So this entire time you guys have been accounting for the brief into the preflight?
Nope, no HEFOE signals. Not sure why we don't do it. I stopped asking why we do dumb things, and don't do smart things long ago. It saves my head from all the bruising smashing it against a wall tends to produce.
Aircraft preflight starts at brief time on most occasions... Flight Engineers and In Flight Technicians are out at the plane starting the preflight while the tactical crew is briefing.
I don't doubt you or what the slide you saw said, but I wonder if the books were cooked at all on that. Not because I think our aircraft are any better; quite the contrary. As someone who is flying the oldest helos in the Navy fleet, I know your pain. It just makes me wonder how the above is possible when VP guys complain so much about maintenance setbacks. Then again, the answer may be it's BECAUSE you guys stick it out for 5+ hours to go execute your mission. Helo guys usually give up by then and cancel the sortie and leave it for the next crew.
Yeah, you guys also have the brief, the planeside brief, and probably a few others for good measure.
Some of the reasons from my P-3 days:Out of curiosity, why are NFOs doing crypto loads and not ATs? The SDO usually loads the CYZ-10, but the ATs are who actually do the loading in my old HSC squadron.
We send out our ATs/AEs to fire up the system and have it up and running when the aircrew walks on the Hummer. To include the backup bird for a big event/Event 1 in combat. Leave some ATAN in the tube as a fire watch, and power it down once the primary bird is airborne.
Just a case where other communities can learn from others.
Why we don't have troubleshooters assigned to each event standing by to handle gripes, I'll never know. Compared to an 18 squadron, we have more maintainers and fewer aircraft, so it certainly seems possible.
We have a shit hot AWV1 who was a former AT1 who worked on E2's for the last 13 years. He does 10x what our normal IFTs do and can't understand why they don't do more in terms of preflights. The only answer I get is that they want the operators to do all the stuff with their own systems, so that when it fails in flight they can fix it, rather than have one dude running around trying to fix everything. Also, VP barely trusts O's with crypto; somebody would stroke out if we suggested E's do it.
Why we don't have troubleshooters assigned to each event standing by to handle gripes, I'll never know. Compared to an 18 squadron, we have more maintainers and fewer aircraft, so it certainly seems possible.