Military at civ airports

[TankerDriver]

TankerDriver,

Don't accept the tanker community/SAC party line. They do some things well, but also look at how to reverse some of the decades-old B.S. (i.e. Get rid of briefing normal procedures ad nauseum every mission and dedicate your resources on training that matters like going through the latest changes in the AIM) Take your civil experience and try and improve tanker training at your squadron! (and don't be bullied by the inertia of the SAC Iron Fist)

My long-winded 2 cents...

I hear you and trust me, I try to figure out why we still do some of the things we do, but a lot of times the only thing I come up with is that we've been doing it for 50 years, everyone is used to doing it that way and/or noone has the cajones to stand up and say, "Why are we still doing this?". In this day and age where we have new tanker AC's with 1,000 hours of only deploying to the "sand box" (and that only takes a year or so to build), you don't find many pilots with real world experience outside the AOR. Everything is canned when we fly over there. It's the same thing, day in and day out. Same routes, same base, same receivers. It's funny when I hear some of our pilots talk about airline pilots having it easy with all the automation and I usually have to raise the BS flag and remind them that they'd uke: in the airspaces and airport environments the airlines operate in.

It's funny you mention that about the visual approach because we still have a "bean" (requirement) for logging a visual approach. We also have to log "visual overheads", which you know, is something different and lots of pilots don't know the difference between the two. I was flying with a relatively new AC a few months ago (I'm a co) and it was a clear and a million day out. Approach control was pretty busy and rather than get vectors for an ILS, I suggested we just request a visual because I already had the airport in site. The AC said no because he didn't want to do an overhead break (of course this is not what I was planning on doing) and I tried to explain we would just do a straight in, but he didn't understand what I was talking about. Like you said, we're programmed to do ILS after ILS after ILS in clear and a million weather.

Boy, this is what makes me miss civilian flying. I need to get into a guard unit.

 

[RampFreeze]

Or find a way to get out of the tanker and into the airlift world... I couldn't stand the SAC/tanker mentality and that's why I left the tanker as soon as I could. No more repetitive crew briefs that no one listens to because they've heard the same words a million times, no more mission planning days to go to the same AR track you've gone to a million times, and no more B.S. like, "Tower, say temp, PA and winds at unstick" (Like the ATIS isn't good enough, especially in an airplane that is overpowered!) The Dash One is still written for an A model and reflects years of inputs from the guys who had way too much time on their hands while sitting around on alert. The airlift world is radically different, you are treated like a big boy and fly airplanes like the rest of the world does. On my first 7-day trip in the C-5 I flew to more OCONUS airfields than I did in 3 years of flying the KC-135. The breadth of experience is incomparable.