June 23, 1995
Sunday
Just finished another long week – I spent Monday through Friday down at Pope Air Force Base flying HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) airdrops at the Army’s Jumpmaster school and yesterday here at Pittsburgh, flying with three Pope crews in a six-ship SKE formation to our own drop zone.
The HALO missions were not very challenging and required very little planning; but physically, they took their toll.
Monday was pretty light - showed up at 10 o’clock, mission planned for the flight down and then flew 1.6 down to Pope Air Force Base, NC.
As usual, there was some confusion as to who we were, what we were doing suddenly showing up at Pope, and where we would be staying. I don’t know why we go to the trouble to pre-coordinate these things because invariably we have to start from scratch once we arrive at a TDY location.
They had no idea we were coming, and it took a while to figure out a parking spot for us, which means sitting on the ramp with engines running (Evidently, an exercise was kicking off soon, but we never saw any evidence of it), but eventually someone figured it out.
Our billeting arrangements went all to hell and instead of staying on base as we had confirmed, we had to stay in a very low rent hotel on the main Fayetteville drag, 30 minutes from the base. Nothing really wrong with that, but it forced us get up earlier in the morning; we still had to drive for meals, and it made it longer to get onto the golf course after flying. ( First world problems!)
So, we finally got things straightened out and into our hotel rooms. The crew for this trip was Dwayne Smith, pilot; Henry Uyeda, copilot; myself; Charles Koerber, flight engineer; and four load masters – Bill Geyer, Al Gray, Bob Leap and Mark Hample.
This was a good trip, though really exhausting – every day for five days we got up, took off by 8 AM out of Pope, flew 15 minutes down to the LZ at Sicily DZ, landed and picked up jumpers, and then did screaming climbs up to 12,500 feet, for multiple HALO passes. Drop down, reload and do it again – five loads of four passes each. It was pretty exhausting, especially having to be on oxygen above 10,000 feet.
I learned to set up the SCNS for the HARP, and on the third and fourth day was calling the drops for the Jump Masters— something they never typically want to relinquish.
We didn’t fly in the afternoons because the winds started to increase, making it dangerous for jumpers. So… Dwayne and I golfed – we did Pope twice, Fort Bragg and Shaw Air Force Base. It was a good trip.
The last day, clouds closed in so after one attempt, we called it and went home early.
