C-27J Spartan Training Info

[busdriver]

Good stuff

I have a suspicion that alwyn is a typical "internet expert." If he has actual experience, I'll eat my humble pie. But this is not airliners.net, people on this board have no shit actual first hand experience. Arguments between people like brock (who I think is the same as bobbybrock on airwarriors) and myself are significantly different than the typical tripe you'll find on the internet. If alwyn is who I think he is, my best advice is to post less and read more.

[brock]

You seem awful butt hurt about Rescue flying in support of Medevac, it was an Army RFF that got that whole thing started.

As to Dustoff going and picking up aircrew, nothing in OEF is "CSAR" nada, zip, zilch. There is no FLOT to cross, no IADs to plan around, no CSARTF to build, etc. As for the Army going to pick up AF crew this past summer, guess what? Every one of us was glad that happened! Closest asset gets the job done. It's not about protecting my terf, it's about patient advocacy.

Yes, we get guys straight out of the school house, they're called co-pilots.

I wouldn't say butt hurt, more like irritated. I agree with you 100 percent, patient advocacy is the number one priority.

I can tell you I was involved deeply with the execution matrix which was used for mission dissemination. But it seemed like every time that we came up with something the new in bound ERQS wanted to change it. In fact the guys who came in right before we left thought that they should be doing all POI's. We thought that the troops would be best served if we put the ERQS at one of the other FOBS. That never happened. It worked well with the 129th taking the mission at Bastion. But at Bagram we had seven aircraft doing the work of three. And the controls measures put in place by the CJTF surgeon as well as standards limited the ERQS as to what missions they could actually fly.

I never saw a RFF. What I did see was the MOA that drafted by the AEW and CJTF. The MOA which was drafted by someone in the AEW even stated that medevac was an Air Force mission. Inter theater yes. Intra theater not so much. That is a little irritating.

You've seen my post on AW and know that I'm not a big fan of Big Army. In fact many of us in the guard weren't happy with the way that Big Army does medvac. I, like you want what is best for the force.

[busdriver]

Jesus, we've thread jacked this thing!

Here I go. The original RFF was made by the Army in 2005, which got the Air Force started in Casevac as a primary tasked mission (we've been doing it as a sub-set mission since the 1960's, about half of the "saves" in Vietnam were Casevac). I deployed in 2006 were we had 3 birds Opcon and Tacon to the Army. My understanding is that the Army's dustoff guys needed relief to reset, and now so do we.

That commitment never went away. What happened this past year was an increase in theater dustoff requirements due to secdef reducing the time requirement, which I know you are well aware of since it put us and you on a much shorter alert string. The AF's answer was to duel role all AF PR assets as PR/Casevac. As to why the AF would fight back on moving to a different FOB? Well, we still have our doctrinally dictated mission of PR for the Air Component commander.

Organizational culture endures even with the coming and going of people. The unit that was at Bagram this past summer is new to the constant deployments that the rest of Rescue is used to. I've heard they did not have a good working relationship with the Army, which is kind of odd as the rest of us have had a rather long tradition of the opposite. In any event, from what I've been told, the unit currently at Bagram has improved that working relationship considerably. Obviously since the Army deploys for longer, your side got to see several different units from the AF, personalities change and you'll get a different opinion. Unfortunately for you guys, longer deployments aren't an option for AF rescue folks, we're close to the breaking point already.

I have no idea about surgeons stating we're not capable of certain missions, since our medics (PJs) are considerably more capable than yours (not a jab, just reality) but altitude concerns, especially in RC-E are a legitimate hindrance to our very heavy version of a Hawk.

As far as having way more capacity than needed, well I very much agree. Kandahar was much the same. Bastion quite the opposite, the ute rate on the aircraft there was retarded high. For what it's worth, I spent the month of August at Bastion. The concept we were batting around was to leave all that capacity at Kandahar, but use the RQS as a sort of Casevac QRF. We train to forward project as part of our PR mission, so we can pull up our root's pretty easily and move around the AOR as required. So the logistics hub would be Kandahar and Bagram, but we'd bounce around as required to stay near the fight.

[OverTQ]

Things should stay the way they are currently. We (Army) fill can't the positions we have. We are very short in the FW world and cannot train new guys fast enough.

[Guest Hueypilot812]

Things should stay the way they are currently. We (Army) fill can't the positions we have. We are very short in the FW world and cannot train new guys fast enough.

I think that's the reason why the Army isn't getting the C-27J right now...money and manning. It's not because they didn't want the airplane or the mission (they did).

On a side note about the CSAR/MEDEVAC issue...the two communities are very different, with very different capabilities. That being said, there's no real reason why CSAR can't fill in at times and fly MEDEVAC missions, and in certain cases, MEDEVAC can perform (very) limited CSAR...for example, picking up a downed pilot in Afghanistan or Iraq wouldn't be a stretch for Army MEDEVAC, but I certainly wouldn't want to send those guys across the border into Iran to pick up a pilot. I'm not being unfair to Army MEDEVAC, I used to fly UH-1Vs. It's just a waste of assets if you are going to over-tax the Army crews but make the USAF crews sit around on alert and practically go un-used.

[OverTQ]

Casey gave the C27J away because it would cost him a ground BDE.

[brock]

Thread jack indeed,

The RFF was for the south. The situation has been somewhat fixed by the addition of the 82nd CAB. The relation was one that the Army wanted. The units basically answered to the Army.

Up north it was a totally different story. The assets still belong to the CAOC. When we dealt with the 101 out of NY they just wanted t help. Fly chase, fly missions, do whatever it took to support us. The guys after them, not so much. The MOA came to fruition and we got them involved. But they began to turn down missions because they said they were not commensurate with their abilities. That is why they thought they should do all POI's. Picking up a trooper at a FOB was below them. On more than one occasion their medicine was suspect. I will concede to the fact that a PJ is better trained than a regular Army medic. Not so in our unit. Over 90% of our medics are full time firefighters and Paramedics. The PJ's couldn't maintain the same standard as our medics. This not only came from our BDE surgeon but the ERQS surgeon as well. That is why such control measures were put in place. We did not see them as a fix but a hinderance.

Over the past few years the Air Force slice of the pie has gotten a lot smaller. Aside from a few TAC air assets and ERQS, they aren't really in the fight. When the Air Force wants a program just so the Army can't have it, it starts to look suspect. Long before Casey axed the C-27 program the Air Force wanted it to be AF only. Not to long ago the AF pitched the idea that all UAS assets should be under the control of the Air Force. All of a sudden the AF is knee deep in TF ODIN. So when the SEC DEF cancelled CSAR-X and said that CSAR should be joint we saw the ERQS out trying to justify their existence. Right or wrong that is how we all saw it on the Army side.

[Guest Hueypilot812]

As a former Army aviator and current USAF pilot, sometimes I'm embarrassed by the attitude displayed by the USAF. But I want to say something first...the USAF crews WANT to get involved, and they would welcome going out there and doing stuff for the Army, be it CAS, CASEVAC, or airdrop/dirt LZ work by the Herks. Unfortunately, folks at HHQ don't see it that way. As a Herk O-5 explained to me, we don't do much dirt LZ and airdrop work per Army requests because it's "too risky" for our airframes and aircrews. So in the meantime, the Army contracts Blackwater to come in and do what they need. I'm sure others will argue other points of view, and it's certainly not quite that simple, but that's the gist of it.

I saw the USAF involvement in the C-27J program as purely political roles/missions posturing, because up until the Army got serious about the FCA (precursor to the JCA program), the USAF had next to zero interest in tac airlift, specifically the C-27J. For those of you that have flown Herks in OIF for all these years, there were many other airfields we could have flown into to help supply the Army (and Marines) but the decision was made against such ops. For example, I never knew there was an airfield at Al Qaim until a year ago...yes, the airfield isn't in great condition but from what was told to me, the Marines were willing to help turn it into an LZ to prevent them from a multi-hour drive north from Al Asad, the nearest coalition airfield. Ditto for several locations operated by the Army...they were interested in turning old IqAF airfields into LZs but they were told no. Interestingly enough, the RAF operated in and out of several such airfields for many years with their Herks....some were dirt, some were semi-repaired runways.

I always heard the phrase "Fear Tac Air", and shook my head...because we weren't doing Tac Air, we were doing Theater Airlift, which isn't the same as Tactical Airlift. Hell, the CAOC didn't even want us going into ORTI, because the "runway is too short". ORTI's runway is around 5,000 feet long, yet we'd routinely fly JAATTs in and out of KPOE, which has about 4,500' of runway. It makes my head hurt when I try to think why we can beat the hell out of LZs, dirt zones and the like all day long back home in the US, but as soon as we get into theater, it's deemed to be such a high risk that we shouldn't ever try for it. I hear leadership invoke memories of Khe Sanh and again, I shake my head. If we did something like Khe Sanh today, USAF leadership would take the wings of all involved and call us all irresponsible and crazy.

Anyways, although I'm a long-time USAF pilot now, I still try hard to remember why I fly C-130s...Herks exist in the USAF inventory for the benefit of the Army and Marines.

[busdriver]

I know the RFF was for the south, just saying that's how the ball got rolling. The unit's down south don't answer to the Army anymore, but don't have to ask permission for most missions. IMHO the CAOC folks never liked the Army "owning" AF aircraft so dreamed up the new arrangement, CAOC get's us back, in exchange all deployed units become dual role. Whether there's some big blue politicking going on I don't know, could be. Casevac is certainly a mission that can be shown off publicly unlike some other missions.

Picking up a trooper at a FOB beneath them? Maybe, or maybe they felt that taking an alert medical asset and using it to pick up a routine patient from a FOB is a waste (ie send a slick). Not saying I agree, we generally held off on all the Charlies until the end of the shift and made a round robin to go get em all.

Suspect medicine? Maybe, but the guys with me down south were routinely complemented by the docs at Bastion. Kinda painting a broad brush when you're talking about your experience with roughly 10 paramedics.

We're not allowed to run "chase" without CAOC approval, which I think has more to do with the perception that we're then acting as a "gunship" which we've gotten in a lot of trouble for in the past.

Gates and CSAR, well the commonly held belief that he's got all AF helos on the chopping block is really only one of multiple directions that review could take.

[MT near]

I think most of the AF forgets we are a support force for the grunts on the ground. No mission focus.

[Guest Cubdriver]

we don't do much dirt LZ and airdrop work

Not sure where you flew herks but things have changed

[Guest Hueypilot812]

I'm speaking about OIF...unless you flew Herks prior to 2003, or flew with the ANG/AFRC, or fly J-models, most of the Herk guys I know flew 90-99% of their combat time in OIF and none did any dirt work or airdrops, save a few if they got sent up to Afghanistan for some sporadic work a few years ago.

[busdriver]

I think most of the AF forgets we are a support force for the grunts on the ground. No mission focus.

No we are not. Some of us have a very Army support-centric mission, Hercs being a great example. But the entire reason the AF is a separate service is due to Air Power pioneers that were 180* out from your statement. I think it was ClearedHot who made this analogy but there's a continuum, on one end you have Airpower turning an entire country into a glass parking lot, on the other you have the Army occupying a country with not one aircraft, to include their own. The reality is a mix, but the point is that we're an equal partner contributing to the mission.

That said, Big Blue being so self serving and risk averse that it feels it's ok to not allow a C-130 to land in the dirt, knowing full well that only transfers that risk (with a multiplier) to convoy troops facing the IED threat is not only embarrassing, it's down right disgusting.

[Guest Pony]

The good news about the C-27 is that the Army wants them chopped to them in Direct Support. This way they do not have to go through the standard AMC process of doling out missions. This concept is being tested as we speak. The Marines make this work everyday with their C-130's. I wish we would work with the Army's rules and the AF's money. Since this is now a Guard only airplane, hopefully we can get away from the standard AF mentality of Process over Mission. As for the FTU, I seriously doubt any of the former fighter units will be selected as the FTU site. This fact dramatically reduces the number of smart choices. Basing timeline should be out by NOV 20.

[tac airlifter]

Anyways, although I'm a long-time USAF pilot now, I still try hard to remember why I fly C-130s...Herks exist in the USAF inventory for the benefit of the Army and Marines.

You pretty much nailed it. The C-27 is a great plane but the AF will neuter it so much; why even have capabilities without the balls to use them? And Cubdriver, not sure where you fly hercs but unless things have done a 180 in the last 8 months he shacked it. Just because we fly into a dirt LZ in OEF or HOA every so often or airdrop some leaflets or CDS twice a month does NOT mean we are doing the extent of what we can do. We don't go to half the places we could in OIF and a larger percentage in OEF. If you can find a listing of places other MAJCOMs or nations or agencies use your head would explode with how much big blue isn't doing to help the fight. Slick hercs train to a very high level, but the leadership lacks the fortitude to employ these assets to the extent of their capabilities. What Huey said is what I saw in the 130 on my deployments to both theaters multiple times over several years; and thats why I left the 130 and will never go back. I'm embarassed at how little the AF HHQ is willing to support the army, and unless the C27 goes AFSOC or is chopped directly to the army (as Pony mentioned here, which I didn't know) it will be just another thing we CAN do but DON'T.

[Guest Hueypilot812]

You pretty much nailed it. The C-27 is a great plane but the AF will neuter it so much; why even have capabilities without the balls to use them? And Cubdriver, not sure where you fly hercs but unless things have done a 180 in the last 8 months he shacked it. Just because we fly into a dirt LZ in OEF or HOA every so often or airdrop some leaflets or CDS twice a month does NOT mean we are doing the extent of what we can do. We don't go to half the places we could in OIF and a larger percentage in OEF. If you can find a listing of places other MAJCOMs or nations or agencies use your head would explode with how much big blue isn't doing to help the fight. Slick hercs train to a very high level, but the leadership lacks the fortitude to employ these assets to the extent of their capabilities. What Huey said is what I saw in the 130 on my deployments to both theaters multiple times over several years; and thats why I left the 130 and will never go back. I'm embarassed at how little the AF HHQ is willing to support the army, and unless the C27 goes AFSOC or is chopped directly to the army (as Pony mentioned here, which I didn't know) it will be just another thing we CAN do but DON'T.

Working for CAFTT and directly for the Iraqis, I discovered dozens of airfields scattered across Iraq, some of which weren't even heavily damaged in the previous fighting. Most were old IqAF aux fields or satellite fields (the Iraqis had their Air Force dispersed to many small airfields during the Iran/Iraq war), but they were still pieces of pavement. Most were still closed, but a bunch were being used by the RAF and contractors on a regular basis. Sure, crews had to land on half a runway, or they had to operate on runways that were in poor condition, but I always thought "unimproved runway" ops were the Herk's strong suit.

Another thing I noticed (and this probably ties into why we don't fly to airfields other than the Big 8 on a regular basis) is airfields without a USAF ATOC or other ground element weren't visited very often at all, if ever (by USAF aircraft). Flying with the IqAF, we flew into several fields that other coalition (and US Army) aircraft flew into, but I rarely (if ever) saw a USAF aircraft going there. In fact, prior to my time with CAFTT, I had never even HEARD of a few of the airfields. The Iraqis wanted to use their Herks to fly into ORTI (Al Taji), but CAFTT leadership balked when they discovered that AMD/CAOC controlled coalition flights weren't allowed into ORTI based on runway available...it was deemed too risky because of the sub-5,000 foot runway. All of us advisors were ready and willing to show Iraqis the ropes of flying into a short airfield (if you were light enough, you wouldn't need max effort procedures), but the HHQ thought we were suicidal for wanting to fly onto a piece of pavement shorter than 8,000 feet. Unfortunately when CAFTT goes away, our IqAF Herk brothers will probably try that by themselves and actually bend metal, and not have the benefit of being TAUGHT how to do it the right way.

The fact we were routinely operating out of non-USAF supported airfields appeared to support the theory that Big Blue only wanted their Herks flying into Big Blue airfields. Otherwise, these crews might fly into airfields were reflective belt usage wasn't monitored, there wasn't any ATOC support, and quite honestly, Big Blue wouldn't be able to directly monitor and control the activities of the aircraft. We all know how micromanaged ops are at USAF fields in theater...and I distinctly remember how smooth ops were at ORAT before the USAF took over ATOC ops there...when the Marines directed the ground ops, it was in and out quick.

I agree...it's very nice we have this thing called the C-27J, but I'll be highly surprised if it's used to the fullest capabilities. Hopefully you guys at KMTN and KMFD won't wind up flying a small, twin-engine turboprop from 10,000 foot runways all the time.

Edited November 11, 2009 by Hueypilot812

[HoHum]

The good news about the C-27 is that the Army wants them chopped to them in Direct Support. This way they do not have to go through the standard AMC process of doling out missions. This concept is being tested as we speak. The Marines make this work everyday with their C-130's. I wish we would work with the Army's rules and the AF's money. Since this is now a Guard only airplane, hopefully we can get away from the standard AF mentality of Process over Mission. As for the FTU, I seriously doubt any of the former fighter units will be selected as the FTU site. This fact dramatically reduces the number of smart choices. Basing timeline should be out by NOV 20.

Threadjack squared!

What's the latest and greatest word on Direct Support? I heard something about it at Scott a couple of months ago and wondered if it was just a fart in the wind. Is is going to be confined to the -27Js for the near future?

[selfc23fe]

Just a point of clarification. In Army FW, I believe the term "Direct Support" reflects a dedicated aircraft for the use by a specific unit (JTF). The term "General Support" is used when a group of mission requests are prioritized for support by the rest of the Army or other users. The distinction may not be apparent to some, but it is different than the "Direct Support" the AF is using.

[brock]

Just a point of clarification. In Army FW, I believe the term "Direct Support" reflects a dedicated aircraft for the use by a specific unit (JTF). The term "General Support" is used when a group of mission requests are prioritized for support by the rest of the Army or other users. The distinction may not be apparent to some, but it is different than the "Direct Support" the AF is using.

Either way, it sounds like the guys down in the weeds want to get things done the right way. Hopefully the guys who make the decisions let them do that.

[Guest Pony]

One of the C-130 units is already down range testing the concept of Direct Support. Direct support is not a foreign concept to the A-10 units. They are used to working around the AF to get the job done for the Army. The army doesn't always help us help them. The army needs to do what the Marines do. With pilots embedded on Marine staffs, they tend to employ their assets much more realistically. The Guard is typically a little more open minded than AD. Hopefully, we can break the code on this.

[OverTQ]

I thought that there were to be two aircraft assigned to the Aviation BDE (called a CAB). The CAB was to manage the use of the two C-130's (eventually the C27J).

[brock]

I just came off a year deployment where aour a/c were opconned within in the BDE. That situation caused all types of problems. And that was an Army guard unit being opconned to the ARMY. I can't even imagine the AF giving control of two C-130's/27's to an Army 0-6.

[Guest Hueypilot812]

Well, the Army O-6 should somehow (not saying it IS this way, just an idea) make use of an AMLO to know what can/can't be done with USAF fixed-wing assets. Worst case, the USAF mission commander should be able to tell the O-6 what can/can't be done.

[brock]

Well, the Army O-6 should somehow (not saying it IS this way, just an idea) make use of an AMLO to know what can/can't be done with USAF fixed-wing assets. Worst case, the USAF mission commander should be able to tell the O-6 what can/can't be done.

Problem is, does that Army 0-6 know how to utilize those assets? I'm thinking not. Does any Squadron want to give two of its airplanes to the Army. Seems like a pretty hard sell to me.

[disgruntledemployee]

Two points.

1. If a Soldier or Marine needs the ammo and gear, lets get it to them.

2. When (not if) we tacon the C-27J to an Army unit, if that Army O-6 is being unrealistic, it is our job to show them what is possible/practical.

In the end, those C-27Js will fly their asses off and those Army dudes will be thankful for it. I just wish we could expand the realm of this concept to Marine units as well. //sarcasm on// Oh wait, if a Marine wants supplies, he would have joined the Army //sarcasm off//.

Out