Getting jacked up on the flightline

[Guest Boom]

UFB. What if you would have had a Klaxon?

Im interested in the outcome of this one. Will shoes rule? or will sanity prevail. I have my guess. At least the Bears are winning

Klaxon isn't used for this type of Alert. We just had a Wing/CC change of command a few weeks ago. Wonder how he's going to rule on this. My Broncos lost.

[jango220]

Back in the other service, we had a guy (civilian) run the gate and ride his motorcycle onto the line and the RUNWAY at Willow Grove (this was waaay before 9/11).

Yeah, the cops at Willow Grove are a special kind of slow. And ever since the Air Force got rid of car passes, it's been even worse. These kids just weeks out of basic have some sort of vendetta against any ID with an Air Force logo on it, and as a result make you wait 10-15 minutes so they can write up a vehicle pass, and then inform you that you should be grateful that they are letting you in.

Also, one of the Flying Club guys there got jacked up a few months back when he landed after having a total electrical failure in the pattern. Tower didnt see the guy frantically rocking his wings, so he just landed. Apparently one of the controllers woke up as he was on short final, sounded the alarm, and the cops ripped him out of the airplane the second he came to a stop. After some yelling from both sides, and base ops finally checking on the roster, the guy was released a couple hours later.

[JarheadBoom]

Apparently one of the controllers woke up as he was on short final...

Glad to hear the WG Tower folks are still at the top of their game...

[Butters]

YES! Another SF bashing! Yokota AB, Summer 2000, C-9 alert aircraft is departing on an urgent. A Japanese family runs the back gate near the C-9 squadron and med-evac alert ramp. Cops try to follow and lose them… For those of you not familiar with Yokota, it is a straight shot about a mile from that gate to the ramp. Well, the family easily evades the cops and drives onto the ramp and parks underneath the wing of the C-9. The family with 2 kids gets out and walks right up the steps and sits down in the first available seats and asked to be taken to America for asylum. The crew quickly call command post with a frantic “Helping Hand” call. Command post proceeds to inform the crew that they are not a “Priority 1” asset and since they are not parked in a restricted “Red” area that a “Helping Hand” is not a valid call… WTF, so they crew tells them some unauthorized individuals have just boarded their aircraft and were illegally parked. Then they asked if the cops could come out and write them a ticket! Well, the crew ends up removing the family from the aircraft and moves their car to the parking lot (oh, there is a patient onboard that needs to get to a hospital in Hawaii) so they can depart on their mission. As they try to close the door and depart the cops finally show up (15 min later) and put a dude with an M-16 at the top of the stairs and 2 other cops try to remove the crew and patients from the aircraft…. Now the crew is calling command post again trying to get a hold of the OG so they can now get the cops off of their aircraft before a patient dies.

I love cops!

[Guest Cap-10]

YES! Another SF bashing! Yokota AB, Summer 2000, C-9 alert aircraft is departing on an urgent. A Japanese family runs the back gate near the C-9 squadron and med-evac alert ramp. Cops try to follow and lose them… For those of you not familiar with Yokota, it is a straight shot about a mile from that gate to the ramp. Well, the family easily evades the cops and drives onto the ramp and parks underneath the wing of the C-9. The family with 2 kids gets out and walks right up the steps and sits down in the first available seats and asked to be taken to America for asylum. The crew quickly call command post with a frantic “Helping Hand” call. Command post proceeds to inform the crew that they are not a “Priority 1” asset and since they are not parked in a restricted “Red” area that a “Helping Hand” is not a valid call… WTF, so they crew tells them some unauthorized individuals have just boarded their aircraft and were illegally parked. Then they asked if the cops could come out and write them a ticket! Well, the crew ends up removing the family from the aircraft and moves their car to the parking lot (oh, there is a patient onboard that needs to get to a hospital in Hawaii) so they can depart on their mission. As they try to close the door and depart the cops finally show up (15 min later) and put a dude with an M-16 at the top of the stairs and 2 other cops try to remove the crew and patients from the aircraft…. Now the crew is calling command post again trying to get a hold of the OG so they can now get the cops off of their aircraft before a patient dies.

I love cops!

I am at a loss for words...WOW!

Cap-10

[Toro]

My old story stolen from the "Why SFS suck thread"

-------------------

Back at the Heath it was fairly standard for people to take their parents out to the flightline to see the jets. Most people would do it in uniform. Well, one guy takes leave when his parents come out to visit and decides he's not going to put on his flight suit to take them out to the flight line (bad decision #1). Now, you don't need a uniform - though it helps - but you DO need a flight line badge. His flight line badge was in his uniform. Just so happens that the cops drive by these four people walking around the planes in civvies and come up to ask them what's going on. He says he's aircrew and - while he can provide a military ID, he can't provide a flightline badge. So this harmless tour ends up with - NSTFS - all four of them (him, his wife, and two parents) face down on the concrete with a cop standing over them with an M-16.

Oh...but it gets better...

So I happened to be driving out to the flightline and saw this. I drive up to them and say I can vouch for the guy - I have my flightline badge, I'm in uniform, and I know for sure that he's one of us. The cops say no - it's already broken protocol. The next thing I know, all four of them are being carted of to JAIL!!!!!

They got inprocessed to the Lakenheath detention center until our commander could get them. We all laughed about it…but it only continues to prove my point.

[Guest CAVEMAN]

I say let them deploy with the Army and run convoys all over Iraq.

Maybe that will kill a little of their ZEAL.

How do you seriously get job satisfcation from unecessarilly busting balls? SAD!!

[sky_king]

At least your airplanes probably have something classified at some level. At Laughlin this situation arises all the time. A stud (after being cleared by the sup) takes his family out to the flight line to show them what he's been flying for the past 6 months. With adrenaline still in their veins from the F-16 that stopped by a week ago, Security Forces stops the family with lights flashing. He then reprimands them, escorts them back inside and takes their camera. What possible reason would you have for taking the kids camera? Hell, everything there is to know about the T-6 is on the internet.

Not to mention how I got pulled over for going 26 in a 20 and they had to bring 3 police cars to fix the situation.

[Guest Hueypilot812]

Here's my ridiculous cop story...

I was a single dad at Dyess AFB flying Herks, and I would have my two boys stay with me each month. They were young kids, about 3 and 4 at the time. My youngest is crazy about airplanes and always wanted to go look at the Herks on the ramp. Occassionally I had time in my busy schedule to take them to the airplane.

The drill was the same each time...call MOC and get a tail number, and MOC would always say "wait a few minutes" so they could call the cops and let them know I was escorting my kids on the ramp. So I go get my kids a drink before we head out to give MOC a chance to make the required calls...about 15 minutes later, I'm walking out to the airplane, in uniform, with a line badge clipped under my name tag. My kids are being usual kids, jumping up and down with excitement and pointing everywhere asking "what's this" and "what's that".

Anyways, I walk through the ECP like always and head to the tail # that MOC had given me, and I'm about halfway out to the airplane when all of a sudden a cop car pulls up and two young sky cops stop me and ask if what I'm doing. I explain that I'm escorting my kids to the airplane, and that I have a line badge and I offer up my ID. They decline the ID and say "stand by", meanwhile several other cop cars drive up and surround us, and now we've got about a dozen cops huddled around me and my two toddler kids, each of them wielding their M16s and/or M4s.

So now I'm standing there with my kids tugging on my flight suit asking "daddy, what are they doing" and all I can say is "well, they are just making sure we can be out here"...what I'm really thinking is "damn idiot cops, WTF, do they think my kids are some kind of threat?".

Anyways, they look at my line badge, then my ID, and say "we're going to have to detain you and take you for questioning" and I ask them about my kids and they say they will give me a chance to call an emergency contact to pick them up after they take them in with me. As they are about to cuff me, someone calls across the radio and says "hey, that guy's been cleared to escort...".

Apparently, MOC made the call, but whoever received the call failed to pass it along to the cops on the flightline. After they "released" me, I was a pretty agitated and angry and asked why on Earth would they respond like that when I was (A) in uniform (B) had a line badge © was escorting two little kids. All they could say is "it's protocol".

F****** cops. My wife's best friend was a cop and she asked why aircrew has an attitude towards cops...well, this story and the others on this thread rest my case.

[Herk Driver]

Nope just stared at it for a few...don't see it.

BENDY

We could probably talk off-line if you want to figure it out. Probably best not to post it here. Never seen a Yokota badge so I don't know, off-hand. However, since flightline security is an "owner-user" responsibility it would probably be useful for you as a "user" to know what they are.

---------------

BTW, cops are normally at the lower end of the bell curve for the ASVAB. What do you really expect?

[M2]

Simply a matter of history.

When I was an SP augmentee at a SAC base in the 80's, (M2 is gonna chime in here soon) it was taken very seriously. Of course this was a leftover from a culture designed by Curtis LeMay and others of his era.

My Wing CC at the time would, on occasion, walk around the flightline with his parka hood zipped up and no line badge displayed. God help you if you didn't jack him up - didn't matter whether you were a cop or not.

The only one I got to participate in was actually outside the area, some guy on his way home from work thought he'd take some pictures of the bombers on the flightline. This would have been no sweat had we not been in the middle of an exercise, with all the airframes containing Nukes. He didn't eat concrete, but there were firearms involved, shouting and he was detained, released to his supervisor with his camera sent to the base photo shop to have the film developed. Even SAC didn't expose your film in front of you - you got your other pictures back. Not sure if they payroll deducted the developing.

Hey! Might have been a way to get your pictures developed for free!

Ah, the good old days!

As LJDRVR stated, I was also a SP augmentee; but in USAFE. I actually chased a few Brits off the fence, most just simply trying to take pictures of a/c (the Brits are massive birdwatchers) but a few seemed to be climbing higher than they should have so they may have been trying to get on. We were suppose to confront them with what was called the "UK Challenge" (I can still run it); but most of the time I would just yell at them and they would haul ass! Their problme was timing, 90% of the time the perimeter protection posts we were in were unmanned. But with the cammo nets over them, they didn't know they were occupied. We had some CND nut jobs hop the wire on occassion trying to get up to the planes, so we had to take security pretty serious.

I remember one guy was standing in the top of the perimeter fence leaning onto the restricted area fence. When I yelled at him, he fell in between the two. Technically, he was on the base but I decided to give him a second or two to see what he was going to do. He leaped over the perimeter fence like a gazelle!

I can tell you from firsthand experience that being a sky cop sucks. Most are cool and don't live to jack people up; but there are always the few that give them all a bad rep.

By the way, this was in today's AFA Daily Update...

Tough to Keep: The Air Force's top Security Forces officer, Brig. Gen. Mary Kay Hertog, says that the service's Security Forces personnel are doing an "awesome job," but they "are getting tired." Evidence of that could be the "pretty low re-enlistment rate," which she said is about 35 percent for first-term airmen. The problem is not just frequent and long deployments. There are simply too few Security Forces airmen to handle the workload. Most airmen who return from deployment have some time to decompress, but for SF airmen, they almost always return quickly to 12-hour shifts at their home station. According to Hertog, "about 76 percent of all our cops' squadrons are at 12-hour shifts right now" and most have been "for the last 12 years." To try to backfill at some stateside bases, the Air Force has started a test program to recruit and train civilians to handle the full-range of security operations, not just law enforcement. Hertog believes that will help, however, she said during a recent visit to Tinker AFB, Okla., the re-enlistment issue "really concerns me because I have to grow the career field; I have to build leaders." (Tinker report by Brandice Armstrong)

I don't doubt the low retention rates, but I gotta call BS on this! I doubt SF have been working 12-hour shifts for over a decade, and they've had civilian cops on the gates for years. Sounds like someone is making excuses...

Cheers! M2

[pawnman]

Ah, the good old days!

As LJDRVR stated, I was also a SP augmentee; but in USAFE. I actually chased a few Brits off the fence, most just simply trying to take pictures of a/c (the Brits are massive birdwatchers) but a few seemed to be climbing higher than they should have so they may have been trying to get on. We were suppose to confront them with what was called the "UK Challenge" (I can still run it); but most of the time I would just yell at them and they would haul ass! Their problme was timing, 90% of the time the perimeter protection posts we were in were unmanned. But with the cammo nets over them, they didn't know they were occupied. We had some CND nut jobs hop the wire on occassion trying to get up to the planes, so we had to take security pretty serious.

I remember one guy was standing in the top of the perimeter fence leaning onto the restricted area fence. When I yelled at him, he fell in between the two. Technically, he was on the base but I decided to give him a second or two to see what he was going to do. He leaped over the perimeter fence like a gazelle!

I can tell you from firsthand experience that being a sky cop sucks. Most are cool and don't live to jack people up; but there are always the few that give them all a bad rep.

By the way, this was in today's AFA Daily Update...

I don't doubt the low retention rates, but I gotta call BS on this! I doubt SF have been working 12-hour shifts for over a decade, and they've had civilian cops on the gates for years. Sounds like someone is making excuses...

Cheers! M2

Maybe if they didn't pull so much traffic watching duty, they'd have enough SF for the important missions.

[Stiffler]

Maybe if they didn't pull so much traffic watching duty, they'd have enough SF for the important missions.

No kidding. I love when you drive by one shooting radar. You are going by at the speed limit, but as you pass he stares at you like a tough guy cop and his head tracks with your car as if to say "next time, my pretty." Its funny.

[Riddller]

ECP's are gay.

Case in point:

I was in Guam, crew on a -130 there for an exercise. I need to grab something from the plane, so the Load and I, in our civvies, go to base ops and request transpo. Transpo picks us up, takes us out to our plane, which is roped off. We go through the opening in the ropes, but realize the plane is locked and neither of us has the key. So we proceed tp break into our own plane through the emergency escape hatch. I grab my stuff, and close the hatch behind me, all while the transpo guy is waiting. He gives us a ride back to baseops. AT NO POINT did ANYONE ask either me or the Load to show them ANY form of ID, but we walked through the ECP's, so we were OK. Yeah, great security.

[Vertigo]

I don't doubt the low retention rates, but I gotta call BS on this! I doubt SF have been working 12-hour shifts for over a decade, and they've had civilian cops on the gates for years. Sounds like someone is making excuses...

I don't know... I went to Elmendorf in '94 and my brother in law came up a year later. He was SF and he worked 12 hour shifts (14 hours if you count the before and after shift guard mount) for my whole tour up there (nearly 6 years). Most of the time it was 5/2 12s- I think they tried a 4/3 schedule once for a couple of weeks but found out they didn't have enough manning. So I tend to believe the story.

I think a lot of the retention problem with the SF is the whole "we eat our own" philosophy they have.

[Guest Boom]

They also have some of the lowest cutoff scores since they're the biggest careerfield size wise and it's a reenlistment incentive. Lower cutoff scores means they have to score less on their promotion tests to get promoted. But the whole "eat their own" mentality is probably one of the biggest reasons people don't reenlist after their first term.

[SuperWSO]

My favorite jacked up story happened to a buddy of mine who worked down the hall at the weapons school. Dyess was going through a period of increased emphasis on line badge use. They had jacked up several crews in a fairly short period. The prize winner was when a crew of 3 came back to the building after a flight. We asked where the other WSO was and they said he was hauled off by the cops. The best part - it was POST FLIGHT and they had just shut down and were loading their stuff on the crew bus.

I can see the need to verify that people walking out to an airplane have a need to be there, but I have a hard time building a scenario in which the people climbing out of the plane following a sortie pose a threat. If they were going to steal the airplane, they probably wouldn't come back for the debrief.

On the lighter side, I told the instructor in question that he appeared to have found an innovative way to get out of the usual Weapons School debrief. (usually 1.5x sortie duration)

[pawnman]

Can't remember if I posted this one in another thread, but:

We're giving some retired guys a tour. This is a reunion for their WWII B-24 squadron, including a retired 1-star. Half these guys did time in Nazi POW camps. They're all pushing 80...hell, some are probably past 80. I'm really enjoying myself, because these guys have way more interest than the average civilian, and they're full of their own BTDT stories.

So we go out to the jet. They've parked it in the ERCC spot...essentially, a huge paved area (several football fields...HUGE). There are no other planes, trucks, ground equipment, or hell, even personnel around. But they've roped off the jet, leaving a small gap near the nose as an ECP (are you kidding me? We're doing a tour for 80 people, and we all have to hang out inside these arbitrary ropes?).

We have a B-1 doing a flyby in support of the event. The flightline is off the tail of the jet. We've got 70-80 elderly WWII vets milling around inside the ropes. When we bring their attention to the flyby, someone knocks over one of the cones. Whatever. There's six aircrew 80 heroes, and nothing worth stealing. Some 2-striper SF guy rolls up in his car and starts hassling the vets about "Who knocked this over" and "why are you over the line". Eventually he finds one of us LTs in a bag and we promise to deal with it, calm down. I think this one's resulted in some face-to-face talks between our SQ/CC and SF's SQ/CC...because that is a damn embarassing way to treat those guys. I'm only sorry that I wasn't the guy in the bag the SF troop talked to, because I'd have lit his ass up right then and there.

[jcj]

Not the flight line, but...

So a few years ago one of the original Tuskegee Airmen is at Little Rock for the initiation of the Tuskegee Airmen chapter named after him. Great guy, in his late 70's but still sharp as hell and an absolute hoot (he went to law school after his WW2 service & is a retired judge).

The night before I'm at dinner in town with him, his companion (a very nice retired CMSGT) and several other folks. As an official visitor, he's staying in the DV quarters on base. Dinner runs late, and a retired 0-6 fellow WW2 vet in the group and his wife bring him & his companion back out to the base.

Well, it's after dark when they arrive and they're doing 100% ID checks.

The driver has his retired 0-6 ID

The driver's wife has her dependent retired ID

The companion has her retired CMSGT ID.

Guess who gets jacked up by the sky cops for not having a DOD ID?

Apparently it got sorted out pretty quick (before things got stupid) when someone more senior and some sense showed up. He did mention to the Wing King the next day how efficient his sky cops were.

Edited October 4, 2008 by jcj

[Guest SnakeT38]

Here is one from the olden days.

As a 1Lt CP on the B-52 at GFAFB, it was common for myself and Nav to "have the honor" of

sitting in our own personal freezer (airplane) on alert, while doing the daily charge on the batteries

with external power. Mx was working on hatch (alarm system). Cops have shift change, old crew doesn't

tell new shift about alarm system getting work. Alarm goes off, Cops form skirmish line outside red line

with guns drawn. They tell us via bullhorn to come out with hands up. I am watching all from my seat.

Nav is scared, says we should "give up". I estimate ground temp to be about 30 below, I vote no. I will only

"surrender" to Wing CC. I call commode post and tell them that fact. Nav gets scared, he goes out, they slam his

navigator ass down on the ground and put a gun in his ear. I observe he appears quite cold and uncomfortable with

Ray Lewis type guy that has size 17 shoe on his cranimum. I watch Wing CC drive up, he calls me on his radio and says

it's ok to come out, I do, I didn't eat ice or snow, Nav had large red spot on his face where the ramp tried to stick to his face.

Over and out.

[backseatdriver]

Helping Hand #1

...The IB I was flying with opened the COMSEC bag and broken open the documents we use and radioed the Command Post requesting authentication. They come back with what they have to say and we authenticate (or so we thought). They then said another set of characters and we authenticate again. The Command Post never responded. ...

It turns out Command Post called a helping hand on us because we couldn't authenticate properly and they thought we were in "duress." So the EP, IB, and myself make statements and we get back to starting engines.

So let's get this straight - you guys didn't authenticate correctly, twice. Command Post responded and they're the asshole? Copy.

While I agree there's some reasons guys get jacked up, but from what you described this doesn't sound like an unreasonable reaction.

[Guest Boom]

So let's get this straight - you guys didn't authenticate correctly, twice. Command Post responded and they're the asshole? Copy.

While I agree there's some reasons guys get jacked up, but from what you described this doesn't sound like an unreasonable reaction.

Yes, they are the asshole because of the way they responded. They tried to say they thought we were in "duress." If I'm in duress for one the last thing I'm thinking of (or doing) will be opening the COMSEC bag and authenticating with the Command Post. Also if someone's in duress why would they ask for a receiver check a few seconds after they jacked authenticating twice? Third, it's not written ANYWHERE in writing that Command Post needs to call a helping hand if someone fails to authenticate twice. If it's for a strategic mission/exercise their response like that is totally justifiable. If they call one on a normal training sortie (you know, where people do training) then it's unreasonable.

To add on to the story I flew (well almost flew, a lot of MX issues) last Thursday. I also happened to be flying with the Maj who's in charge of the Command Post. We authenticated correctly, then we were challenged by the Command Post. We authenticated again (correctly) and they read the normal phraseology after you authenticate correctly. When we stepped back into base ops the Maj called the Command Post and asked why they challenged us if we authenticated correctly the first time. The Airman who was talking to us said that we didn't do it within the 15 second time window. He was wrong, we did it within four seconds.

Cliffnotes: Command Post controllers are retards.

[HerkFE]

While I think it is gay, I think wearing your mickey mouse ears is actually a good practise. I could not count how many times I bumped my head into a panel while doing pre-flight or post flight inspection. The sound is another big issue. When I used to be a grease monkey, we had a few guys that were starting to loose their hearing. I think one of them has to go to a medical board. You ever been on a Nimtz Class flight deck during flight ops? it gets loud REAL quick and it stays loud.

I agree that hearing protection is good practice...Navy cranials, while a neccesity on a carrier flight deck, are gay elsewhere. I only have about 500 days underway on a carrier...Forrestal class, but the jets are just as loud.

[Duck]

My Dad told me this one years back hopefully I remember it all.

My Dad, who was a 1Lt at the time, was flying Harriers with several Captains and a Colonel and they landed on an Air Force base. They got out of the planes got them refueled and what not. After a short wait they headed back to the Harriers. Before they knew it some Airman with an M-16 was yelling at them to get on the ground. The Colonel wasn't too happy and the following is a direct quote directed towards said SF Airman.

"If you point that F**ng gun at me, you had better F**ng shoot me you G** D*** Mother F***ng piece of S***, because if you don't I am going to take that gun from you and shove it up your F***ng A$$ and pull the F**ng trigger, you worthless piece of s***. I am going to my plane and I am going to take off, so I suggest you turn around and go back to where ever the F*** you came from."

Not sure how the rest of the story went, but they didn't get arrested and they didn't get in any trouble. The SF Airman had to change his BDUs though...

[HerkFE]

My Dad told me this one years back hopefully I remember it all.

My Dad, who was a 1Lt at the time, was flying Harriers with several Captains and a Colonel and they landed on an Air Force base. They got out of the planes got them refueled and what not. After a short wait they headed back to the Harriers. Before they knew it some Airman with an M-16 was yelling at them to get on the ground. The Colonel wasn't too happy and the following is a direct quote directed towards said SF Airman.

"If you point that F**ng gun at me, you had better F**ng shoot me you G** D*** Mother F***ng piece of S***, because if you don't I am going to take that gun from you and shove it up your F***ng A$$ and pull the F**ng trigger, you worthless piece of s***. I am going to my plane and I am going to take off, so I suggest you turn around and go back to where ever the F*** you came from."

Not sure how the rest of the story went, but they didn't get arrested and they didn't get in any trouble. The SF Airman had to change his BDUs though...

I was told a very similar story by one of the F-16 drivers in my old guard unit. He was taking his mother out to show her his airplane, He was in his flight suit with his line badge. I think his mother step on the red line. He bascially told the cop the same thing.