Dictionary>One of my former squadron mates – usually my instructor during various training and real world flight operations (combat, MEU deployments) – kept a green logbook of each flight he went on for a few years, he probably still does that at MAWTS-1 where he trains new WTI's (by the way if you don't know the acronyms I use, just google them, and you'll get it, but here's a couple freebies: Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron – One (Yuma, AZ) and Weapons and Tactics Instructors.
Well going by his example I'm going to try to log each flight I go on starting with last night.
I was leading a division (3 aircraft) as well as 2 escort aircraft ( 3x CH-46's and 1x AH-1, and 1x UH-1) We were trying to do some initial training for LLL (that's low light level, or no moon) as well as some escort training. When I say initial training, each initial flight is called an “x" and we write ATFs (aviation training forms) for the pilots under instruction (PUI). The weather was pretty bad over the island of Okinawa, with lots of really close lightning strikes. We pushed anyway – we're an all weather platform afterall. After getting about 20 minutes to our training areas we found they would not be workable and decided to turn back around and re-evaluate the night. There were a couple other aircraft from our sister squadron (HMM-265) working the local pattern and the one small island we land on from time to time.
All in all, I thought it was a good call to knock-it-off, and most the pilots concurred. In training evolutions sometimes it's just not worth the risk, and last night was one of those situations. Even though we would have gotten a lot out of it – x's complete, and qualifications achieved – I think we got just as much out of making a good weather call, and debriefing our plan, brief, and partial execution.
Oh by the way, the crew chief found a pretty bad leak in one of the oil reservoirs for our rotor head, which could have been pretty bad if we would have gotten stuck out there because of the weather. " Live to fight another day", was a repeated phrase last night, and we have… The Thai Airforce also has a saying: “no fly… no die"
peace,
Adam