I’m on the early page it seems, with the 0515 brief burned into my forehead. And the late go as well, so long as your definition of “late” is expansive enough to admit a 1215 brief, 1400 take-off, and 1500 land. With the debrief to follow. Well within the limits of crew day, mind. But a 0415 wake-up, day after day, is rough country for old men.
Especially when, as it was today, the whole thing seems to be for naught.
Used to be that Navy had an on-site meteorology staff at every major deployment site to do their weather guessing for them. People that had spent five, ten – even fifteen or twenty years – learning what secrets old Gaea had hidden up her sleeves to trap the unwary or ill-informed. For it’s a dead solid truth that you’d rather be on the ground, wishing you were in the air, than on the air wishing you were on the ground. The corollary to which is that every airplane which takes off will land eventually, in one fashion or another. Sometimes they taxi back to the line. Sometimes they are swept up.
The Sandy Eggo-based weather guessers were full of bad omens and fearful visions. A ninety-degree crosswind at 25 gusting to 35 knots, we were foretold. A situation utterly beyond our capabilities, for the drag chute loves to fair itself into the wind regardless of whether that wind is down the runway, and you only have so much rudder to keep her tracking true once the rubber meets the prepared surface.
And yet, when it came time to walk to our machines, the flags hung limply, with no hint of later vengeance. So too, after we started and taxied to the hold short. Sometimes weather phenomena do not materialize as they have been forecast. And sometimes they do, but only after you have committed to going flying. Mr. Murphy still gets his vote. As does Mr. Finagle.
There are old pilots and bold pilots, but the overlap is minimal. Yet were we aware that our customers would take off if ever a plausible reason presented itself, and it would not be well thought of if the oldest among us proved chary while the youngest checked the X in the block. So at the hold short my lead called the local metro agent, who has been here since Darius stood in ranks, and asked him what he thought: You should be good to go, quotha. The weather not coming in until after 0900.
And so go we did.
Of the mission itself, not much to report. We joined up, held until committed, pushed out bravely and died unmourned. We were rewarded by the fates for our intrepidity by good conditions upon return to base. Gave thanks for our deliverance, and headed over to debrief our observations.
Heading into the debrief, a strapping young lieutenant I did not know passed me at the door, saying, “Seriously? I read your blog every day.” And that was at a distance mind, too far to read my name patch. Some other man, I replied gamely, knowing it was a lost cause. And wanting to add, “and where are your comments, at all?”
Weather guessers are often accurate, but only occasionally precise. Crosswinds did indeed manifest themselves, albeit after their predicted window. We lost the middle sortie.
The afternoon go also had predicted weather. Down the runway, or very nearly, but at 35 knots gusting to 40. In the bandit brief afterwards, the question was asked of our Navy friends what winds they would suffer. Twenty-five sustained knots, the answer came. On account of the ejection risks.
We did a little hangar flying then. When I was leaving the squadron I had the honor to command, a Marine Harrier pilot had the misfortune to lose his only engine on a gusty day in the Owens Valley east of the Sierras. He successfully ejected and was dragged to his death by the surface winds. I was for a time warned that I would lead his Judge Advocat General Manual investigation. I was happy to have the burden lifted, for JAGMAN investigations – somewhat perversely written by line officers, rather than JAGs themselves – are publicly releasable, unlike mishap investigations. What evern I determined in the course of that investigation could have brought no solace to the man’s family. And there was other work for me to do.
Another pilot remarked that a former TOPGUN instructor and his wingman had suffered a similar fate a few years back after a midair collision over Kuwait. It made for a somewhat subdued conversation afterward, but this is how we remind ourselves that for all the larks that are in it, there are tigers in the grass as well.
It seems a strange irony that the egress system which would save your life in an emergency could snatch it away from you based on something so intangible as surface winds. But just imagine being dragged behind a pickup truck at 25-35 miles per hour while grappling with your harness release and you’ll get some sense of our trepidation. The odds of losing an engine on a gusty day are no better or worse than on any other day. The odds of survival, given the conditions, are much reduced. And there would be other days to fly.
We all of us volunteered for this business, but all of us want a chance, should some bad thing arise, especially in a peacetime training environment: You’ll probably never have to eject. But if you have a bad day and are forced to, you’d a whole lot rather have an even chance to explain why you did so later.
Not long after we’d made our decision the snow was falling sideways and the wind howled through every nook and cranny, piercing though our flight suits and forcing us to shoulder through the gusts. I made my way to the O’Club for a pint of Guinness (for strength) followed by a shot of Jameson’s (for courage). Grateful for the day I’d had.
Looking forward to the next.
Budgetary cuts, USAF hub phenomena, and the bean counters driving the Navy moved the METOC community from the airfields, and now have your forecasts coming from one or two rather centralized places. It is cheaper to reduce the footprint, trust the models, have no local intuition and pattern recognition and then write a Dash 1. Every aviator I talk to decries the even less accurate forecasts they get as a result. Local knowledge of phenomena like funneling can make a modeled 12 kt go day for a SEAL jump turn into a 20 kt broken platoon day with broken legs, arms, hips, etc. But, hey, we saved a bit of money that day forecasting for Fallon from SandyEggo or for Pax from Norfolk, right?
“There are old pilots and bold pilots, but the overlap is minimal.”
Dude, you can write.
But just imagine being dragged behind a pickup truck at 25-35 miles per hour while grappling with your harness release and you’ll get some sense of our stoic trepidation.
Whenever I hear comments of this sort, I reflect on the encapsulated ejection system as implemented on the B-58, XB-70 and F-111.
I know, I know. It’ll never happen in singleseat fighters. Impossible to accommodate within the invariably strained volume and mass budgets. To say nothing of the cost.
The B-1A was a capsule bird as well. Didn’t work for 50% of the crew:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_B-1_Lancer#Crashes
Mother Nature, it seems, has a thing about conspiring to kill Naval Aviators. She has so many ways at her disposal that it boggles the mind. Thus, O Clubs.
Cheers
Tom
The winds in the Sierra’s and the Great Basin are amazing. I can remember going from Lahontan Valley past Salt Wells and over the hill into B-17 and Dixie Valley and the winds would be 180 degrees from what they were at NAS. Descents from the Sierra’s required the kind of throttle jockeying attention to Nr normally associated with a piston helicopter due to downdrafts (most likely when headed east), or occasional updrafts. It was a fascinating and sometimes very scary place to fly, especially for folks whose flying background was mostly maritime. I don’t agree with the centralization of METOC, but even back in the day the local AG’s had trouble predicting weather in that neck of the woods.
Dog: Word, bro. I began to see the sorry contraction of METOC’s at the end of my allotted span in Navy gray cockpits. I sorely miss the ability to jump into the mighty chariot, cruise over to AirOps, into Fleet Weather and get the real, TINS forecast, some amazing, free weather education and, occasionally, some very nice eyeball liberty.
Uh, so I was told. By a guy. Once. In a bar.
But you are right, the eastern slope of the Sierra and eastwards to the Great Salt Lake were some of the squirrliest wx I encountered. That, and late-May blizzards in Cold Lake, Alberta.
Comjam/
Freaky bad wx in that part of the world? One of the most miserable nights I’ve ever spent ANYWHERE was during Aug in a leaky motel w.o heating system and a single blanket in the middle of a sudden, out-of-nowhere ice-cold Salt-Storm in Wendover, Utah on the western edge of the salt-flats way back in 1960. They told me it can sand (salt) blast windshields (and windscreens on canopies) totally opaque. Talk about a god-forsaken place! No wonder they picked it for the Nuke bomb wing to train in WW2!!
(come to think, I mentioned that here once before.)
Cute AG’s and AC’s? Say it ain’t so. Sorry I missed that!
I’ve said it many times, any pilot who flies with a parachute, be it an aerobatic pilot, a military jet jock or an old geezer with a dream job, they should make a few skydives so they at least have a clue. You’re not scared are ya Lex?
Scary:
Lex may have had the joy of experiencing the sort of training we conducted at Stead AFB, and after at Fairchild AFB. We taught, among other things, releasing your parachute while being dragged. The USAF graciously allowed some of us instructors to participate at Fort Benning’s three week camp for boys (back then boys only) and learn the thrill of leaving a yet-flying, and airworthy, aircraft.
All that said (at unnecessary length), being dragged by your parachute after, not lying down on the grass, but having left an aircraft which was no longer airworthy and reaching the ground, are two different matters.
The old/bold dicotomy applies to more than just strapping one’s self behind the controls of an aircraft and taking it into the air. I may (do) snark at “legs” myself with the best/rest of them, however, I don’t snear at someone who by choice or by chance has not jumped. (At least not unless they are very good friends of long standing.)
Paul
Lex:
“There are old pilots and bold pilots, but the overlap is minimal.”
Having gotten so far as you have in one of those states, I’m happy to read that you are not trying for a twofer. The forgoing quote is my experience as well. Selfishly, I enjoy hanging out here far too much to wish that you would take a course other than the one you did. Selfish I know, but that’s the way I am.
Paul
From a different angle …
Decades ago I would use the Owens Valley Radio Observatory interferometer, made up of two 26m diameter fully steerable parabolic antennae. They were mounted on railroad tracks and could be moved from station to station (concrete pads with tie-downs) to adjust the spacing (changing the fourier components that were sampled as radio sources crossed the visible hemisphere). The crew ALWAYS made the changes in the early dawn hours, on days when the Owens Valley was forecast to be calm. If one of those got away in a wind, it would make a Yankee Clipper seem to be slow as it ran out past the end of the track.
Never happened … although there was one time that an engineer parked his rental car south of the 45m disk to unload a dewar of liquid nitrogen, thence proceeded to drive the dish from stow (birdbath) position to service (at horizon, due south) position. Almost there, the dish stopped with a crash. Stepping out of the teepee, he saw that he had run the edge of the dish into the roof of the rental car.
Accident report — “A huge saucer-shape descended from the sky and creased the roof of the rental.”
Edward:
“Accident report — “A huge saucer-shape descended from the sky and creased the roof of the rental.”
The question is: Did the Insurance company pay for the ding or did he?
Paul
Paul,
Insurance. But he DID have to explain that the saucer was planted firmly on the ground and of human manufacture.
By the way, I got to see that 45m sucked down into a mini-wormhole in the 1996 movie, “The Arrival”.
And I also got to see it while it was being built. The dish framework was lifted in one piece by 3 200ft tall cranes so the support structure (teepee) could be rolled under it. However, before rolling the teepee, crew were standing under the entire structure when the brakes on the cranes failed and the whole thing settled down at a speed of about 10 ft/sec to the ground. After recovering from shock, we counted those standing and found that nobody was under a structural member when it hit the dirt. Talk about blind luck.
Edward:
Wow. That “settled down” thing sounds just too exciting for words. I’ll bet your safety squirrel (assuming you had one on-site) had a stroke. How high was it before it settled down?
Paul
Paul,
The lowest point of the structure was above the high point of the teepee. I estimate from my memory that it must have been 40ft at the least.
We ALL nearly had a simultaneous stroke. You can see a nice picture of the finished beast here
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/OVRO-CMB/40m.html
It is a striking object to see, especially during a clear sky full moon night.
Long ago I spent many nights inside the semi-tetrahedral base (the teepee) tracking Jupiter and Uranus to investigate ammonia (NH3, a major source of microwave opacity in their atmospheres) in the atmospheres of those two planets. The axis of Uranus (pronounced your-a-nus by those who do not want to break out into a smile inadvertently) is tilted about 95 deg with respect to the normal to the plane of the solar system, so it presents its north pole to the Earth every 84 years (and south pole too). Thus it is possible to investigate the latitudinal variation of NH3 in Uranus if you happen to be around at the proper time.
Edward:
It is indeed an impressive piece of equipment.
How much damage was caused by the settling down?
That must have been very satisfying work; fun for certain types of people.
Paul
Paul,
Surprisingly, no damage to the structure at all. It was raised again and secured to the teepee. Then the reflective panels were mounted and adjusted to conform to a parabolic shape to focus the microwave energy into a fuzzball about 1cm in diameter.
And wanting to add, “and where are your comments, at all?”
We live for those, don’t we? It’s the coin o’ the blogging realm.
The breadth and depth of yer fame should come as no surprise, Cap’n.
In my day and maybe it is still the same, the Navy pareto of bad things that could happen held “drowning in your parachute” higher on the list than “being dragged to death”. Or maybe it was just felt that there was more one could control about the former than the latter. In any case, Pensacola provided practice in extracting oneself from a tangled parachute in the water, but nothing on the dragged over land scenario.
Strangely, same goes for the USAF in my day as well, Flat.
vx:
So, you never attended the USAF Global Survival School, either at Stead Air Plane Patch or (the much tamer) version at Funny Child.
Paul
Never heard that nickname for Fairchild before. I went through in June and was glad I didn’t have to pass through in winter. Got so tired and filthy/smelly out on the trek that I barely took notice of the skeeters chowing down on my hide. I always felt bad for those Huey drivers who extracted us and brought us back from the boonies ’cause we were pretty ripe. I did learn how to pronounce “Pend Oreille”.
Of course after that trek and the prison camp experience most of the crews headed back to their units. But some of us had to stick around for that “special” survival school for a few more days. Didn’t enjoy that too much and always heeded the instructors’ advice to carefully store the graduation certificate lest some future bureaucrat decide that we hadn’t actually attended and be forced to repeat unless proof could be produced.
A week later I found myself in a Deuce and a Half heading out the back gate at Clark AB
and into the jungle, wondering why in the world would a Russian linguist need jungle survival training.
Rivetjoint:
Wow! They flew out of the field? In my day, at the end of the trek there was a coffee point (coffee brewed in 55-gal. trash cans) and the students loaded onto buses for the ride back to Fairchild. (Funny Child may be my own name for the place.)
Paul
My apologies, Paul. The Hueys brought us out of the (deep) boonies to the staging area for the busses to take us back to Fairchild. Don’t remember a coffee point but the best tea I’d ever had was in that simulated POW camp after being ‘captured’ and spending time in isolation.
There were a bunch of us that didn’t, Paul. When I got out of UPT we went pipeline from RTU right to DaNang due to high losses; We were supposed to go stop by Clark’s “Snake School”, but once we got there we were waived straight onto DaNang, being told we would be sent back down later, but manana never came, then after my time in SEA was assigned direct to the UK.
Sir,
You get to fly AND write, you lucky dog.
Best regards,
Mike
Interesting, I was genuinely taken aback at the thought about wind being a factor due to ejection considerations. The younger crew are better thinkers, I guess. Back when winds like that would challenge your CEP with nary a (ok, not even a little bitty) thought about what would happen should one eject in such conditions. On the other hand, winds like that at Fallon would most likely render the target useless anyway. Dust, you know. Maybe we didn’t even try in those conditions…
You’ll probably never have to eject. But if you have a bad day and are forced to, you’d a whole lot rather have an even chance to explain why you did so later.
When doing malfunction training with handgun, one of the instructors comments was, “You’re in a gunfight so by definition you’re already having a bad day. Why would you think things are going to start going well now?”
Those sound like smart weather minimums to me.
It snowed up here and on Whidbey this week, Lex. Winter isn’t over just yet.
I was hoping we’d see him comment now. Dang it.
Back in my firefighting days, I had experienced every bit of weather that the Rockies, Sierras, Sangre de Cristos
could thow at us. One day,flying out of Billings Mont. we get a call to the Beartooths, working the Hellroaring and
the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone drainages. The Black
Canyon is narrow with very squirrley winds. We were working
that day behind a leadplane pilot that had spent the previous three seasons actively trying to kill us. Her
famous “Its a bit sinky in here.” still makes chills run
down my spine. We get there and she said”You’ll have to hug the canyon a bit,oh and by the way..” Well, as we lined up we saw that we had to do a good 45 deg. turn and roll about 55 deg to get around the canyon wall.Just as we saw that
we were committed to drop. as getting rid of 25,000lbs.
seems like a good idea, – as we slipped below the rim-
“Tanker 62 GO AROUND! Jumpers on the Ground,GO Around!”
Well we Put everything forward that would go forward, and
I saw the chutes of the Jumpers in the path of the drop. We
rolled left hugging the canyon,and being somewhat familar with the topagraphy due to my previous years doing survey
flights in that area, I yelled in the intercom “Hard right,
NOW” and Larry the Captian rolled hard right it a 60
deg. Bank. and we snaked down the Black Canyon into the
clear. As we were gathering our wits out in the open county,
Lead Plane Driver said:” well we need to do that again.”
This time, we came in a bit higher and were able to clear the Smoke jumpers.Then she said “Tanker 05 you need to tack on to that.” we didn’t hear the rest we went back to Billings. When we got there the show was called. Seems that
“tack on” was right in to this little eddy of wind that pushed 05 (a P2V-5)almost rolling it over-into the wall.
The Co-pilot, got out of the P2 and simply walked over to the rental agency, rented a car and left. Never forgot
that.
Then there was the Little Rosebud fire…
but that was another story..
Paul, my post wasn’t meant to be snarky, but I guess it did kind of sound that way, I just meant that anyone who wears a chute should get some training so that if they have to use it they have the best chance of survival. Both in the air and on the ground.
The weatherman on WLOS in Asheville was known as “Lyin’ Bob.” Now they have a weather babe and she’s known as “Lyin’ Julie.” Comes with the territory.
Given where weather forecasts are coning from, you could probably do as well as with Weather Channel. I’d go with DUATS or something similar, prolly.
I think that NOAA sends forecasters who are either a little full of themselves or in need of punishment up here to the far western, pointy end of the Great Lakes. It is now noon, CST. It has been “lightly snowing” since about 7:30 pm last night. I am looking at snow blowing for the fourth time in a week, this time about 8″ of a “light dusting, under 1″ total” that was forecast. Lyin’ Bahstahds…
Comjam:
Most weather guessers will tell you that their field is as much an art as it is science. As with all art, one enjoys the work of some practitioners more than others.
Paul
Paul,
In all seriousness, this area is known for its challenges in forecasting. There are several geographical variations that, when combined with atmospheric cycles, give regional and even local forecasters real headaches. Combined with several significantly different local micro-climates, they’re often caught either over or under-predicting climactic events. But it is fun to tease ‘em.
The Mountains here in NC are the same way. The main ridge of the Blue Ridge does funny things to weather systems. We watched one Friday, the same one that bred twisters in Alabama, parallel the main ridge, then suddenly turn from a NE path to almost due east. A twister touched down in the National Park near Newfound Gap, something of a rarity in the mountains. It was strange to see the direction of the system change so suddenly.
I don’t know what kind of effects you see in your part of MN.
A brief history of the parachute
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/a-brief-history-of-the-parachute?click=pm_news
Very interesting to read. As an ASEL private pilot, I just assumed that your wind limits would be a lot higher than ours, but it appears that the reverse is true! I’d never given any thought to the parachute dragging issue! My personal limits are the demonstrated factory x-wind of the particular airplane I happen to be in (some have tons of control left at that point, while others are truly at the physical limits, so I don’t chance it by going higher) and total wind low enough that I can eventually make the runway (Most I’ve been in was 38 gusting 45 nearly straight down the runway, felt like we did a vertical landing in the ol’ PA28!).