I guess i'll chime in my 2 cents. I haven't posted much but i'm an avid reader and I enjoy all the discussions. Frankly, some of the responses to peoples posts have kept me from writing. Now that I have taken my Testemax
I feel the need to share a liitle perspective from the Booms side. Regs are Regs, but I also understand in some situations you just have to do what needs to be done to get the receiver gas. I had an A-10 over the Stan that kept falling off the boom because he was heavy. The guidelines for me to make a contact is to wait for the receiver to stabilize 2-3 feet from the boom and then extend to make the contact. So to get this guy his gas and get back into the fight, I kept the boom extended at 10 feet, like normal, and I basically let him make the contact. Doing so gave him a little more time on the boom before he broke the aft limit, thus getting the gas sooner and saving the Joes on the ground during a firefight. I could give dozens of scenarios like that. I have been fortunate to fly with some really great pilots who do everything they can to help out the receivers, sometimes we can't always make it happen but we do try. I think if the 2 communities talked a little more, we could have a better understanding of each others mindset and reasoning for different aspects of AR. On another note, I haven't and have never been on a crew that denied gas. I haven't even heard of that happening very many times. We have a lot of young booms, straight out of high school, 8 flights and a check out of Altus, and off to their bases, so don't be so hard on a guy asking for the tail number, that might be his 20th flight(total) which means he is alone without an IB for the first time ever. Sorry to ramble but it's after midnight and I'm on a roll. I would love to write more but I do not want to subject whoever reads this to more of my poor sentence structure, grammar, spelling, or whatever. See you guys in the air!