I'm very familiar with the way the Army Warrant Helo drivers day goes, as well as deployments and overseas tours. I just wanna get an idea of what a typical day in each different airframe. Helo's run in my family so I liked to keep the tradition going in some form, but not in the Army.
I'm not from the helo community but have been in Marine aviation since starting July 2000. But I can speak to the "typical" day in any Marine aviation squadron.
A "typical" day in a fleet squadron involves being at work from 0730 until 1630, MINIMUM. This will change depending on your ground job and how much studying you need to do (tactics, NATOPS, quals, etc). You may or may not fly on any given day, it depends on a number of things (time in squadron, upcoming dets/deployments, if you're working up for a qual, etc etc). Sometimes you fly days, sometimes you fly nights and sometimes you fly both..... again depends on what the squadron is doing and what quals you need.
Ground job..... everybody has one. You may be the Coffee Mess O, the Powerline O, the CMCC (you basically own all the classified material), the NATOPS O, the Legal O or a number of other such "administrative" type jobs. These are the "paper pushing" type jobs. You may, and probably will, have more than one. At times, depending on your ground job(s), it will seem like the ground job is your first priority and flying is just something else you do on the side. It kind of sucks, especially if you're the new guy trying to work up for your quals but that's the way it is.
Just because you're at work 9+ hours a day doesn't mean that you'll be busy as hell the whole time. There will plenty of times when you're just sitting around not doing much of anything. This is a good time to get caught up on studying, go work out or just spend some time getting to know the Marines you serve with.
When you're deployed, things may actually get a little easier in some ways. A few of the ground jobs become easier and some aren't really needed at all. Writing the daily flight schedule is WAY easier because your squadron will be tasked to fly certain missions and all Ops has to do is plug in crews to fly them. There basically seems to be less BS when you're deployed and actually doing your job for real.
Sorry no helo specifics but hope this helps a bit.
