I graduate next Wednesday and fly to Korea a week after that. In between, it’s just outprocessing: getting signatures from the various agencies on base certifying that they require nothing more from me, selling off my car and furniture, etc. I won’t be sad to go. Fort Rucker’s been decent to me–better than I had expected before arrival–but it was never my idea of a wonderful place to stay. I’m just not a very rural type of person. I’m moving overseas, to a world metropolis, to an assault regiment: exactly what I had hoped for. It’s going to be awesome.

There is more to do, of course. There’s a mandatory leadership course before graduation, presumably to remind us all that while we’re all peers and students in flight school, in the real world there will be more complex leadership requirements when we are not the last link in the chain of command. There’s a collection of immunizations and security briefs required before leaving the country, and the general busywork involved in moving across the world. All told, it’ll be a month before I pin on my wings, and probably another before I actually head out.

Even so, the real work is now finished. I’m qualified to fly Black Hawks, and they gave me a little keychain to prove it.

It feels good.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Altitude control is a big issue (in normal flight, the standard is to maintain altitude +- 100 ft), but it is not the big issue. The big thing in formation flight is making sure you don’t get so fixated on the guy ahead that you do something stupid, like fly into an antenna.

Today’s flight was a big deal. The class was given a scenario and a goal, and the responsibility to create from these a viable mission. This, they tell us, is how things work in the Real Army. We exist to support the infantry. The ground commander will pass along a lift request, and a few days later, a dozen aircraft will lift off in two formations. The only thing we were really missing was The Ride of the Valkyries.

The general plan on any training day is this: you go out, fly your route to two RTs (Remote Training sites, just random fields from whose owners the Army has secured permission to have helicopters land). At one or both sites, you practice whatever maneuvers your IP feels you currently need practice in: terrain flight decel (don’t hit the tail on the ground!), masking/unmasking, slope operations, emergency procedures, whatever. After the second RT, you fly to an actual airfield: sometimes a military stagefield, sometimes a civilian airport. You refuel there, swap students, and then the second guy does pretty much the same thing in reverse.

Today we refueled at K79J, which was busier than I’ve ever seen it. In addition to my flight, there was a gaggle of TH-67s, three or four OH-58s, a few other -60s, and a MI-17. Size-wise, that thing has the same relationship to a Black Hawk that a Hawk has to a Kiowa. I’ve got no idea what he was doing or where he came from, but it was definitely an impressive sight.

It is for mornings like this that I own a coffee brewer with a delay brew timer.

Today is a Safety Day. Two or three times per year, Fort Rucker shuts down entirely for one of these, no matter what they were otherwise doing. People on the flight line just lose that training day, and make up the hours later. WOCS candidates and AIT kids get the day off from training. They even bring the SERE people out of the field and give them access to showers and the same crappy lunch pizza that everyone else can get. The Army rents out the civic center of one of the nearby towns so that the thousands of us can all sit in the same place and watch the briefings. The briefings are the same every time: Drunken Driving Will Kill You. Motorcycles Will Kill You (And Owning One Means You Don’t Love Your Family). Think Carefully When Starting Fires In Your House. Don’t Be Stupid On Vacation.

For the rest of this week, I’ll be in the simulators. Everyone, including the trainers, prefers real flight hours to simulator hours. Still, simulators are valuable for the most dangerous parts of training: the first few days encountering the aircraft, the first few days in instruments, combat maneuvering flight at terrain flight altitude, sling loads. It is the last of these that I’ll be doing now.

Sling loads are unique in that they really aren’t dangerous to us. We used to train them in the aircraft. In some of the training LZs, you can still find the practice loads, which are nothing more than big blocks of concrete each with a U of rebar looped into it. Nobody can verify the story, but everyone agrees on it: one day, one of the training devices failed in flight. The rebar just slipped out of the concrete block, which then holed someone’s house. Now we train sling loads in the simulator.

I should head out now. When briefing us about the safety day, our class leader gave us the mandatory accountability time, and told us to bring a book: there are no scheduled activities until more than an hour after we have to show up. We all also know that this accountability time is according to the Army schedule: if we have not already checked in with our section leader ten minutes before accountability, everyone will consider us late. It is for this reason that I am leaving at 0600 for a day whose activities start two hours later.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” one mentioned. “I kept hearing during training about how much fun my officers had back when they were lieutenants. Now it’s halfway over, and I’ve spent the entire time here.”

Another chimed in: “You have to admit that it’s not always so bad here. You really can’t beat SERE detail.”

“Yeah, no, you’re right; I just expected to come out of training and have fun doing Army things.”

*  *  *

The only appropriate word for last Monday’s checkride is ‘terrible.’ A bunch of extraneous factors combined to provide the worst possible conditions, but in the end, I just flew badly. In light of that, it really doesn’t make sense to go into the other stuff. Still, it is a new and uncomfortable feeling when during the debrief, the two major statements from the check officer are “The main reason I didn’t fail you was that I never got the impression that you had lost control of the helicopter,” and “You know, if you study hard and really work, maybe for your next checkride you could get into the high B range.”

I honestly think the low expectations for my next ride hurt more than the score I got on this one.

*  *  *

The army uses for flight planning a baffling collection of software components, mostly developed independently, some designed to work together. We have had no less than four different introductory classes on the basics of how to install and use certain of the features of this software suite. That would be ok were it not for the fact that each of these four classes have been identical.

I feel kind of bad for the instructors of these classes. It’s not their fault that they’re required to teach a random set of features in mind-numbing detail (“To change the color of the ellipse we just drew, right click on it, choose the ‘Edit Ellipse’ option, then choose the ‘Color and Position’ tab, then click the ‘Color’ button to open the color chooser…”). It’s very difficult for me to pay any real attention; there are few aspects of anything they teach that aren’t already intuitive for any skilled user of Windows programs, and we’ve already covered the rest of it in previous iterations of the same class.

I can wish all I want for a proper teaching staff, composed not of ex-pilots who want a cushy civilian DA (Department of the Army) job after having retired, but of proper subject matter experts. It still won’t happen until I get out of this and back into some sort of normal academia. Even so, I can’t help contrasting my experiences at WPI to those here as “higher education done right, and done wrong.” It makes me think that I’d really enjoy getting some sort of postgraduate degree once I have the freedom to, after the Army.

In that time, the 24 of us have had the following incidents. Two people broke the tail wheel locking pin. They were given the broken pins in the expectation that they would be worn on the same chain as the dog tags. I have had jet fuel spray into my face. It does not sting the eyes. After a trip to HAZMAT (to turn in all the clothing that contacted the fuel) and another to Central Issuing (to replace said clothing), things continued as normal. One guy in class had three aircraft fires in two days. All were on the ground and relatively minor; his crew was issued another aircraft each time and they were still able to fly.

Today, the aircraft in front of mine in the traffic pattern had an actual engine failure. With the weather we’ve been having and the minimal loads we demand of the aircraft in training, it was easily able to sustain flight and land the aircraft at the stagefield without further incident.

In the event of a precautionary landing (it would have technically only been a forced landing if continued single engine flight had been impossible), all other aircraft stay put. The ones on the ground stop, engage their parking brakes, and wait for clearance to move. The ones in the pattern, like mine, simply fly goarounds continuously until we get clearance to land.

The air traffic controller at the stagefield was not prepared to deal with an emergency. In the confusion following the PL, he cleared an aircraft to take off just as another was performing its goaround overhead. The pilots noticed and avoided a midair collision by over 200 meters. That margin was deemed unacceptably close by every person concerned.

Flight school is safe. Every building on post is named after a dead aviator, but the information panels describing them are full of tales of their valorous deeds in combat. It wasn’t until I got to this basefield, where the Army’s been training its utility helicopter pilots for the last 40 years, that I started noticing placards with the words “Killed in Training.”

Sometimes it hits you that the risks associated with your profession may not be trivial.

This may or may not turn out to be a permanent state of affairs. Every liquid and certain solid components in this helicopter are known to be carcinogenic. The IPs strongly recommend that we bring a pair of work gloves, distinct from our flight gloves, for use in pre- and post-flight inspections. They also recommend that we carry a spare flight suit in the trunk of our cars on a permanent basis: if our flight suits are splashed with any helicopter fluid, we are not allowed to fly in that suit ever again. Instead, we are required to bring it into central distribution and exchange it for a new one. If we have a spare on hand, we can at least continue with the day’s flight.

Today was the first time in my life I have touched a Black Hawk. Tomorrow I will fly one. It is a heady feeling.

For every significant piece of Army equipment, there is an Operator’s Manual explaining in detail how it is to be used, how it works, the basics of maintenance, etc. In the aviation community, these Operator’s Manuals are referred to as Dash-10s, because each of their official document numbers ends that way. For example, I am currently looking at TM 1-1520-237-10, which is for Black Hawks.

The internal format of a dash-10 has been standardized for ages. There are nine chapters, each with a clear purpose. Chapter 5 is Limitations. Chapter 9 is Emergency Procedures. Combined, they total just over 50 pages in this TM; a tiny fraction of a book two inches thick.

The thing about 5 and 9 is that they must be memorized. Only the underlined portions must be memorized verbatim, but everything must be at least paraphrasable at a moment’s notice. Representative examples follow:

From chapter 5:

MAIN TRANSMISSION OIL PRESSURE
_____ to _____ PSI precautionary
_____ to _____ PSI continuous
_____ to _____ PSI idle and transient

It doesn’t seem too hard to learn to fill in the right numbers (65, 130, 30, 65, 20, 30) on a written test, or spit the whole thing out orally. The fact that there are some 40 or so limitations similar to this one seems only an obstacle that can be overcome with time. It’s annoying, but not all that difficult.

The real challenge comes when we get to chapter 9:

UNCOMMANDED NOSE DOWN/UP PITCH ATTITUDE CHANGE
If an uncommanded nose down pitch attitude occurs:
1. _____ – _____ _____ _____
2. _____ – _____ _____ _____
3. _____ _____ _____ _____-_____ _____ – _____ _____ _____ to arrest nose down pitch rate
4. MAN SLEW switch – adjust to 0 at airspeeds above 40 KIAS and full down at airspeeds below 40 KIAS
5. LAND AS SOON AS _____
If an uncommanded nose up pitch attitude occurs:
1. _____ – _____ _____ _____
2. _____ – _____ _____ _____
3. MAN SLEW switch – adjust to 0 at airspeeds above 40 KIAS and full down at airspeeds below 40 KIAS
4. LAND AS SOON AS _____

Every blank of the above is a particular word; one that must be memorized verbatim without hesitation, paraphrasing, or uncertainty. The entire procedure, and some 40 others like it, must be memorized in their entirety.

It works out to a fairly significant amount of memorization, and pilots in the advanced portion of training are expected to walk into the first day of classes prepared to pass a test on the material. In primary, they work you into it, only require you to memorize a few a day; they take it easy as that’s your introduction to flight school. By definition, everyone in advanced training has been waiting around since primary; they get no such leniency.

Actually, there is some amount of leniency on that first day’s test: it is graded as a normal test. If you get a question wrong, it counts against your score, but so long as you achieve your 90%, you still pass. By the end of training checkride, any error on 5 and 9 is an automatic failure. Tests to that standard are conducted yearly at a minimum for the rest of your army career.

As with most decisions, this was a matter of finding the appropriate context. I was having a hard time doing that earlier because the ideal context, in which I had the opportunity to try both aircraft and choose after, was impossible. It’s no good trying to predict how well one will like something before ever trying it.

I had to step back and look at things from a larger perspective before the choice started to become non-arbitrary. Why did I choose Kiowas in the first place? Because they led very naturally into a progression that could include joining the 160th, or otherwise flying the ARH. Both of those paths assume that I’d make a career out of the Army.

At this point, that isn’t seeming very likely. Of course, I’ll make the final decision much closer to the end of my mandatory service period, but I think I could make more money, and have more fun, outside of the military. If I don’t assume that I’m going to be doing this for my entire career, the Black Hawk starts making a lot more sense. The missions I’d fly in that transfer much more directly into the type of flight I’d expect as a civilian, and the better selection of bases and assignments grow in importance.

Am I doing the right thing, intentionally declining an opportunity which may never again be presented to me? I hope so. Perhaps it’s lucky that there is no way to prove whether or not this was the right decision. I’ll just have to be happy with the choice and assume that it was for the best. It shouldn’t be too hard; I’ll be flying the most versatile helicopter in the Army.

Pros of switching: I get guns. I get a more interesting mission.

Cons of switching: I class up a month later–enough to be annoying; not enough to take the JLPT. I get fewer and worse duty stations. Higher risk. Lower toque. (Torque is all-important for helicopter flight.)

At this point, I feel like I might as well flip a coin. It all seems implausibly evenly balanced. What do you think?

(poll closes at noon tomorrow so I can deliver my answer on time)