I’ve spent so much time on KC-135s lately I decided to do a comic including them and, sadly, what is more or less a true story from one of my flights. We seriously didn’t find out that the fighters we were scheduled to refuel weren’t coming until after they’d landed. I swore I’d make a comic out of it one of these days, and now I have. Success!
Another experience which will more than likely soon find it’s way into the strip is a debacle I had to deal with Wednesday, during which a computer glitch caused me to receive multiple copies of every email I got throughout the day. By the time they got it fixed, I’d received more than 33,000 emails. That’s typed correctly – thirty three thousand - in a single day. What made matters worse was the fact that the weather at RAF Mildenhall couldn’t make up its damned mind, so we were constantly getting inclement weather notices – and their subsequent cancellations - from the command post.
Happy Guy Fawkes Day, to those who observe it!
-Farva
Remember, Remember, the 5th of November.
The Gunpowder treason and Plot. I know of no reason, why the gunpowder treason, should ever be forgot.
great strip..
WOW on the email glitch.. and think of the spam on top of that!
Fireworks at Lakenheath village tonight as long as the weather behaves
its gonna be too windy just like it has the past few nights
My dogs are going to freak smooth out.
Pilot, Boom; I guess we’re flying home with the gear down.
That’s an impressive number of emails.
Guy Fawkes, the only man ever to enter parliament with honest intentions…
Happy Guy Fawkes Day
Ditto
Aw, poor tankers!
Also, holy crap, your email issue makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
The only thing better than getting weather notifications and cancellations all day from the CP is getting exercise FPCON changes and other random exercise related stuff….2 F**KING DAYS after the exercise ended. I was still getting auto-emails on a Friday about an EME that ended on a Wednesday. Apparently the email system took a massive dump or something base wide and got all clogged up.
As a former Marine KC-130 navigator, I can tell you that this happens to us too.
I set up a rule that automatically deletes the weather updates from command post because the weather changes too much over here in england
Gotta love those e-mails and the auto prints on the printer that eat reams of paper on a regular basis.
Heh, I’m one of those guys that sends out those annoying FPCON, Weather, and other annoying spams on a daily basis. I hate receiving my own spam, I can only imagine receiving it 10 times over.
Man, usually when we don’t show it’s because we’ve maintenance canceled.
I do know that overseas, 135′s will never, ever give us the full onload.
?? Seriously? did you ask for more fuel and were denied? Possibly your SQ schedulers didn’t frag out a full fuel load. maybe things have changed since I stopped flying -135s a few years ago, but if we had the extra we gave the extra. We also made sure to bill the extra to your wing fuel account!
VD
It never failed…we were fragged for an 80K onload, we’d hear our tanker scream by us on the boulevard, and we’d hear them check in with C2 “Fragged minus 10″.
Ditto the Guy Fawkes Day greetings.
OTOH, Bert and Barbie kinda recalled an odd civilian instructor that hung with some P-38 pilots in the South West Pacific teaching fuel management and leaning out the mixture to extend their range… a former pacifist named Charles Lindburgh. Tanks Farva
(maybe Freudian typo)…
Reduce the revs Boost the boost and soon you will be home to roost. Only works with supercharged or turbocharged engines. Those P-38 drivers were running around at high prop rpms, flat prop pitch burning through the gas big time. Lindy was there to add weight to the technique of reducing prop speed but jamming the boost in. He also flew on several combat sorties and “may” have gotten a kill but no one would confirm it.
VD
It does bring some of Yager’s criticism of TAC pilots turned loose on jets…
I went on an incentive flight in a KC-135 once, where we were supposed to refuel a C-5 Galaxy. The Galaxy was delaying all morning because of mainteance issues while we were sitting on the taxiway sweating for hours. Just as they’re about to scrub the mission and release everybody to go get lunch and go home, the guys with the Galaxy say they’re good to go, so we take off.
We fly around for a few hours, no sign of the C-5, end up going back to base. Find out after landing that the galaxy never took off because they never figured out what was wrong with it. So yeah, that was a fun incentive flight. Sat baking on the flightline for a few hours, took off, flew in a big circle over north Texas, and went back to Kansas.
Oh, and I’ve had that email thing happen to me too. They ended up having to do something weird with my mailbox that ended up giving me a 5 MB mailbox limit, giving me yet another reason to be pissed at the folks who had to make some fancy powerpoint slide saying “We’re cooking burgers on Friday at 1100 at the park”, filling up my mailbox with useless cruft.
Did you have a PST set as your default mailbox? I used to be at the Help Desk on Ramstein, we used to get a lot of calls about that.
Been there, done that. I was going TDY to Edwards AFB for a few days back in ’04. The crew was supposed to refuel some F-22s on the way down. The @#$%^$%& cancelled so I didn’t get to watch. I thought after working on tankers for 5 years I’d finally get to see the aircraft I worked on do its job. I did get to watch a C-17 get refueled at night not long before I PCS’d though. Not much to see other than some formation lights glowing.
The tanker crew did have to do an evasive maneuver though. Everybody that was sleeping was awake right after the taker leveled off. I was listening on the headset wehn I heard the boom operator yell “PULL UP, PULL UP!” Between the throttles being maxed out and the yoke being pulled back, everything that wasn’t tied down slid back. Those F108s are some great engines and I loved working on them more than any other engine I worked on.
In the sandbox the KC-10′s always dreaded the 135′s call in, “frag complete, instantaneous 50, request consolidation with…”
14.3 hours over the sandbox, 4 onloads from 135′s and no offload minus a 100k to another KC-10 as we were departing due to duty day limits.
Yes, that was our way of sticking it to you -10′ers and your nice deployment bases! Although why we would be in a hurry to get back down and have to deal with the local environment (or lack therof)
Cheers
VD
It was nice to stick it to a Modded -135 once though! Dumped 30k into him
And we always have the nicest places to deploy, or go TDY….oh wait, maybe not.
Guy Fawkes’ intentions were less than honest. He was not trying to overthrow an “evil” theocracy–he was trying to install one. Fawkes was a fighter for Spain and subsequently, the Catholic Church. He was trying to bring and end to Protestant rule in England by helping to restore Catholic rule.
That is odd. I thought that would have been required in the flight briefing, to rendezvous with the tanker.
You would think. They brief everything else, from what tail they will be flying, to how long they get to use the piddle packs in flight. Makes you wonder how they forget about thier tanker, especially when its designated as a refuleing sortie.
Just sayin….