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.