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Aircrew: more than driving the bus

  • Published
  • By Capt. Ben Sakrisson
  • 15th Wing Public Affairs
Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska --  To an uninformed outside observer, being on aircrew can seem like a pretty easy gig. They wake up feeling alert after a long night's crew rest, drive into the office to pick up the flight plan, then head out to a plane that maintainers have prepped in advance, take off, turn on autopilot and take a nap until it's time to land.

This perception couldn't be further from the truth.

Flying the plane itself is in reality just a small portion of what goes into each sortie flown and is really only the execution of a finely honed plan that can take many hours if not days to develop. Frequently, more time can go into the flight planning than it takes to fly the sortie.

Here at the RED FLAG-Alaska international air-combat employment exercise, C-17 Globemaster III aircrews from the 535th Airlift Squadron out of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam are developing plans to fly into airspace here that many have never flown into before and under timelines similar to actual wartime employment.

"Everyone has to pass information in a very condensed planning timeline so that all players are on the same page," said Maj. David Morales, a pilot from the 535th AS and the C-17 mission planning cell chief and lead planner here. "Safety is paramount, and all players will not fly if the plan isn't safe."

There is a multitude of time and position dependent information that the crew must continually be aware of; often more than one person can track on their own.

"It's not about who is a pilot or a loadmaster, when we enter the aircraft we are all aircrew," said Chief Master Sgt. Lou Orrie, a loadmaster here and the 15th Operations Group superintendant at JBPHH. "The only way that we can effectively accomplish our mission is to follow the team concept and work together to be the best aircrew possible."

Aircrews arrive for mission briefings hours before they actually head out to their aircraft to ensure that the flight plans they previously developed still accomplish the task at hand in light of any last-minute information.

Some information is obvious such as runway number and the fact that they must check in with the control tower. Obviously there could be clouds, but what do you do? Go above? Below? Or return on home? Everyone needs to know the same answer.

Take something simple like a radio, it is not merely a push-to-talk walkie-talkie; communication check-ins are required at many points throughout the flight. The aircrew must track the proper frequency for each point, gain clearance to enter and exit airspace, and use the proper syntax for messages. Also, they must know which channel of the radio to use depending on who they want to contact and for what reason. Combined with the need to stay in contact with both military controllers and civilian airports, communications traffic can quickly become overwhelming.

"When you are dealing with geographically separated units, communicating over video teleconferences, and dealing with international language barriers, this is no easy feat," said Morales. "To move that much metal into very specific regions, at high airspeeds, with live ordinance and equipment coming off of jets, the task is a large one; not to mention your number one goal: you have to stay alive."

Undoubtedly, much of the requisite information for a sortie is less than apparent to an outsider. The crew must know the restrictions on where they can deploy flares, the minimum permitted altitudes over defined locations on the map, and follow approved routes to ingress and egress the airspace to deconflict with other aircraft. In the end, the map of a sortie ends up looking like a 3-D traffic map without stop-lights for guidance and with aircraft stacked up above and below at predefined altitudes.

If that does not seem confusing enough, throw in intelligence information on enemy threats and locations and what you want to do may have to change entirely in response. At the end of the day being aircrew is far more complicated than causally steering the jet from point-A to point-B.