Airborne Again

Flew to Afghanistan yesterday. Boy is it a long haul! 4.9 hours each way. That's about like flying from Pittsburgh to Salt Lake for us. Not sure the economy for us to fly all that way, but I guess if you don't have enough cargo to fill a C-17, why send it?

I lucked into the flight because the crew's normal Navigator was tagged for Supervisor of Flying duty, and I saw the opportunity to fly with that crew in his place, keeping them on the schedule, instead of missing a day. It was great to get out of the office. I had been working the midnight to 8 am shift for a couple days covering for one of the other ADOs while he flew with a crew getting the pilot back on flying status. First those hours don't really allow for dong the six mile walk during the night.. I guess you could do that before work, but then I'd be so beat afterwards, I'd be falling asleep. Second, nothing much happens during that time of night. Most of the planes launch during the day; the early lines will come back before midnight, and the later ones will land after sunrise. So the graveyard shift is pretty much that. I was able to get 5 episodes of The West Wing watched one night, but I was pretty sick of it by the end of the shift.

We loaded the airplane around 7 am. It was already 98 degrees and 65% relative humidity. In an ideal world you could get an air conditioning cart to blow cool into the plane while you preflighted and loaded the cargo. Not here. They have two available, and the J-model, the newest version of the C-130, gets one all the time, and the other was cooling off an airplane where 1 guy was inside working in long sleeves and still shivering. Meanwhile we were absolutely drenched in sweat. The perspireation just pours out of you and pretty soon you feel like you jumped into the pool fully clothed. You can't change clothes at this point so you just press on and hope that you dry out quickly during the flight.

Our cargo to Afghanistan included some of the self-loading kind, including 4 losers from the various seasons of American Idol. My family have watched on and off most seasons, but I only recognized one guy. He was Justin from the year with Kelly Clarkson. Very personable young man, easy to talk to and genuinely interested in what we were doing as we flew along. The others were eliminated 5 or 6 weeks into the respective seasons they perfromed on. They were on a USO tour of the middle east and it really seemed like they didn't know what they were doing or where they were going. I didn't see handlers, but I suppose someone was keepng track of them. It just wasn't very evident when we were with them.

We got a couple of pictures and then they were herded off to catch the next plane or helicopter downrange to meet folks who could really use a taste of home.

We were in Bagram Air Base in Northeast Afghanistan, the weather was summery but not humid like our home station. It is in a high desert valley, much like living in Tucson or southern Utah. We had been orginally tasked to go to Kahndahar, but apparently there was no cargo needng movment, and all our outbount people just needed to get to our base to either relax or catch a rotator home, and none needed nor desired to spend an extra second in any location in Afghanistan if they could help it.

While we put on fuel, a couple of us walked over to the Pat Tillman USO center that was erected in memory of the NFL Cardinals football star who, after 9-11, gave up professional football in the prime of his career and joined the Army Rangers. Unfortuntely, he was later killed in an Afghanistan firefight while on patrol hunting Talliban, tragically a victim of misidentification and friendly-fire. You can read more about him here: http://www.pattillmanfoundation.org/pat_about.php

To honor him, a USO center was erected and is filled with memorabilia from his college and professional careers. Jerseys and photos hang on the walls. Photos and art prints abound. When we were there, the place was packed with guys making phone calls and using computers to send e-mails to their families back home. A more fitting tribute could not be found…it is just what every deployment-weary soldier needs: a place to relax and unwind, if only for a couple minutes or hours.

The flight back was not nearly as entertaining, but not without interesting events. Halfway out of Afghanistan we were informed of an airplane approaching on our airway going the opposite direction. The controllers in this part of the world don't have radar, they just get reports from planes every time they cross certain landmarks, and then base their control on these "position reports." We have a system called TCAS (Tactical Collision Avoidance System) that sees the different planes' radio transponder codes and can determine what altitude the various planes are, and if they are headed towards you, away, or just going by and are not a factor. Ours showed the approaching traffic, NOT the required 2,000 feet below us, but ony about 300'! I typically offset our course by about a mile whenever we fly in "unmonitored" airspace, just to be safe, and we found that this guy was dead on centerline, passing by us about that one mile away. Got some good views and a picture of what we think was a Russian AN-124!