The Grim Line

Gooooood morning dear readers, Python 69 checking in.

I'm back on the flight line. It took a lot of fucking work but I managed to get off the desk on time and onto Traver's crew without pissing too many people off. There's a story to that, one that I will have to write down and immortalize later. It's less of a story really and more of a procedure, a Plan B, a fuck-over insurance claim; and one thing I've learned being deployed is to always pay your premiums when it comes to fuck-over insurance because it's only a matter of time until you find yourself getting fucked over, and it's always wise to have a safety net.

I flew today, the Grim line. After months and months of flying in every-which direction at all-odd hours of the day and phases of the moon, you get to the point when you've flown with every single squadron currently deployed in the Middle East. Each squadron has a different callsign: the F-16s are Nickel, F-35s are Panther, there are two sets of F-15s - Abide and Dude, the AWACS is Whistler, and the B-52 is Grim. Each flight of Nickels or Panthers or Dudes or whatever typically has in-gas support as well as out-gas support (dragging them into country and a separate tanker dragging them back out). Our Python flight numbers are all tied to the diplomatic clearance for the whole flight package and are coded according to the direction (left or right), the phase (in or out), the level of secrecy (black or white) and the receiver. So if you understand the system, which I always find to be in one's best interest, you can decipher your whole mission and know exactly what you're doing by only hearing the flight number when you get alerted in the morning. If you know the system, a four second phone call saying "Goooooooood morning Python 38 you're alerted CYA" ... means .... "Goooood morning Decker. About a 5 hour flight today, a fat 80,000lbs of fuel scheduled to offload. Tonight you're going to fly to the edge of Omani airspace, turn towards India and go dark, rendezvous in the middle of the Indian Ocean with a B-52 who's RTBing after a mission in Afghanistan, and about-face back to Qatar just before hitting the edge of the Maldives." That's the Grim line.

And that's exactly what we did. Tonight there was no moon and no boat lights or anything in the ocean, yielding an impressive amount of stars above us. The AC and I had our heads pressed up to the window for an hour watching dozens of newly visible satellites and a meteor shower on the way back to the Arabian Peninsula. The sun came up and it was nice and quiet through UAE (because no one in the world but us is flying this month). I was jonesing to do the Malak again despite doing it yesterday, I'm always down to give everyone at Al Udeid Air Base a nice 6am wake-up flyby; but it was quite hazy crossing into Qatar and we were fairly heavyweight since Grim only took 40,0000lbs, so a 500ft tactical approach wasn't in the cards. Instead I did the ILS to 16L with a direct 10kt crosswind and greased it on with zero crab in front of a Rivet Joint holding short for takeoff, serving as an audience. All in all it was a standard Grim line, pleasurable as always.

There's also a few Dude lines, a handful of Nickel lines, a Whistler line, and so on. One quaint aspect of this level of familiarization is getting to know each squadron's reputation and culture. Ernest Hemingway said "If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars", which is true. But if you want to know about a pilot culture, you gotta fly with them. There's something about the sheer complexities and tensions involved in flying that allows you to really read a person or a squadron.

The Dudes and Nickels are always a joy to fly with, they make things easy and are typically the first to admit it if they fuck anything up. Whistler is a pain; they don't fly much when they're at home so they typically suck and they're always trying to back-dick us into giving them practice AR (which is fine if they're upfront about it, but they never are and we have other shit to do so take your gas and fuck off Whistler).  Grim is usually on the back half of a 22 hour mission, so their crews range from slap-happy and Go-Pilled-up giving us riddles and playing word games during AR, to understandably slow and sloppy in which case they're always apologetic about it. Panthers are the biggest pain in the ass though. I've never flown with an F-35 flight lead who didn't seem to have a god complex, they're never ashamed to show up late without a heads up, or to ask us to rework clearances for them even when we're super busy and there's four of them doing nothing (hey Panther 11, how about we do our job and you do your job?)

I try to take our perception and reputation seriously. Every ATC center in the Middle East knows who Python is. Every receiver knows it's us and that MacDill is the current deployed 135 squadron. So when we run into them at the bar in Ramstein or in Spain in two weeks they can either think "oh those guys are douchebags" OR they can remember how Lt Loyd rolled out right fucking in front of them every single night, making their half of the rendezvous carelessly easy. They can either remember how some of us stutter like idiots on the radio, OR that we always give them a full-on heart-felt "thanks for stopping by, CYA" when signing off. Reputation matters. No one wants to be a part of the douchebag squadron.

Anyway. That's about it for today. I'm flying an over-the-shoulder tomorrow with a new AC who I think is the same guy who was two years ahead of me in ROTC. That'll be fun. We're still expecting to leave in two week despite the Secretary of Defense ordering every single person deployed to extend by 60 days. Pilot perks. We don't have to worry about catching coronavirus on the rotator or when changing planes in Germany, we'll just fly ourselves home when it's time.

Until next time...