The Perfect Rendezvous

Buenos días.

I flew today. C'est la Grim ligne.

Yesterday we all did an over-the-shoulder with a first deployment crew. For crew's who've never deployed the Udeid before, they put a few experienced crew members in the jumpseats to back them up "over the shoulder" for their first flight. I'm one of only two copilots who do them, which can either be received as a compliment as a burden, I of course treat it as the former. The AC was Koji Buterbaugh, who I went to college with and who was two years ahead of me in ROTC. He was the TO (training officer) as an upperclassman, who's sole job was to scream at the underclassmen and be scary. He's a big 6'4 Turkish dude with resting-angry-face and was of the perfect caliber for his position in the wing. I saw him on the schedule and that he needed an over-the-shoulder in my window so I made a phone call and made sure I was on his flight.

His copilot was fresh off the boat from Altus. Over-the-shoulders with brand-spankin' new copilots are my favorite because I get to really appreciate how much I don't suck. I get to just sit there and watch her go line-by-line on an 80-step checklist while I think to myself of all the shit I would've already had done, and become bothered by the fact that we haven't called for clearance yet so when Oman rejects our flight plan it's gonna take half an hour to refile.

"Okay, so I know you're still working on making sure the PMC switch guards are closed, but while you do that... keep in mind steps 60, 63-67, 71, 74, and 78-85 are all the things you can do without hydraulics. So when you start getting faster at this don't hesitate to get ahead."
"Well the AC doesn't get up here until I'm done with step 40, and the first thing he does is pressurize hydraulics right?"
"Yeah... I try to have everything done by the time he gets up here. But you'll get there! You keep going you're doing great!"
"Thanks! PMC guards are closed. Now let's see... Crossover valve..."
My god it's like watching paint dry.

Weather's been skosh the past few days. Mainly rain over the Gulf and the accompanying turbulence. We took off and were starting to bounce around while getting out towards BAYAN. The copilot was flying and visibly growing a little bit uneasy. "Is this okay? Do we need to deviate?" ... "For what, light-occasional moderate? No we'll be fine." Shortly after that she checked off for the lav and immediately after she left the St. Elmo's fire started up. I pointed out to Buterbaugh that she's probably never seen any elmos, and perhaps we could have some innocent fun. So we dimmed all the lights as much as we possibly could and then just waited patiently for her to return. The fire was streaking and flashing all over the front two windows, dimly yet prominently illuminating the cockpit in a white-blue strobe, while the four of us just sat there, exaggerating how unfazed we were.

"WHAT. THE FUCK. IS THAT." Her mic wasn't plugged into the intercom, but we could still hear her yelling from the doorway.

"What are you talking about?" We all calmly expressed, as if there weren't massive streaks of lightning glossing the windows every other second.

"ALL THAT BLUE SHIT! DO YOU SEE THAT!?"

"What blue shit..."

So that's how this particular copilot learned what St. Elmo's fire is. (It may be a little mean, but it's extremely funny).

Today the weather wasn't much better in the Gulf, but we'd passed it all by the time we hit UAE and Oman. Over the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean it was quite nice. No turbulence. No clouds, no lights, no moon, only stars. Crazy Horse called (that's the callsign for the step desk, I was Crazy Horse occasionally during my staff days when the ADO would leave to get food or something) and said Grim was gonna be an hour late, new CT was 0110Z. Cool.

Traver hopped out to the galley to make some popcorn and he and Marcus were talking about parenting or something and I had two hours to myself in the seat. I decided I would spend the time strategizing the perfect rendezvous. What is the perfect rendezvous you ask? Well, I'd be happy to tell you.

Most rendezvouses are with fighters and they have pretty good radar and exceptional maneuverability so they can usually just pop right into position as long as you don't fuck it up or do something unpredictable. Rendezvousing with heavies on the other hand requires a little more planning to make it look polished. We usually have a point called the IP, either an intersection on the airways or just a lat long point over the ocean, and we agree upon a time and both aircraft time everything to the second so that we both cross that point at the exact same moment with us 1,000ft above them. This works great on coronets and day to day missions, but on combat missions we're typically all tactical and doing sketchy stuff with ATC and it can get sloppy. My goal, since I had the time to plan it out, was to erase all that sloppiness inherent to connecting two aircraft at a point in the middle of the ocean while blacked out with no ATC clearance. For the join up, they're considered "in position" at 1,000ft below and half a mile back; that's about when they'll get cleared into precontact (50ft diagonally). So my target was to get as close to that as possible.

I figured I could use the same math and trigonometry as a point parallel rendezvous and tweak it a bit. A point parallel rendezvous is when both planes fly beak-to-beak and the tanker is offset by X miles depending on the winds and airspeed, and we do a 180 degree turn when we hit a certain distance from the receiver and roll out right in front of them. This only works on certain AR tracks with certain clearances and it all has to be briefed ahead of time, and none of that applied to us today; but... I could still use the math and run the numbers in order to plan for my perfect rendezvous. I had two hours of chillin doin nothin so I might as well take out all the stops.

Let's get into it. We would be flying at FL260 and 275kts indicated, when adjusted for inflation that comes out to 397kts true airspeed. We can assume Grim is gonna be flying the standard contract of 310kts indicated at FL250, or 437kts true. By adding the two, our closure speed is 834kts. We can take our bank angle to figure how long it'll take for us to turn 180 degrees, and then figure how far the two planes will travel towards each other in that time, in this case it's 23.36 miles. Then we can take our true airspeed of 397kts and figure out the radius of that 180 degree turn. It's about 10 miles, and for this we don't really need an exact number because once we see the B-52 we can vary our bank angle to hit our mark laterally. We know the receiver is coming from Afghanistan, and will getting out via the Boulevard, which has a set exit point (TAPDO); we also know they'll be going directly to the IP after exiting. We can use the FMS or the chart to deadreckon the bearing between TADPO and the IP, 164, and we can expect that to be the heading they'll be flying.

So the time passed and I had my plan in place and all programmed into the FMS. I gave a nice detailed briefing to Traver of exactly what I was gonna do and when in order to execute the perfect rendezvous. He pretty much said "whatever"; he seemed to think I put way too much effort into this. I started an orbit over the IP and descended down to FL260. Grim called us on COMM1 with an updated ETA of 0108Z, I told them to "just keep flying straight and level. I got this." I flew past the IP with a time of 0102Z, and kept going until 0104Z. Then I turned to heading 344 and flew along an arc I'd built in the box to that would line us up exactly 10 miles to the right of the line between TAPDO and the IP. We rolled out and trucked towards them for a minute, and right at 0107Z we were abeam the IP and the distance between us and Grim was ticking down.

26... 25... 24.6... 24.2... 23.8... 23.6... 23.5... aaaaaaand 23.4... Hit it. I cranked it into a left turn, all the way over to 27° of bank which was what would keep us at a 10 mile radius. At about halfway through the turn I could see them, silhouetted against the dark blue sky on the opposite side of the newly rising sun.

"Python Grim 21 visual."
"Grim Python you're cleared rejoin. But....we recommend you stay straight and level."
"Grim"

The B-52 passed below the wing to my right and I told Marcus he should see them in a second. "Visual" We rolled out just before the IP and I looked at the A/A distance readout to see how I did. 0.5 miles. "Hey Marcus, are they left or right of us?" ... "Uhh neither, they're pretty much dead center." ... "Rog. Ready up front."

"Grim 21 cleared precontact." Fuck yeah.

That, my dear readers, is the perfect rendezvous.