded by 7,000-8,000-foot mountains. 

If we come up through this layer and we get stuck, we’re gonna have to push up through the icing and all the clouds to try to get an IFR clearance back, and it’s going to be a significant emotional event for everyone. But, you know, that’s the nature of medevac missions and we wanted to get this guy back home. 

We decided to push it. 

We came up through this hole—I think it was 4,500 to 4,800 feet—there was a layer where these broken clouds were sitting at, that 4,800-foot layer. We couldn’t really see it, but we knew that there was a ceiling at about 6,000 feet, and it was snowing pretty heavily. 

We got the grid where this guy was supposed to be, and of course, we couldn’t see him. And so we’re trying to fly around, and I’m telling my pilot in the other seat, “If you lose the mountain out the left side, let me know so that I can start to descend, or we’re gonna push up and start climbing because at that point, I think visibility was probably a mile.”

Very similar to flying in a ping-pong ball. We were using the broken rocks on the side of the mountain as reference points. We did two orbits looking for this guy and he finally figured out that there was a helicopter in front of him. He had a jacket that was red on the inside, and he turned it inside out and waved it at us, so we saw him.

Winners! Alaska Army National Guard aviation wins DUSTOFF Association Rescue of the Year! #TeamAKNG #AKArmyNationalGuard #dustoff

Story here https://t.co/GBzGt7kUN5 pic.twitter.com/ucgARAqB0R

— AlaskaNationalGuard (@AKNationalGuard) February 18, 2022

What he had done was he came off a saddle and scurried across a little scree field with a 60-degree slope, and then got caught on this little rock ledge that was maybe 3 feet by 3 feet. And then it snowed while he was there while he camped overnight. The next morning, he was just stuck. He couldn’t go anywhere. 

We identified him, knew where he was at and knew it was going to be a very technical hoist. We did an orbit and just talked about, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to do a dynamic-style hoist. We’re going to minimize our time coming in. And then after we pick him off the hoist, we’re going to do a left descending turn, and while [Minchaca’s] coming back up into the helicopter, we’re going to descend back down through that sucker hole to make sure that it doesn’t close up on us.” 

We came out maybe a quarter mile from where he was and we did all of our safety checks, opened the doors [Cooper] moved out to the door of the helicopter and brought [Minchaca] out. 

We have skis on our helicopter, so you actually have to drop half of our ski when it kind of dangles down below so that the hoist rider doesn’t hit it. Then we brought [Minchaca] out to what we call the brace position, which is where we bring the cable down and he sits basically where the floor of the helicopter sits at his armpit level. And then we kick the tail out to the right about 15 degrees, so we’re flying in kind of like a notch profile. What this allows is for the hoist operator and the hoist rider to visually confirm the target and to make sure that everybody’s on the same page of what we’re doing and where we’re going.

We are in that profile with the nose kicked to the left about 15 degrees. We’re going about, I don’t know, 50 knots-ish, and we’re starting this kind of gradual approach to him. 

[Cooper], in his head, is measuring where the target is at so that he times running the cable out.

Staff Sgt. Sonny Cooper, helicopter crew chief and hoist operator 

At this point, we’ve identified the target. The aircraft is in its profile and we’re on approach but this guy put his jacket back on, the camo side out. I was the only one who actually had eyes on him at this point, so I’m trying to guide the aircraft in while trying to point him out to [McKinney], who is on the controls in the right seat and also point him out to the medic because we don’t really have the time to do more orbits in there and find this guy.

This is our one shot, our one chance to actually get to him in a timely fashion.

We’re making the approach and calling him in, and about halfway in, [McKinney’s] able to identify him. [Minchaca] gets eyes on him and I start rolling the cable out. I’m lowering [Minchaca] down. I’m waiting for his hand and arm signal letting me know that he’s about the same level as the guy on the mountain. 

He gives me a signal, so I stopped cabling him down. I continue calling the aircraft in until [Minchaca’s] within five feet of the target. But, I’m looking down there at this guy and he’s on this small ledge that’s maybe 3 feet wide by 2 feet back and there’s a wall of rocks right behind him. There’s nothing but snow on either side of him, to his left and right. I’m not wanting to set [Minchaca] down right on top of this guy because there’s a risk of bumping this guy off the mountain.

At first, I tried setting [Minchaca] into the snow on one side of him. The snow sloughed out from under him, so I tried the other side of the guy and set him down. That snow was just as soft and nothing stable to put [Minchaca] on, so my last option was to put him basically right on top of the guy.

When [Minchaca] landed, his feet basically interlocked with him.

Keep in mind this is all probably within about 30 seconds. I tried one spot, tried the other, and they don’t work, and I put him right on the guy. 

Capt. McKinney

I think at this point, too, the cable length is probably 70-80 feet. We like to hoist at no lower than 70 feet because the rotor velocity on the helicopter is so great that it will affect the hoist rider. We also didn’t want the downwash from the rotor system to push that guy off that ledge.

Like [Cooper] just said, [Minchaca] tried to touch a part of the ground that was next to him and it just completely shuffles, like sloughed off. It was a good thing he didn’t try to walk out because it would have killed him. 

This terrain relief was 60 degrees or so. When we ran [Minchaca] out on that cable initially, we’re at 5,800 feet and all the way down to the bottom of that valley. He was sitting out there, just dangling for 30 seconds at 4,000 feet or so.

Sgt. 1st Class Damion Minchaca, flight medic

When I came out of the helicopter…and I didn’t see the guy. I finally get a little glimpse of the guy but I keep losing him. I’m really trying to work the wind because, as we’re coming in, we have to beat our rotor flow. We try to beat that before it starts to make you spin. I come down and me and Cooper, we’re working together. I’m near the area I want to be at, but I touch it and [what looked like snow covered ground] obliterates. I thought it was solid. I felt like I was going to fall off the face. It was pretty intense. 

Before we got out there, me and Cooper actually did a little practice run of how we’re going to use the ARV—our air rescue vest—in the back of the helicopter, so I was ready and pretty prepared to get him inside of it.

I push him against the ledge to get a nice and stable base. He was already on top of it. He’s screaming about his hunting bag before I can talk to him about anything else. I was like, “Hey, just hold on. Let me get this vest on you.” I throw his arms through the vest, get him locked in. I get all three points locked in, and I reach over and grab his hunting bag. 

[Minchaca informs the man that if the bag hinders the operation in any way, it will be left behind.]

I look up and you can see the helicopter, all the snow, it’s breaking the mountain apart as we’re trying to get off of there. I just knew we had to get out of there right away. I snapped it on. I get the up signal, so I shook my head up and I’m ready to go. And I come right off that mountain. 

When we do those swings, as you come off the mountain, the helicopter turns into the swing, and it is a perfect flow as we’re coming through. We came up nice and straight. We didn’t spin at all and came right into the cabin.

Capt. McKinney

One of the interesting things about the medevac and hoists and a helicopter that’s over 70 feet long is that—like typically in aviation—it’s always the pilots who have the precision and the skill and all that stuff. But in hoists and these precision environments, it’s really a team effort.

The way that [Minchaca] rides the hoist, like if he puts an arm out in the wrong position and gets into a spin. If he doesn’t give the right hand and arm signals, we put him down in the wrong spot. But we know we’re 70 feet in the air coming down to a target that I can’t see, so it becomes like this trust game. 

[Cooper] is not only working a pendant that goes up to 300 feet per minute, trying to manage [Minchaca] and talk to me about what’s happening on the hoist. He’s also calling the helicopter, and I am just blindly trusting whatever he says. 

So if [Cooper] says, “Hey, you’re clear left, I want to bring that tail around and start to move left and descend,” I just do it because I trust him. 

That’s kind of the environment that we’ve built here. It just absolutely does not work unless you have that. 

When we started bringing [Minchaca] in, because you have the rotor velocity coming off of the helicopter, it comes down on that slope. And as it’s coming down on that slope, it doesn’t matter how good a pilot you are. As soon as you pick that load up, that velocity is going to push that load away from the mountain. The only way that you can manage that is that you time it and you roll the helicopter away with it to stop any unwanted conical rotations. 

[Cooper] was managing all of that stuff. He’s also, in his head, timing as we roll out. Then, as we’re turning around the corner, we’re descending into a cloud layer, and we’re looking for that open spot. 

As I’m coming right, my co-pilot [Chief Warrant Officer 2] Brad Jorgensen says, “Hey, you got an opening right there. Let’s straighten it out.” Cooper’s saying the load is good, bring him up. In a matter of two minutes that felt like an eternity, we pick this guy off of a mountain. We’ve got him. We brought him back in the helicopter. We descended back through a cloud layer and we’re headed back.

The reason that these missions like this are possible is because we have the support of our leadership to train in technical environments, so when we go and we do a hoist off the mountain, it’s not like the first time we’ve done it. We have the Air Guard and other DOD assets that we train with, the Air Force. We’ve trained with the [Navy] Seals up here, [Special Forces] teams. We have this high level of proficiency so that when we go out and somebody is relying on us to bring their kid home that they can have the trust, and we have the fidelity to actually execute those missions. 

The post Flying Blind: Trust Is the Cornerstone for This Alaska Air Rescue Team appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Editor’s Note: On August 30, 2021, the last round of U.S. military airplanes filled with troops and civilians departed Kabul, marking the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. During the Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO), military flights evacuated an estimated 124,000 people from Afghanistan. U.S. Air Force C-17 pilot Major Kirby Wedan led the last formation of aircraft out of Afghanistan. Here is her story of that day, lightly edited and as told to FLYING.

I guess, like any exercise I’ve trained for, it all started kind of the day prior. We had a brief for all the crews, we had a bigger picture operation brief, and then the C-17-specific brief for the crews executing, and then everyone was sent to crew rest, just like every other exercise that we’ve trained for. 

It didn’t really hit me until after it was all over, the significance of that day and of that flight. 

I was a part of the 816th [Expeditionary Airlift Squadron] for the entirety of the evacuation. We’d been working long hours, getting very little sleep. Crews were, you know, putting the pedal to the metal, throttles to the max for going on two weeks to two and a half weeks, almost three weeks. Everyone was exhausted and it was kind of that culminating event that day. 

I think the most significant thing that I remember of that [last] flight was just looking in the back of our aircraft. We were taking some of the troops that were at the Abbey Gate, which was the gate that had been bombed earlier during the operation. They were in the back of our airplane, and no sooner than five minutes off the ground, they were asleep. You could just see the exhaustion, the wide array of emotions from everyone on board from what everyone had been through over the past couple weeks. That was pretty eye-opening. It was a relief. It was relief, sadness, anger, frustration. Everything.

I will tell you that, on that day…when the airfield was overrun, I was at Al Udeid [Air Base] monitoring, and I have to say that that was probably one of the scariest moments I’ve ever had in my career. Just kind of watching it happen real time and not really being able to do anything about it. I had the squadron commander in the room with me, and that’s the most scared I’ve ever been, pretty much all of us. We immediately were trying to get a hold of anyone on the ground there, to try and help to see what we could do, what we could—anything. And for the rest of that whole time, and especially on that last day, it was a concern of all of ours. 

We were always on the lookout for anything to happen. Anything and everything could have happened that day, and we were eternally grateful that things turned out the way they did on that final day.

We had full trust in our crews. Our crews have trained for these moments their whole careers. Every single one of them brought their A-game. Every single one of them was ready, was able, had the knowledge, had the skills, and were willing to think on their feet. Those crews on that first day, when they did get overrun, every single one of them made safe judgment calls, made the right judgment calls, and did what was necessary to keep their crews, their aircraft, and everyone safe. 

Back in the beginning planning stages of the operation, we had initially thought that we could [execute] an orderly evacuation of putting people in seats on the airplane, and try—especially with the coronavirus concerns—facing everyone out. But in the first days when [the NEO] first started, that just wasn’t feasible. Some of the judgment calls were using past experiences and the knowledge that crews have, being able to do the floor-loading process. So just bringing people on and having them sit on the floor, essentially, with straps. And it wasn’t until, you know, later down the line, that the approvals and things caught up with that.

Even now, we really don’t have a good number of…how many people you could fit in the cargo compartment. A few years ago, with the Philippine evacuation, we had 600-something. On that first day [during the Afghanistan evacuation] when one of the jets was overrun, and they departed, I think their number was in the 800s. There’s really not a good number that we have even now. So every single day, those crews…we would give them our best educated guess and different planning numbers to go off of, but every day they were making that judgment call of how many they were willing to accept on every flight, to make sure everyone got safely out.

My main job was actually to be on the ground at Al Udeid [Air Base] prepping the crews as they were stepping out to go and fly. There were crews that went in and out five, six, seven times. I would estimate that they were bringing out thousands across their mission.

The NEO in particular—we actually don’t have very much training [on that]. There’s been a couple of weapons school papers written about it, about how we would be employed in a NEO. Honestly, in the planning for this NEO, that’s mostly what I relied on—overarching Air Force and DOD regulations of evacuations, and then our specific weapons school papers about a NEO and how the C-17 can be employed in that. 

Going to do an evacuation is just like any other mission.…Unfortunately, Kabul was kind of a thunderstorm of the worst case in every planning scenario. So there was a lot that each crew member had to deal with on all of those missions.

Because Kabul is at a high elevation [with a] high pressure altitude, and it also has significant terrain, we did actually use tactical arrivals and departures going in and out of that airfield. Because of that terrain, it has had a really high climb gradient [on departure], which on a normal given day, on a normal mission going out of Kabul, it really limited the amount of weight that you could take off with. [During planning] we had come up…with different routes to try and mitigate that, to help crews be able to take off at a heavier weight and have a lower climb gradient to get out of Kabul. That was something we looked at beforehand to help crews with their decisions and being able to accept more weight.

Every airfield, there’s the obstacle climb gradient that TERPS [terminal instrument procedures] uses to plan any [IFR] departure leaving an airfield. The rule of thumb is the 200-feet-per nautical-mile rule. That’s like the slope that they use. And then, if there are any obstacles that break that slope, then they have to raise it up and create a new climb gradient. So for Kabul, I believe at least on the primary departure runway, the climb gradient was 400 feet per nautical mile, which for the C-17, decreases our performance. If we want to be able to climb out at that climb gradient, we would have to decrease our weight either via fuel or cargo in order to meet that climb gradient off of that runway.

You want to land on [Kabul Airport’s Runway] 29 and then also depart on 29 because that gets more aircraft in and out. Otherwise, if you depart the opposite direction, you’d be conflicting with anyone trying to come in and land. Being able to take off and land in that same direction was ideal. We planned a VFR departure, which takes away the IMC TERPS requirements for the climb gradients, and we were able to come up with a VFR climb gradient to ensure obstacle clearance using a VFR ground track. Essentially, they had to be able to see the obstacles in order to take off and maneuver around them. In essence, it took the onus of obstacle clearance off of the TERPS planners that designed the departure procedures and put the onus on the pilots to see and avoid, essentially, the terrain to be able to depart.

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I still think about it a lot. I will be completely transparent and say that it took me a really long time to kind of get back to normal after that whole experience.

It took me a few weeks just to, kind of, get back to normal life. It was an experience and I don’t think I’ll be how I was before, probably ever. It’s definitely something that’s going to stick with me forever. It changed a lot about how I look at my career, what I want to do with my career. It reminded me why I went to the Weapons School for C-17s. It reminded me why I wanted to go, why I wanted to go through that training. It also reminded me about our [cargo] community. Our community is, a lot of times, overlooked. We’re not in the spotlight a lot. We’re always behind the scenes; we’re not fighter pilots, we’re not the tip of the spear in most instances.

It was a good reminder of the importance of what we all do. 

I think the biggest thing that I want to make sure that people see is just the heart and the willingness of this community and the airmen, not just in the C-17s. Airmen on the ground, in maintenance and support functions—they were all doing everything they possibly could to get the mission done, in spite or despite of anything that was going on at higher levels. They were willing to fight. And that’s something that people need to know.

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