As-salaam alaiykum.
I flew today. I can't say that every day now that I'm on fucking staff. "Staff" is Air Force lingo for "desk". You know in all the movies when the cop gets in trouble and the police chief says something like "If you so much as blink wrong I'll have you on a desk TOMORROW, McCallaghan!" It's kind of like that. Except the Air Force is smart enough to gift-wrap it in the lie that "it's an honor to be selected to staff". (That means they trust you enough to not fuck up the war we've been fucking up for 26 years). They call us penguins, because we have wings but don't fly. So I pulled the lucky ticket and now I'm on staff... flying a desk... for up to two months. I know. It's a brutal reality.
I know I've thought this before, but don't know if I've ever written it down. I cannot imagine life sitting at a desk in one place for eternity. It's probably because I've been flying lines for almost three years, and I'm evolving to the point at which I can't fathom anything different. It really wasn't that long ago that I lived in a single-bedroom apartment in the foothills of Lexington Kentucky, slaving away at ROTC bitch-work and Electrical Engineering exams. Traveling was limited to the few months in the summer when Karen and I had enough freedom and wealth to take multiple trips. And then we'd clear customs back into reality around mid-August and lie dormant, numb, and left waiting for the next.
There are a lot of people who post to Instagram and brag to their friends how much they love to travel. "I've been here, and here, aaaaaand here." Maybe they travel two weeks a year, maybe they save up and are able to span the globe for a month or two. Maybe they say they love to travel but they really only mean they enjoy their cheap vacations to Myrtle Beach and Gatlinburg when it comes time. I've been reading older blog posts, lately I've been reading the ones from early 2013 immediately following a big trip to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco; and oh boy, it almost makes me nauseous the way I talk about being this top-notch world-experienced traveler. Reading it now I realize I was on one trip for two weeks, and then it was back to the real world, to the reality of being in one place for another several months.
Being a pilot in the Air Force is different. It isn't one trip that "changes you" and makes you more interesting for a few weeks when you get back home and clock back into work. It isn't months of planning and saving and looking forward to the day you pack your bags and head out. And it isn't accompanied by any sort of feeling of dread and depression when you return home and finally clock back in, alone in the same office you've been at forever albeit now painted with updated vacation pictures. That is what I used to do, but not so much anymore. And I didn't even realize the dichotomy until reading my thoughts from when my life was very different.
To me, travel used to be a moment of gratifying enjoyment that had to be earned, following months and months of work. Summer would end. Winter would come, winter would go. Spring would come, finals would be had, and eventually I'd find myself at the head of the trip of a lifetime. We'd fly out, pretending we were regulars, but we couldn't have been because I remember vividly just about every flight and layover during those years. We'd travel, we'd learn the language, we'd use public transit, we'd do everything right. But 10 days would pass, and we'd come back home and go to class. Only to start the whole cycle again.
Being a pilot is enjoying a job where movement is required. It's not ten days a couple of times a year when school and work are light. It's a line. There're no months of planning, for anything. I find out on Wednesday that I'm crossing an ocean, and I land on a different continent on Saturday. I can confirm I'm a "regular" on the airways because unlike in college, there are some flights that I just can't, for the life of me, remember. That's how you know things are routine, when days blur together and events become just similar enough to know that you went somewhere and did something, but it must not have been interesting enough if there are no lasting memories or pictures. When things are routine for just long enough, it becomes a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle of movement. And a lifestyle of movement is what I've spent most of my life desperate to achieve.
The lifestyle is the true reward. It's not the wings on my chest, or the flightsuit I wear, attracting impressed looks in Publix on the way home from base, that makes it all worth it. The pure joy of landing a 200,000lb airplane with half a mile visibility and crosswinds is an amazing feeling, but I'm often too tired to recognize it, so that's not it either. There are dozens of little tidbits of my current life that I wouldn't want to give up, but I wouldn't attribute any of it to being a sole contributor to the worthiness of my life. No, that honor belongs to the lifestyle.
I became confused reading an old thing I wrote. It was a piece about Miami and returning after Spring Break and how typical it is that I'm depressed and riddled with the post-vacation blues. I didn't understand what I was reading at first; what is honestly depressing about not being in Miami? I've spent most of my life not in Miami. But then I thought about it and memories came flooding back to me; memories of how it had to have felt when I didn't leave home twice a month, when home wasn't gorgeous and in Florida, and when work wasn't at 30,000ft. At that particular point in time, travel wasn't a lifestyle, travel was an escape.
On this side of the present, travel is not an escape. Instead there are two realities which exist in parallel: that it is exciting to leave home, and that it is exciting to return home. It is exciting to fly and it is exciting to travel, but there is no relative end to it, in which you clear customs and clock back in. And thus no post-vacation blues. When an end doesn't exist, perceptions of travel change a bit. I don't yearn as much for it anymore, because it's always around the corner. I return home and can enjoy my birds and my pool, because I'm aware of the mystery that exists and will reveal itself to be my next destination. There are never post-vacation blues, even after Karen and I take an actual vacation, because travel is no longer treated as an escape and the subsequent recapture.
Travel just is. If you miss it this week, it'll be there waiting for you the next time around. At times, travel is something that you couldn't avoid if you tried; times when you end up in a place one way or another, and have to make it across town to the hotel, and then have to get food, and then you might as well get drinks. Travel is forced upon you. You don't even have to try.
But when you do try, you can sculpt beautiful, awe-inspiring, experiences. All of the best, the ones to literally write home about, were crafted-by-hand and carefully put into action. Trying, is what leads to the best travel.
I'm writing this while sitting in the Fox, the staff is clearing tables and stacking chairs in preparation for the Superbowl. I got back on base about an hour ago after a scrumptious Indian meal and some time at the beach, and before that I worked my shift until 8am. At about 2am this morning I made the decision to try; to try to travel.
The thing is, while travel is a given, a guarantee with this lifestyle, to go beyond that requires an amount of work. There are two ways to get off base on this deployment: legitimately, and illegitimately. Equally a pain in the ass. In order to go legitimately, you have to find at least one other person to go with, you have to find both a vehicle to use and a period of time when it's available, you have to do paperwork, and most importantly you need approval. Going illegitimately bypasses the paperwork and approval process, but is no easier. Now you need to find a way to travel 12km to the front gate, abetted by someone who can keep their mouth shut. You need to call a taxi or limo service to pick you up at the front gate, and schedule a return time, and you need enough cash, phone battery, and Wifi to warrant your safe return.
Regardless of which method you choose, it takes work. It takes researching and calling people and exchanging favors and making decisions at 2:00 in the morning, time that could just be spent doing anything else.... doing nothing. But if you put in the work you may find yourself walking along the beach of an island in the Persian Gulf watching the sunrise, or raging to house music in a Toyota 4x4 rolling over sand dunes, or just enjoying a very nice meal with some friends.
The beautiful thing about each of those examples, is that on each of those days, we decided to leave base about 6 hours before actually going. The next big thing is right around the corner. It always is. We live life with that fact.
Whether we try, and make it the best day that could be had abroad, or we don't and the circumstances of the time and place are allowed to just fall into place; another is just around the corner. Another flight, another place, another day, another experience, is just around the corner.
That is the lifestyle of movement. In which traveling isn't a break from reality, it is reality. It's losing count and letting memories blur together, because more's to come. It's not having to dread the last day of a trip, because you don't even know which the last day will be. It's enjoying time at home with your family, because leaving home is no longer an escape. It's one, after another, after another, after another, for as long as you can remember and as far as you can envision ahead. It's the lifestyle, that makes it all worth it.
An idea I had while driving through Doha today, was finding a real, tiny, rural, Muslim town in Qatar. I want to go there. I want to find some middle-of-nowhere place and have lunch, like Karen and I did in Cambodia or Oman.
I'm sure within a week or so, at 2:00 in the morning, I'll find a way.
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Thursday, January 23, 2020
The Skill of Travel
Good morning. It's actually almost 6pm but I woke up an hour ago.
A few days ago we had the dreaded 12-hour flop. You see as a pilot, where work hours vary across not only all times of day, but all zones of time, a lot of effort is put into planning your sleep. You have what's called a "window". This is essentially the window of time when your circadian rhythm is adjusted to being awake, in zulu time. If your window is 8am to 8pm in Florida, then when you fly across the ocean to Germany, your window is 2pm to 2am. Your window is always changing. After landing in Germany you may have a day or so before taking off the following morning, and for that your window will need to be 6am to 6pm local, or 12am to noon Florida time. So in the space of two days your window has been forced to the left by 8 hours. Then you may land further East. New timezone, new window. This continues until you exit the game.
Even when you're in the same location for an extended amount of time, for example Qatar, you still have a window. For risk and fatigue management they'll try to fly you in your window, but every now and then things will need to shift and you'll need to move your window. My window since I've gotten here has been 8am to 8pm. Then a few days ago we had to move.... to 8pm to 8am... 12 hours... and we were taking off 28 hours after being told we're switching windows.
That is a 12-hour flop. It's figuring out a way to adjust your body to an exact opposite schedule, something sleep psychologists agree takes two weeks, and doing it in the space of a day. It's a puzzle, a process.
Step 1: All lights on. Phone brightness all the way up. Once the sun sets, no more looking outside as the blackness of night will remind your brain what time it is as opposed to what it's supposed to be.
Step 2: Exercise. This isn't gonna work if you don't.
Step 3: Only eat fruit or light snacks when it's "night" and only eat heavy, long-to-digest food when it's "day". Save the heaviest for right when your new window is ending.
Step 4: Sleep until you can't anymore.
Step 5: Go fly. Wash, rinse, repeat. Welcome to your new window.
....
Step 6: Fly to Afghanistan for 8 and a half hours.
Step 7: Have your friend tell you that they're going to the dunes in 1 hour. You can't miss it.
Step 8: You're too tired. Prepare to tell him no.
Step 9: Become informed that both riding camels and sandboarding is involved.
Step 10: Okay forget steps 1 through 4. We're going sandboarding.
Afghanistan is a crazy place. Movies make it look like the Muslim Wild West. Flying out there makes it feel like the Muslim Wild West. Geography forces us to fly through Pakistan in order to get there, but ever since we caught them with their pants down and Osama bin Laden hiding behind them they've been pissy with us. (Most of geo-politics is just getting pissy with each other). So Pakistan forces us to make these ridiculous position reports along a VFR corridor (which is really just an airway, but don't tell them that because then they'll change the procedures and make it an even bigger pain in the ass), but Pakistan has very shitty radios. Out of everywhere I've flown in the world, I'd have to put Pakistan at second to last in radio quality. And the worst is Afghanistan. So in addition to having to get all of these required clearances and making position reports, the radios don't fucking work. So every five minutes you have to open the secrets binder and flip it to whatever page and figure out, "Okay, we went NORDO (again) inside XXXXX airspace, looks like we squawk XXXX and offset by XX." And you fly your whole flightplan like that.
So. Once you navigate that shitshow, you land with 0/0 ceiling/vis (and you fucking nail it!), which I'm not going to talk about (for reasons. Just know that I did it and it was cool and I fucking nailed it). Then pop back into the squadron and give a fist bump to Gio, and realize that despite all the debate concerning lack of sleep, the only logical thing to do is to go dune bashing and sandboarding in the desert along the Saudi boarder. You'll be fine. As long as you don't break an ankle with a compound fracture, get an infection, and die.
Which brings me to the thesis of this whole post. I travel a lot. My best friends travel a lot. I travel a lot, with my best friends. We get used to it. We have a very blessed life, with an awesome job, which leads to experience, which leads to even better know-how of how to make for amazing experiences on the road, which leads to an even more blessed life. It's a positive feedback loop.
Some pilots look down on people who're non-aircrew, I've noticed. "Nonner's" they call them. Or "normal people". (Normies!) The general stereotype is that they suck at anything and everything that isn't done at a desk. Once you step outside and off-base, their experience wanes. They get incredibly tired after 6 hours and 3 time zones. An 9-hour flight is doesn't just feel long to Nonners, it feels unbearable. They have the most adorable tendencies, like chewing gum to clear their ears. So the general consensus among aircrew, is never do a shore excursion (a day trip of sorts, well planned and executed; all those amazing pictures you see on instagram from Air Force pilots you know? Those are all taken from well-done shore excursions) with nonners. "Just don't do it"...."You won't have fun"..."They get so stressed about such dumb stuff, like...taxis" I've heard people say.
But I always disagreed with that. I thought that travel was in the heart, something you were born with. I thought experience had very little to do with it. I figured most people weren't born to travel, and those people don't join the Air Force, and those who were.. did. I thought the people who talked shit about Nonners screwing up very basic worldly concepts (such as time change or currency), were just being elitist.
So there I was, after being awake for 24 hours, driving to this rendezvous point near the Museum of Islamic Art where we were meeting a group of Qataris with Land Cruisers who'd take us to the dunes. Cool, I've done kind of thing a million times. This is just a rather exciting Sunday morning for me.
Gio and I started getting frustrated about 15 minutes into the Nonner's desperate attempt to find an ATM.
"Well we need 1,200 Riyals to pay the guides. We don't have enough cash so we have to stop." The Nonner's said, stressfully.
"Okay... Yeah... but the guides will want their money so they'll probably drive us to an ATM... And they know where they all are and which are most convenient because, well they live here."
Our attempts to make things easy were moot. We ended up stopping at the Museum of Islamic Art, and the Nonners paid the 50 riyal entrance fee in order to use the ATM in the museum. I just waited until the Qataris who met us took us to an ATM, which was conveniently located in the gas station they had to fill up at anyway.
I've noticed travel is a skill. You can travel regardless of your skill level; you can over-pack your bags and arrive at the airport way too early and fly off to places you think are unknown (England?). You can use a travel agent to book your heavily-overpriced transportation from airport to hotel, and you can make sure you only eat at that hotel because they have your credit card on file and it's easy. You can make sure you have two days off after you arrive to adjust to the timezone shift, and you can do your guided tours that cost 250 euros which drive you place to place. You can do all of that, take the easy street. But it doesn't make you a better traveler.
You can take your pictures in front of whatever monument and post it to Instagram so that it appears to everyone that you've accomplished something by packing your bags and leaving the country. You can do that. But it's a very different thing compared to what I do.
There's another side of the coin. There's a type of person who has a 10 hour layover and still sees half of the city. The person who always makes the conservative, boring decision at home... so they have the fuel to make the exciting, sleep-deprived, potentially dangerous decision abroad. This type of person can see a road-sign, wonder what it is (Banana Island, that sound's like an interesting place) figure out how exactly to get there in a day, and go.
These are two extremely different people.
I have trouble speaking for the Nonner's, I don't know how they think or what they want to get out of the few months of travel they get every two years. But I can speak for me. I can speak for Gio and I can speak for a lot of pilots who'll drop everything Nonner-adjacent in order to see something, experience something, new. The urge to explore, and experience, it's irresistible. You can't simply come to a person like that and expect them to find a reason to not go. And once we're out and about, off-base and among the people, things can slow down. We'll get back. If our phones die we'll buy a charger. If our car breaks we'll the call rental agency and a cab. If we run out of money we'll find an ATM. These are not cosmic problems. It's a different attitude than the stressed-out tourist look. Experience backs us up, every time. And you aren't born with experience
The Nonners will plan, replan, micromanage, and grow stressed when things don't go they way they envisioned. The aircrew just go.
I can't imagine what my life or personality would be if I lived any differently. There's always a voice ticking in the back of my head when I'm abroad, "Just go! It'll be worth it! You can figure the rest out later." I start debating with myself, weighing the pros and cons, whether or not it actually will be worth the lack of sleep, the work it takes to move from place to place (especially when that includes a boat), and the money I may spend. I always hit a point when I realize how angry I'll be at myself in the future if I'm able to find a single thread of a reason to not take up the opportunity in front of me. Every part of my brain that doesn't hold the opportunistic side of me, steadily shuts down. While the front of my head tells me to sleep, turn the lights off, turn my phone brightness down, reminds me I have to fly tomorrow, the rest simply admits what was actually true all along, "Alright. I guess we're going."
And it's always worth it.
A few days ago we had the dreaded 12-hour flop. You see as a pilot, where work hours vary across not only all times of day, but all zones of time, a lot of effort is put into planning your sleep. You have what's called a "window". This is essentially the window of time when your circadian rhythm is adjusted to being awake, in zulu time. If your window is 8am to 8pm in Florida, then when you fly across the ocean to Germany, your window is 2pm to 2am. Your window is always changing. After landing in Germany you may have a day or so before taking off the following morning, and for that your window will need to be 6am to 6pm local, or 12am to noon Florida time. So in the space of two days your window has been forced to the left by 8 hours. Then you may land further East. New timezone, new window. This continues until you exit the game.
Even when you're in the same location for an extended amount of time, for example Qatar, you still have a window. For risk and fatigue management they'll try to fly you in your window, but every now and then things will need to shift and you'll need to move your window. My window since I've gotten here has been 8am to 8pm. Then a few days ago we had to move.... to 8pm to 8am... 12 hours... and we were taking off 28 hours after being told we're switching windows.
That is a 12-hour flop. It's figuring out a way to adjust your body to an exact opposite schedule, something sleep psychologists agree takes two weeks, and doing it in the space of a day. It's a puzzle, a process.
Step 1: All lights on. Phone brightness all the way up. Once the sun sets, no more looking outside as the blackness of night will remind your brain what time it is as opposed to what it's supposed to be.
Step 2: Exercise. This isn't gonna work if you don't.
Step 3: Only eat fruit or light snacks when it's "night" and only eat heavy, long-to-digest food when it's "day". Save the heaviest for right when your new window is ending.
Step 4: Sleep until you can't anymore.
Step 5: Go fly. Wash, rinse, repeat. Welcome to your new window.
....
Step 6: Fly to Afghanistan for 8 and a half hours.
Step 7: Have your friend tell you that they're going to the dunes in 1 hour. You can't miss it.
Step 8: You're too tired. Prepare to tell him no.
Step 9: Become informed that both riding camels and sandboarding is involved.
Step 10: Okay forget steps 1 through 4. We're going sandboarding.
Afghanistan is a crazy place. Movies make it look like the Muslim Wild West. Flying out there makes it feel like the Muslim Wild West. Geography forces us to fly through Pakistan in order to get there, but ever since we caught them with their pants down and Osama bin Laden hiding behind them they've been pissy with us. (Most of geo-politics is just getting pissy with each other). So Pakistan forces us to make these ridiculous position reports along a VFR corridor (which is really just an airway, but don't tell them that because then they'll change the procedures and make it an even bigger pain in the ass), but Pakistan has very shitty radios. Out of everywhere I've flown in the world, I'd have to put Pakistan at second to last in radio quality. And the worst is Afghanistan. So in addition to having to get all of these required clearances and making position reports, the radios don't fucking work. So every five minutes you have to open the secrets binder and flip it to whatever page and figure out, "Okay, we went NORDO (again) inside XXXXX airspace, looks like we squawk XXXX and offset by XX." And you fly your whole flightplan like that.
So. Once you navigate that shitshow, you land with 0/0 ceiling/vis (and you fucking nail it!), which I'm not going to talk about (for reasons. Just know that I did it and it was cool and I fucking nailed it). Then pop back into the squadron and give a fist bump to Gio, and realize that despite all the debate concerning lack of sleep, the only logical thing to do is to go dune bashing and sandboarding in the desert along the Saudi boarder. You'll be fine. As long as you don't break an ankle with a compound fracture, get an infection, and die.
Which brings me to the thesis of this whole post. I travel a lot. My best friends travel a lot. I travel a lot, with my best friends. We get used to it. We have a very blessed life, with an awesome job, which leads to experience, which leads to even better know-how of how to make for amazing experiences on the road, which leads to an even more blessed life. It's a positive feedback loop.
Some pilots look down on people who're non-aircrew, I've noticed. "Nonner's" they call them. Or "normal people". (Normies!) The general stereotype is that they suck at anything and everything that isn't done at a desk. Once you step outside and off-base, their experience wanes. They get incredibly tired after 6 hours and 3 time zones. An 9-hour flight is doesn't just feel long to Nonners, it feels unbearable. They have the most adorable tendencies, like chewing gum to clear their ears. So the general consensus among aircrew, is never do a shore excursion (a day trip of sorts, well planned and executed; all those amazing pictures you see on instagram from Air Force pilots you know? Those are all taken from well-done shore excursions) with nonners. "Just don't do it"...."You won't have fun"..."They get so stressed about such dumb stuff, like...taxis" I've heard people say.
But I always disagreed with that. I thought that travel was in the heart, something you were born with. I thought experience had very little to do with it. I figured most people weren't born to travel, and those people don't join the Air Force, and those who were.. did. I thought the people who talked shit about Nonners screwing up very basic worldly concepts (such as time change or currency), were just being elitist.
So there I was, after being awake for 24 hours, driving to this rendezvous point near the Museum of Islamic Art where we were meeting a group of Qataris with Land Cruisers who'd take us to the dunes. Cool, I've done kind of thing a million times. This is just a rather exciting Sunday morning for me.
Gio and I started getting frustrated about 15 minutes into the Nonner's desperate attempt to find an ATM.
"Well we need 1,200 Riyals to pay the guides. We don't have enough cash so we have to stop." The Nonner's said, stressfully.
"Okay... Yeah... but the guides will want their money so they'll probably drive us to an ATM... And they know where they all are and which are most convenient because, well they live here."
Our attempts to make things easy were moot. We ended up stopping at the Museum of Islamic Art, and the Nonners paid the 50 riyal entrance fee in order to use the ATM in the museum. I just waited until the Qataris who met us took us to an ATM, which was conveniently located in the gas station they had to fill up at anyway.
I've noticed travel is a skill. You can travel regardless of your skill level; you can over-pack your bags and arrive at the airport way too early and fly off to places you think are unknown (England?). You can use a travel agent to book your heavily-overpriced transportation from airport to hotel, and you can make sure you only eat at that hotel because they have your credit card on file and it's easy. You can make sure you have two days off after you arrive to adjust to the timezone shift, and you can do your guided tours that cost 250 euros which drive you place to place. You can do all of that, take the easy street. But it doesn't make you a better traveler.
You can take your pictures in front of whatever monument and post it to Instagram so that it appears to everyone that you've accomplished something by packing your bags and leaving the country. You can do that. But it's a very different thing compared to what I do.
There's another side of the coin. There's a type of person who has a 10 hour layover and still sees half of the city. The person who always makes the conservative, boring decision at home... so they have the fuel to make the exciting, sleep-deprived, potentially dangerous decision abroad. This type of person can see a road-sign, wonder what it is (Banana Island, that sound's like an interesting place) figure out how exactly to get there in a day, and go.
These are two extremely different people.
I have trouble speaking for the Nonner's, I don't know how they think or what they want to get out of the few months of travel they get every two years. But I can speak for me. I can speak for Gio and I can speak for a lot of pilots who'll drop everything Nonner-adjacent in order to see something, experience something, new. The urge to explore, and experience, it's irresistible. You can't simply come to a person like that and expect them to find a reason to not go. And once we're out and about, off-base and among the people, things can slow down. We'll get back. If our phones die we'll buy a charger. If our car breaks we'll the call rental agency and a cab. If we run out of money we'll find an ATM. These are not cosmic problems. It's a different attitude than the stressed-out tourist look. Experience backs us up, every time. And you aren't born with experience
The Nonners will plan, replan, micromanage, and grow stressed when things don't go they way they envisioned. The aircrew just go.
I can't imagine what my life or personality would be if I lived any differently. There's always a voice ticking in the back of my head when I'm abroad, "Just go! It'll be worth it! You can figure the rest out later." I start debating with myself, weighing the pros and cons, whether or not it actually will be worth the lack of sleep, the work it takes to move from place to place (especially when that includes a boat), and the money I may spend. I always hit a point when I realize how angry I'll be at myself in the future if I'm able to find a single thread of a reason to not take up the opportunity in front of me. Every part of my brain that doesn't hold the opportunistic side of me, steadily shuts down. While the front of my head tells me to sleep, turn the lights off, turn my phone brightness down, reminds me I have to fly tomorrow, the rest simply admits what was actually true all along, "Alright. I guess we're going."
And it's always worth it.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Read the News
As-salaam alaikum,
Well there's not a whole lot to write about tonight. I reckon it will be three, perhaps four more weeks of talks at the UN before the Middle East comes into agreement and reaches peace. It seems to me the Sunnis and Shias are starting to realize that they actually agree on more fronts than not, and beginning to feel foolish over their actions of the past 1,500 years. I think Iraq's government is going strong and the country is reaping their efforts in rebuilding aaaaaaand okay that's enough - you and I both know none of this is true.
I follow the news very closely. I always try to keep well-read, but when I'm especially away from home in some unfamiliar part of the world I become quite obsessed with catching up on the past few decades of politics and regional events. I remember being in Cambodia when the King of Thailand died, and reading for hours about what exactly that means, how national mourning periods work (it's literally against the law to laugh), and precisely from where instability stems. In Greece while I was at the Parthenon, gunshots could clearly be heard from the warren of narrow streets below, overcasting a roaring crowd. "Okay. That sounds like a protest, indicating that I'm in no way of harm. I know they're pretty pissed off about the economy, something about the Euro. But what exactly are they protesting? How is the government responding? Who are the affected players?" And then I read the news.
My habit of information is stimulated significantly now that I'm living alongside the Persian Gulf, flying into Iraq or Saudi Arabia five times a week and able to wave at snowcapped mountains in Iran when I'm able to pick them out from altitude. When the front page articles of Al Jazeera or CNN have a direct effect on what you'll be doing that day, and how you're going to do it without causing more headlines, you should probably be reading them. So it's become my daily ritual when I wake up, before checking Facebook, before checking the flying schedule, and after texting my wife but just barely, I read the news. And every morning lately I've thought, "Jesus fucking Christ what happened!?"
I've made the observation before that most people, with the most opinions, with the loudest attitudes NEVER ask that question. An explicit example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, laid out ad infinitum just for you day after day, story after story. It's ironic, the more you know the more questions you have when you read an article. But I'm lucky in that regard because I happen to have a security clearance; and 90 minutes after I read the news every morning I go into a room with an intelligence officer, close the door, and I ask away.
"Morning Dave. So uh, what the hell happened!?" Questions asked. Questions answered. Near perfect understanding of an event and all parties involved. Just the way I like it.
But then I spend the next seven hours in a media blackout, which is a strange occurrence in this day and age. Seven hours, spent flying directly toward and above the very place you've read about every day, seven hours spent just wondering what the headlines will be when you land.
We've been briefed lately on some shenanigans at the behest of Iraqi controllers. I can't go into details. (Just picture Iran trying to convince the Iraqi government to END THE DISGRACEFUL REGIME OF AMERICA AND ITS ALLIES while Yakety Sax plays on the radio and there's like a chair on fire in the background or something.) So we were on guard and had a scan going of all the strike frequencies up so that if the world started ending, we'd hear about it. I'm afraid to say it was not the most exciting flight over that country, until we started heading out.
We were a hundred miles or so from Basra, on our usual track back home. We "FENCE'd out" (fuel, emitters, nav, comm, and equipment; it's when we reconfigure back to a regular airplane and just casually slip back onto the ICAO airways with Emirates and Etihad like nothing happened) and started picking up our clearance with Baghdad. It was an American controller, I've dealt with him before, chill guy. He said "Python XX, radar contact...eh... sorry guys I gotta switch you over to another frequency, contact 120.something. Have a good flight back." I read it back, "CYA", and switched over.
This new controller was Iraqi. And he was pissy. "Python XX radar identified!" He was yelling. "You are supposed to be at FL230! Descend immediately to FL230! Cross TONNY below FL230 or else you will be unauthorized!"
Okay pause. Here's why that's bullshit.
1) We spend most of the flight operating in military airspace, controlled by America, within the best interests of Iraq. We are controlled and cleared by Americans who are tracking us with American radar, satellites, and radio, all of which are encrypted. It is those controllers who give us our clearance out of the country, at whatever fucking altitude we want. They gave us FL280.
2) It is Baghdad's job to sequence us and clear us into Kuwait. They have hundreds of miles to do this. There is no other traffic in this airspace... until we get to Kuwait. If they need to change our altitude, we have until Kuwait to do it.
3) TONNY is the point where we check in with Baghdad and get a public IFR clearance. It is physically impossible to descend to any altitude by that point, because we are already past that point when we check in.
4) Being "unauthorized" is not a thing.
Alright back to the story. "What? That's bullshit! Who pissed in his hummus!? Can we switch back to the American dude!?" I said on intercomm before very calmly and without alarm reading it back on the radio, "FL230 by TONNY, Python XX." As we got closer to Kuwait and were picking up more on the radio, the bullshit indicator starting swinging again. "Python XX switch my frequency 121.whatever, contact secondary frequency 125.this, and monitor third frequency 128.fuck-you."
Pause again. Here's why that's bullshit.
1) Aircraft are not normally, not ever, given more than one frequency to contact or monitor.
2) We have a finite number of radios, a portion of them are dedicated to talking to our military controllers and chain of command. We are unable to do that if Baghdad gives us ten frequencies to monitor.
3) If you are supposed to be on a certain frequency and you're not, they'll start calling you on Guard.
4) When transmitting on Guard, everyone within range is forced to hear.
5) Iran is within that range.
So again, acting courteously as if this were any other day, I read it back. ("121.whatever, 125.this, and 128.fuck-you, as-salaam alaikum Python XX") Then we start hearing our buddies on their way into-country, fighters, other tankers, the usual crowd between Kuwait and Iraq; and Baghdad wasn't letting them in. Assigning vectors in the opposite direction, present position holding patterns with no reason, or just simply telling them "You are not authorized to enter Iraq."
"Ohhhhhhh SHIT! It's going down!" My A/C and I rushed to crack back open the secrets case and started punching in secure frequencies (We were supposed to be monitoring 121.whatever, but this was more important.) The secure lines were filled to the second with the diplomatic discussions. And then...
Well... I can't talk about what they all said or what happened to all of those planes. I guess... I guess just use your imagination (And then all the KC-135's launched their missiles and took out every single remaining member of ISIS) But knowing what happened doesn't change the fact that there are questions. Why did the American controller on Baghdad immediately switch us to an Iraqi controller? Why are all the Iraqi controllers being such assholes? Why does it feel like we're being tricked into busting airspace and causing an international incident with Iran? OH! And why aren't any other American planes being allowed into Iraq? What the hell happened!?
But as far as what happened to me... After a time we were switched over to Kuwait Control and within minutes we crossed the ADIZ and we were out of the country. There was quite a bit of weather over the gulf, pretty nasty turbulence, but we flew through it into a busy Doha Approach, and I landed. We taxied back and shut down and ran our checklists. Our driver picked us up and drove us off the flightline.
"We're gonna have to report this to intel aren't we?" I asked as we were walking through the door to the squadron.
"Yup. And we'll back-brief the Tactics Officer."
There's a number of things we have to do when we get back to Ops after a flight. We have to put our helmets and oxygen masks back on the rack. We have to turn over our classified documents, and shred all of our notes and kneeboards and scrap papers from the flight, as those are now classified too. We have to do paperwork and update our currency records and check the schedule for the next day.
But the first thing I do, is read the news.
Well there's not a whole lot to write about tonight. I reckon it will be three, perhaps four more weeks of talks at the UN before the Middle East comes into agreement and reaches peace. It seems to me the Sunnis and Shias are starting to realize that they actually agree on more fronts than not, and beginning to feel foolish over their actions of the past 1,500 years. I think Iraq's government is going strong and the country is reaping their efforts in rebuilding aaaaaaand okay that's enough - you and I both know none of this is true.
I follow the news very closely. I always try to keep well-read, but when I'm especially away from home in some unfamiliar part of the world I become quite obsessed with catching up on the past few decades of politics and regional events. I remember being in Cambodia when the King of Thailand died, and reading for hours about what exactly that means, how national mourning periods work (it's literally against the law to laugh), and precisely from where instability stems. In Greece while I was at the Parthenon, gunshots could clearly be heard from the warren of narrow streets below, overcasting a roaring crowd. "Okay. That sounds like a protest, indicating that I'm in no way of harm. I know they're pretty pissed off about the economy, something about the Euro. But what exactly are they protesting? How is the government responding? Who are the affected players?" And then I read the news.
My habit of information is stimulated significantly now that I'm living alongside the Persian Gulf, flying into Iraq or Saudi Arabia five times a week and able to wave at snowcapped mountains in Iran when I'm able to pick them out from altitude. When the front page articles of Al Jazeera or CNN have a direct effect on what you'll be doing that day, and how you're going to do it without causing more headlines, you should probably be reading them. So it's become my daily ritual when I wake up, before checking Facebook, before checking the flying schedule, and after texting my wife but just barely, I read the news. And every morning lately I've thought, "Jesus fucking Christ what happened!?"
I've made the observation before that most people, with the most opinions, with the loudest attitudes NEVER ask that question. An explicit example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, laid out ad infinitum just for you day after day, story after story. It's ironic, the more you know the more questions you have when you read an article. But I'm lucky in that regard because I happen to have a security clearance; and 90 minutes after I read the news every morning I go into a room with an intelligence officer, close the door, and I ask away.
"Morning Dave. So uh, what the hell happened!?" Questions asked. Questions answered. Near perfect understanding of an event and all parties involved. Just the way I like it.
But then I spend the next seven hours in a media blackout, which is a strange occurrence in this day and age. Seven hours, spent flying directly toward and above the very place you've read about every day, seven hours spent just wondering what the headlines will be when you land.
We've been briefed lately on some shenanigans at the behest of Iraqi controllers. I can't go into details. (Just picture Iran trying to convince the Iraqi government to END THE DISGRACEFUL REGIME OF AMERICA AND ITS ALLIES while Yakety Sax plays on the radio and there's like a chair on fire in the background or something.) So we were on guard and had a scan going of all the strike frequencies up so that if the world started ending, we'd hear about it. I'm afraid to say it was not the most exciting flight over that country, until we started heading out.
We were a hundred miles or so from Basra, on our usual track back home. We "FENCE'd out" (fuel, emitters, nav, comm, and equipment; it's when we reconfigure back to a regular airplane and just casually slip back onto the ICAO airways with Emirates and Etihad like nothing happened) and started picking up our clearance with Baghdad. It was an American controller, I've dealt with him before, chill guy. He said "Python XX, radar contact...eh... sorry guys I gotta switch you over to another frequency, contact 120.something. Have a good flight back." I read it back, "CYA", and switched over.
This new controller was Iraqi. And he was pissy. "Python XX radar identified!" He was yelling. "You are supposed to be at FL230! Descend immediately to FL230! Cross TONNY below FL230 or else you will be unauthorized!"
Okay pause. Here's why that's bullshit.
1) We spend most of the flight operating in military airspace, controlled by America, within the best interests of Iraq. We are controlled and cleared by Americans who are tracking us with American radar, satellites, and radio, all of which are encrypted. It is those controllers who give us our clearance out of the country, at whatever fucking altitude we want. They gave us FL280.
2) It is Baghdad's job to sequence us and clear us into Kuwait. They have hundreds of miles to do this. There is no other traffic in this airspace... until we get to Kuwait. If they need to change our altitude, we have until Kuwait to do it.
3) TONNY is the point where we check in with Baghdad and get a public IFR clearance. It is physically impossible to descend to any altitude by that point, because we are already past that point when we check in.
4) Being "unauthorized" is not a thing.
Alright back to the story. "What? That's bullshit! Who pissed in his hummus!? Can we switch back to the American dude!?" I said on intercomm before very calmly and without alarm reading it back on the radio, "FL230 by TONNY, Python XX." As we got closer to Kuwait and were picking up more on the radio, the bullshit indicator starting swinging again. "Python XX switch my frequency 121.whatever, contact secondary frequency 125.this, and monitor third frequency 128.fuck-you."
Pause again. Here's why that's bullshit.
1) Aircraft are not normally, not ever, given more than one frequency to contact or monitor.
2) We have a finite number of radios, a portion of them are dedicated to talking to our military controllers and chain of command. We are unable to do that if Baghdad gives us ten frequencies to monitor.
3) If you are supposed to be on a certain frequency and you're not, they'll start calling you on Guard.
4) When transmitting on Guard, everyone within range is forced to hear.
5) Iran is within that range.
So again, acting courteously as if this were any other day, I read it back. ("121.whatever, 125.this, and 128.fuck-you, as-salaam alaikum Python XX") Then we start hearing our buddies on their way into-country, fighters, other tankers, the usual crowd between Kuwait and Iraq; and Baghdad wasn't letting them in. Assigning vectors in the opposite direction, present position holding patterns with no reason, or just simply telling them "You are not authorized to enter Iraq."
"Ohhhhhhh SHIT! It's going down!" My A/C and I rushed to crack back open the secrets case and started punching in secure frequencies (We were supposed to be monitoring 121.whatever, but this was more important.) The secure lines were filled to the second with the diplomatic discussions. And then...
Well... I can't talk about what they all said or what happened to all of those planes. I guess... I guess just use your imagination (And then all the KC-135's launched their missiles and took out every single remaining member of ISIS) But knowing what happened doesn't change the fact that there are questions. Why did the American controller on Baghdad immediately switch us to an Iraqi controller? Why are all the Iraqi controllers being such assholes? Why does it feel like we're being tricked into busting airspace and causing an international incident with Iran? OH! And why aren't any other American planes being allowed into Iraq? What the hell happened!?
But as far as what happened to me... After a time we were switched over to Kuwait Control and within minutes we crossed the ADIZ and we were out of the country. There was quite a bit of weather over the gulf, pretty nasty turbulence, but we flew through it into a busy Doha Approach, and I landed. We taxied back and shut down and ran our checklists. Our driver picked us up and drove us off the flightline.
"We're gonna have to report this to intel aren't we?" I asked as we were walking through the door to the squadron.
"Yup. And we'll back-brief the Tactics Officer."
There's a number of things we have to do when we get back to Ops after a flight. We have to put our helmets and oxygen masks back on the rack. We have to turn over our classified documents, and shred all of our notes and kneeboards and scrap papers from the flight, as those are now classified too. We have to do paperwork and update our currency records and check the schedule for the next day.
But the first thing I do, is read the news.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)