Anytime an Army pilot arrives at a new post, they have to get to a status called Readiness Level One, which just means that they’re familiar with the local flying procedures, the local area, and their new unit’s mission. This can take several months. Here in Korea, since the default tour length is only a year, the indoctrination process has been formalized into a training program known as Green Platoon. I’m happy to report that I’ll be done in late August, just a little over four months after I arrived in country.
Due to the extreme urgency of the program, everything is compressed. We are told to expect 11 to 12 hour working days containing five hours of flight on a daily basis, plus homework. It’s been hard to take that completely seriously; the first three days of introduction and acclimatization took a pretty regular eight hours apiece. Today we even got let out early. As we left, the instructor had a reminder: we had a takehome test due tomorrow.
Six hours of work later, that test is complete.
One of the basic pieces of equipment of an army pilot is a dash ten. Formally known as TM 1-1520-237-10, Operator’s Manual for UH-60 Helicopter, it’s a three inch binder full of procedures, warnings, limitations, charts, and other information necessary for the correct operation of this machine. The test was simple: answer 50 fill-in-the blank type questions, most of which we’d memorized the answers to long ago in flight school. The trick is that you only get credit if you can reference the correct page and paragraph number to back up your answer.
It’s one thing to know that with asymmetric fuel loading, lateral control margin will be reduced in the direction opposite the heavy side. That’s simple logic, once you get past the jargon. However, it is quite a different matter to be able to find that the manual says so on page 9-25, paragraph 9.35. The difference can easily turn into fifteen minutes of searching.
Remember, this manual is three inches thick.
The test honestly wasn’t all that bad. If I hadn’t been so scatterbrained, I could have spread it over three nights instead of concentrating it all tonight. Still, they’ve shown us the hourly schedule for the rest of the time, once this introductory week is over, and it’s very easy to see myself spending twelve hours daily getting everything done.
Despite that, though, I’m having more fun than I have since I got to Korea. Having just spent years in flight school gaining the somewhat exotic skill of flying a helicopter, it was hard to stay enthusiastic when my working days here were a search for army-related things to fill the time with. Somehow, when that idleness was noticed and I got assigned a bunch of additional duties I’m only tangentially qualified for, the new work wasn’t much fun either.
Now, finally, I’m getting back into the swing of being a pilot. It’s mission planning, weather contingency planning, and execution: flight. Even flight in the sims under the tutelage of a good instructor is enough to make me remember that this job was worth joining the Army to do.
It also doesn’t hurt that, when compared with peers of similar experience, I’m not bad at this at all.
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