I have the rather fortunate position of not making a living from writing about flying and yet finding myself frequently able to do things in aviation that usually only happen for people who write for a living about flying. In fact, Joy of Flying really exists because I like to share the experiences that I have been fortunate enough to have with people without those people having to shell out a bunch of money to support magazines devoted to the 1% of all flyers who can afford the stuff that they advertise.
I find that all pretty ridiculous. In fact I find the most popular flying magazine out there really an exercise in demonstrating how a chosen few can gloat over jets flown and very expensive turbo-props owned while the most of us out here just dream of being able to put a few gallons into 50 year old designs once a month. Yet, much like magazines that focus on the sordid and chaotic lives of celebrities, people buy this stuff and read it voraciously. Frankly, I have focused my attentions on Kitplanes and EAAs Sport Aviation.
But once in a while I must admit that I have to share an experience that is pretty unique. I would add that it is not to gloat, but rather reflect on my sense of amazement over the experience. It is in that vein that I am writing this and giving it to you. Enjoy.
Our mission profile was pretty straightforward. It involved a departure from an airport in Northern Iraq, direct to Balad (otherwise known as LSA Anaconda) and on then to Baghdad International. Several interesting events would punctuate our trip.
I stepped into the cockpit and strapped into the seat behind the copilot’s. The familiarity of the big beautiful MD windows surrounded me. I once had the opportunity to be up front in a DC-10, in the days before the insanity, the days when an obviously big American kid could come up front and see the world from FL330. Having once been up front in a 747, I was amazed at the panorama that I looked upon from inside the big McDonnel Douglas machine. I decided right then and there that if I ever flew a heavy, my choice would be the biggest “three-holer”.
The quick release readily accepted the shoulder straps and once in and secure I pulled the levers and slid the seat over and in between the center console. The AC and Pilot were rapidly going through the checks and confirmations that accompany the starting and preparation of all big machines prior to their departures. The exception being that on this particular trip our destination had over half of its useable runway blown apart by mortar rounds and we were restricted to landing on just one side of the runway. I would tell you what the useable runway length was but I have no desire to delve into what might be classified, but even more so, I have no desire to assist the enemy in gathering data on what might be a limit to the MD, now Boeing’s, capabilities. If you have any specific interest in all of this you can easily go to
http://www.af.mil/factsheets/
and everything you want to know about the C-17 is right there courtesy of the Air Force.
I will just say that we were something in excess of 400,000 pounds and our available runway was more in the Class D range than Class B range.
The crew spoke to the loadmaster in the rear. Weights and numbers were passed on the intercom and the data was plugged into the FMS. The performance numbers were passed and the AC taxied the aircraft out to the active runway. I sat back and marveled at how benign Iraq was from the cockpit of a heavy jet. Aside from green flight suits, the cockpit looked like any other that one might find at LAX, BWI, DCA or a host of others, well the flight suits and the countermeasures controls located on the center console. This is indeed a war machine, no question.
I sat back wondering how long it would be before we pushed forward. The thought of a mortar, a lucky mortar, finding its way into us, full of fuel, did not excite me and I also knew that we had to not only escape the lucky mortar, but we had to make our way up and beyond the reach of any number of shoulder fired surface to air missiles. We were not out of the woods and nowhere near safe yet.
The power came forward and the world began to race past the picture window to my right. So benign and yet right over that berm is a world where people think mutilating soldiers and innocent civilians is a perfectly acceptable method for waging war. By the poll numbers, they seem to be right. Odd that every time some homicidal wack, butchers one of our guys, ‘our’ guys here seem to suggest that it is all our fault. They suggest that somehow our actions create psychosis.
Let’s get one thing straight; angry people just shoot other people and move on. Psychopaths butcher other human beings. We, the USA, might make angry people; psychopaths come out of the factory already like that. Anyone who has been there knows this.
We rotate and the fans behind us make their familiar cross between a vacuum cleaner and chainsaw howl that only a true fan of high bypass turbofans can really love. More than any afterburner, more than any turboprop, I love the sound of big fans on takeoff. I once purposely parked my sleep deprived family in an RV at Dover AFB RV park as close as I could to the runway just so that through the night I could hear those fans. Indeed, the next morning my wife was clearly not well rested while I slept like a baby. The C-5s lulled me through the night like the voices of angels.
We got to FL220 fine and configured for the approach into Balad. The crew ran over their computer and did what they had too to make it all work out. The descent was necessarily steep. I won’t say how steep but I can say that if you look up the GS at London City Airport, we exceeded that considerably.
Somewhere in the midst of this, as we identified the touchdown zone at Balad, the instructor riding behind me mentioned that Globemaster flying is ‘backside’ flying.
“Backside” flying is what caused me to fall in love with the C-17. All my life I have had a passion for Helios, Caribous, Maules, SuperCubs, you name it, if it tries to be a helicopter with a fixed wing, I love it, period. I fly and fly in a lot of helicopters but to me, simplicity in aviation is everything. If the thing can land short without the plethora or moving, spinning and turning parts of a helicopter, to me that is perfection.
The C-17 is indeed about flying the backside. Power is altitude and pitch is airspeed. The difference in this behemoth is that the crew has some computer generated HUD symbology that tells them exactly when to pull and push the power levers. They work on keeping the ‘pig’ on the ‘dance floor’. If you make the ‘pig’ stay on the ‘dance floor’ your airplane is going to go right where you want it to go. I wish that I had one of those in my airplane.
It was dark as we approached Balad and only the TDZ was illuminated; a reality of tactical landings. No lights till right before landing and they come off immediately afterward. Had we been flying with night vision, there would have been no visible lights. The crew worked the airplane as we descended very steeply toward the few lights in the sea of blackness below. Before I realized what was happening I felt the main gear contact and in short order the straps tightened as I was pushed forward by inertia as the reversers slowed us.
It has been two years since I left Balad on my way home. Not much has changed. A lot of space and a lot of Americans surrounded by mostly people whose biggest concern is ice cream on weekends. It is just those few psychos that like to lop off heads that really mess the entire picture up.
We sat at Balad for a few minutes. Long enough for the folks in back to get off-loaded whatever it was that was back there. While we waited the crew started inputting new data for the flight to Baghdad. I took the time to look around this marvel of modern technology. The cockpit was simple in design and with easily read instrumentation. I looked at the switches and other controls and realized how much effort had gone into building an airplane that required just two pilots to fly pretty much anywhere in the world.
The taxi out to the active runway was uneventful and in short order we were climbing out on our way to Baghdad.
It is easy to get somewhat complacent when things are going well. It is when things start to go badly that you suddenly realize how fast your mind can process information. Nobody was complacent but when the SAM warning went off there was a noticeable change in the level of alertness that only heightened when the missile slammed into the airplane.
Almost immediately the fire-warning handle illuminated on the effected engine and the flurry of activity just feet in front of me was something to behold. Checklists were completed and the crew began to earn their month’s pay. We continued to fly toward Baghdad. The Aircraft Commander made some decisions regarding weight and loads. Again I won’t discuss 'what' specifically because such things are best left in the hands of people who need to know and not in the hands of those who might like to know for bad purposes.
We orbited over Baghdad while we considered various controllability issues during the approach and with great care the crew got us lined up and on final. The C-17 flew like it was just another day. We touched down and saw the emergency vehicles on the ramp waiting for us. Mission complete we left the aircraft to the people who would oversee its repair.
All of this in a day!
Of course I was fortunate enough not to be in Iraq. Like I said, I left that country in 2004 and have been blessed not to have to return since. But being a flight surgeon I was afforded the opportunity to ride along with the crews in the sim so I could watch crew resource management. CRM is the reason why we have very safe commercial air travel. Properly resourcing people in the cockpit to maximize the human power present to deal with issues and emergencies in flight.
Given that most airplane accidents are due to human factors, watching and learning how to improve CRM is of particular interest to me. There is no better place to do this than an aircraft simulator, where, in a matter of three hours, you can fail just about anything that can be failed in the aircraft and specifically watch the crew as they work their emergency procedures, navigate and try to recover the aircraft safely.
I have had the opportunity to jump seat on many large aircraft. The earliest in terms of “airliners” was the Boeing 707 in the form of the KC-135. This airplane was decidedly ‘steam gauge’ with the only LED (note not LCD) display being in the form of the fuel totalizer on the center panel. Everything else was no more sophisticated than the IFR Cherokees that I have flown in the past.
After the -135 the next series of large aircraft that I jump seated on included the C-130 and C-5. These airplanes had on-board GPS and FMS but still retained their steam gauge primary instruments. Both aircraft utilized flight engineers to help with fuel and power management. The C-5 alone had 5 seats just for crewmembers in the front end. The C-130 retained a navigator and this was in 1998.
The 777 was the first airplane that I jump seated that had two crewmembers and glass. I flew in a 757 shortly thereafter and it had essentially the same avionics set up. EFIS displays, INS, FMC, GPS integrated into the avionics suite and an engine and power management system that entirely eliminated the engineer. I remember the engine start on the 777 being absurdly simple. As I recall the checklist had something like 5 items on it because that was the extent of any human interaction in the process. The computer monitored everything, including the shutdown, in the event of a ‘hot start’.
The C-17 goes beyond all of these aircraft. It is indeed a large leap ahead. Like the 777 and 757 it has but two crewmembers and a suite of computer driven avionics and systems that handle everything from bus switching to fuel management. But beyond those, now standard, capabilities the C-17 also includes a HUD and integral fly by wire systems that basically ‘pilot proof’ the airplane. The pilot can select flaps full at 250 knots but the aircraft will not allow that to happen until the airspeeds are within an acceptable range. The same goes for flight control manhandling. Remember, the -17 uses a stick to fly and many of the maneuvers used in combat flying a heavy airplane are more akin to a fighter than something that takes off at ½ a million pounds. Stalling this airplane at gross weight and low airspeed as it maneuvers after take-off would not take a lot of effort were it not for the computers that augment its flight envelope. The airplane, in other words, is smart enough to seek its own survival regardless of what the pilot wants to do with it.
So after 10 hours of watching others fly the machine, I was afforded a brief effort at flying the largest airplane that I have ever had my hands on. While the finishing crew headed for debrief I sat myself in the right seat and gazed out upon a 12,000 foot runway located in the Western United States. I selected a notch of flaps, taxied forward to straighten out and then applied brakes. The Boeing instructor started to speak several times but each time he cut off his own words as I apparently did whatever he wanted to tell me to do next.
Pushing the throttles forward and feeling the noise and vibration increase in the cockpit I released the brakes and kept one hand on the tiller and the other on the power levers. At 80 knots I moved my hand to the stick and waited for Vr. It came quickly and I over rotated about 3 degrees until I found the sweet spot in the trim. The C-17 unstuck and I retracted the gear and continued to climb.
My time in the front seat was on the instructor’s dime at the end of a long day so I satisfied my curiosity about the control response as I flew a standard pattern. The roll rate was 182-like, the control pressures were 182-like, in fact, everything about the C-17, aside from the HUD and three extra ‘go-levers’ is just like flying a 182. It is very heavy, but when you push the power levers, it responds.
On a 12 mile downwind I set the EPR at about 1.1 and asked the instructor if this was good. At flaps 0 he confirmed that it would work about right. Time being a factor I did not enter any landing weight or other data into the FMS so I lacked HUD symbology, but it was no matter, because I could see the threshold and the VASI as I turned a 5-mile final.
Flaps come in notches and I had pulled the first and second on the downwind. I dropped the gear on the base turn and confirmed three greens. Third notch of flaps as I turned final and lined up for the landing. The C-17 rolled a bit with a slight crosswind but crabbing with rudder held it lock-solid on the centerline. I was at this point flying by ‘feel’ the aircraft was configured, I was by myself and so no checklists were run, just the normal GUMPS (which in a jet really boils down to an FUSP, Flaps Undercarriage, Switches, Power check) check. I did satisfy my inner desire to reach up and switch on the lights.
I would love to tell you that my first landing in a large airplane was a greaser. It wasn’t.
Large airplanes don’t flare so much as they level off, perhaps pitch up slightly and allow the ground and the mains to impact one another. Unlike a Cub, the idea is to fly the airplane onto the runway. When I first learned to fly a Cub the idea was to stall the airplane fully a couple of inches above the runway and allow it to plop down without any energy left to pop back up when it made contact. I suspect that the stick threw me because as I crossed the threshold I retarded the power levers and selected flaps full. The airplane did what it was supposed to do; it kept flying and flying and flying, past the touchdown zone and another 1000 feet down the runway before it settled down and I was able to pull the reversers over the gate and stop.
Nothing broken but certainly a long way to go before I can handle a 4000 foot runway in the middle of the night.
What I marvel at is that there is some 500,000 pounds between the largest airplane that I have flown, the Beech 1900, and the C-17 and yet flying the Globemaster III was as easy as flying a King Air. In spite of the oddity of flying what amounts to a heavy airliner into a combat zone and landing on less space than most Citations require, my impression is that the United States has designed and built what amounts to the most advanced and capable air lifter in the world. Before my time in the box my feeling was that we had spent $250,000,000.00 a copy on a huge adventure in overkill. Now, I want a C-17 sticker on my car.
Our technology has allowed us to build a machine easily flown by 25 year-olds, into the worst of places in the world, while carrying incredible amounts of stuff. Sure the -17 has a relatively small range and it is not prettiest beast in the sky, but it can do what the military demands of it and it does it with aplomb. Its capabilities are unique in the world and I feel really privileged to have been a guest of the people who teach our young air warriors how to fly it to the limits of its very robust capability.
Thanks Boeing for having me as a guest.
And finally, because it was crystal clear that no photographs were to be taken of the simulator or facility I am forced to use photos sourced from the internet.
Fly safe.
