Okay, we're ready for departure here on the Pilot Project podcast, the best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF. I'm your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is my old buddy from Cadets, John Larman. John, welcome to the show and thanks so much for being here.
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.
Before we start, let's go over John's Bio. John graduated from flight training and got his wings in 2016. He was posted to four two nine transport squadron to fly the CC One Seven Seven Globe Master Three out of CFB, Trenton, Ontario. After a deployment to Op Impact in Kuwait in 1900 flying hours, he was posted to three Canadian Forces flight training school in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, uh, in the fall of 2021 to instruct on the C 90 B King Air. Today we will be focusing on his time on the C 17. As I recall, the road for you to join as a pilot was pretty long and a little bit complicated. Can you tell us about the plan you joined under and just kind of more about that process for you?
Yeah, absolutely. So, m my initial intent was to join under ROTP. The thought coming out of high school, having your school paid for you going into a job that I looked forward to doing seemed very appetizing. However, the degree I wanted to take was at Seneca College, the Aviation Applied Technology, specializing in flight. I like the aircraft they had, I like the instruction, I like the location. However, the program itself wasn't compatible with ROTP. So I decided to go the civil route. Went to Seneca College on my own dime, got through the majority of it. So I had a file active in the system having been selected for pilot prior to third summer, I went tried to reapply for ROTP. Unfortunately, Du pilot was closed at that time and there wasn't really any option to get into the military. Civilian aviation didn't really interest me too much at that time. Having to look at the upgrade process, the additional funds involved. The Seneca program was very expensive to begin with. Myself trying to pay my own way through it got very stressing at times. So elected to sit around and kind of wait for the military, uh, to open up the pilot trade again to direct entry pilots. So I worked at the airport that had been flying out of for years. Had a couple of other college friends that worked there. Luckily enough, I was just about to pack up my bags and start a new career out in Calgary when the military finally called, said, hey, we are offering you a position as pilots. Would you like to join? That was in November of 2013, so I agreed.
So you waited for how long?
From the time I first applied, uh, we're talking about five years from that point. It was three years after graduation.
Okay, I see. So five years from the beginning and then three years of waiting with the closed trade.
Yeah, absolutely. The closed trade was really the more difficult part of it. The program not being able to fit the ROTP mold. That was understandable, but carried on forward with that. They recently had the Seneca, uh, program open directly for pilots, for the military. Excellent program for the people who have gone through it. Unfortunately, I think they're closing that one down or slowing the role on that front. But, uh yeah, all in all, three years pretty much at the end of my rope. I can't wait around too much longer and I got the call. So started Basic in January 4 of 2014. Okay, nice and cold.
You mentioned that Seneca program, I think also, with fact, future air crew training coming in. I'm sure all of that stuff is being reevaluated to how flight training is even going to look and the ways they're going to stream people in and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, uh, everything in the training aspect of the military right now is inflexible the Air Force specifically with respect to.
Pilots and all air crew.
Yeah, we'll see where it comes in the next couple of years.
Yeah. So that's a long process to keep going and keep waiting through. What kept you going during that time?
I always wanted to be a pilot. That was the only thing I ever wanted to do. So that's why I wanted my schooling to be heavily focused in the flying aspect. The military always seemed to have there always seemed to be a little bit more potential for job satisfaction in the military going out, hacking missions, making a difference in the community not only, uh, in your home country, but abroad as well. So that was kind of my main driving force for that. Despite having to jump around, find my file again, go through medicals in different districts because things were misplaced, that was the main driving force to keep going with that. That's what I wanted to do. Just heavily focused on it.
So once you did get in, how did you find your flight training in the forces?
Flight training for me, I, uh, remember going to Basic. I was in a platoon of 36 other pilots from various different walks of life. Generally younger than myself. How old was I? 26, 27, I think the time doing basics. So a little bit older than some of the, uh, younger individuals joining fresh out of university. Some people were on ROTP as well. I was actually circling back to that recruiting story. Another reason it took so long is they had changed the wording of the requirements for pilots. You had to get a degree from a Canadian university and I was presenting a degree from a Canadian college, so that took some time. But in that discussion with the recruiting officer, he was kind enough to slide a Seneca application across the desk at me of which I was giving him the final product to. Okay, so funny enough, I was in Basic with people on the first iteration of the Senega program.
They basically decided that was just a wording issue when it came to your degree.
Oh, yeah, sorry. It ended up going up to some higher level of, uh, the recruiting center ended up getting a waiver saying, yes, this education is acceptable. We'll carry that forward.
Yeah, I mean, not only is it a degree, but they were also about to send a bunch of people there.
It's a degree for the program that you were actively backing.
Yeah.
Um, anyway, back to the original question, flight training. So there was platoon full of pilots initially going through i, uh, came through with a commercial group, one IFR rating, um, from my civilian time. And there were a couple of other about five or six in the same platoon who had the same rating. Everyone was interested in getting in there. Everyone's. Finally, yes, hired by the military. Nice and eager. I want to fly as many airplanes as I can. I want to get as many hours as I can, um, for myself. I was more interested in, again, being at a, um, higher age as more of the other individuals, like, okay, I kind of want to get this ball rolling a little bit more. So after Basic, I explored the option of bypassing phase one as, ah, per my prior experience, got through that and managed to get directly into Mooshjaw within the year. So I graduated Basic April 2014, and I was in Mooshjaw of August 2014 as well, having completed my basic land survival, having completed basic sea survival and the AMT training.
That's awesome. That's the way it should go.
Yes, it was very streamlined, very, very slick. Definitely a very unique success story on that front.
But they're working on that.
They were working on it, we're working on it as a whole. But I managed to convince a bunch of the other people who had the same kind of qualifications to go the same route. So a lot of us have progressed through our flight training and flying careers in the military in the very same way.
Oh, uh, that's cool.
As for the actual phase two portion itself, having bypassed phase one, there's a lot of very unique skills you learn in phase one that didn't really take for granted. It's just a classic case. You don't know what you don't know. Jumping into phase two, into the Harvard Two, jumping into what is all but an F one car from flying Cessnas, prior to which a little beat up Ford Pinto with three wheels kind of thing. Big adjustment there. Learning the military way of instruction, the military way of flying. I remember sitting in ground school very distinctly, and one of the instructors was talking about the very strict traffic pattern in Moosejaw, because of the high density airspace, all the other flights going on, whether it be the Fast jet Hawks, whether it be all the other Harvards from various different stages, doing various different maneuvers. And he said, yes, this is the overhead brake pattern in the back of my head. I'm like, what the heck is an overhead break? Yes, you can do a closed pattern here. I'm like, what the heck is a closed pattern?
Yeah.
So many questions, and I'm sitting there with four or five other people who did the exact same thing I did. We all lock eyes, look at each other, and we're like, that wasn't any of the Canadian rigs. I don't know what the heck that is. Yeah. The rest of that phase two training went pretty smooth, all things considered. Uh, well, I had one hiccup, um, that was on my thankfully, after we were selected. So that was nice. On my basic instrument test. Busting through an altitude to your final flight? My final flight.
And how'd phase three go?
Phase three, uh, luckily enough for me, happened pretty early afterwards. So I finished very long phase two being done through the winter. Finished that. I think I'm thinking back probably sometime in and around July. And I was loaded up on phase three in October.
Nice.
So, all in all, just outside of two years from joining basic to getting my wings, that's all. Actually, it was just about two years. Come to think of it. It was two years and a month.
Yeah. And I think they were saying the goal is to get it to three years.
Yeah.
Right now it averages five.
Uh, phase three, though, truth be told, pretty straightforward course.
Had you guys done crew flying as well at Seneca? I kind of learned all my commercial multi IFR stuff was all single pilot.
Yes. And that's one of the things that makes that program kind of stand out. Not that this is a sales pitch for Seneca or anything, but all things considered, the bang for buck value is very, very high. So at the end of it, you end up doing a simulated line and doc on an RJ.
Oh, very cool.
With Air Canada jazz instructors and a type D SIM. Um wow.
That's awesome.
That was excellent. You can build the basis for the CRM required in that course.
CRM means crew resource management and focuses on communication, leadership, and decision making. I always ask somebody, is what you were selected for what you wanted? Now, it's pretty rare to meet someone who gets C. That's not what they want ah. Because it's our biggest one of our newest aircraft. And also, you obviously just said you did quite well in your flight training, so that was what you wanted.
Yeah, I was lucky enough to get my first choice, uh, as did the majority of my other compatriots, uh, through flight training. Um, having done so well, all of us, we got pretty lucky. The group of us ended up getting posted to Trenton to fly pretty much what we were all hoping to fly. So the key to the lesson there is now having seen behind the curtain how it works. The military is going to do their best to make you happy, because a happy worker is a good worker. Um, but at the end of the day, it does come down to the needs of the institution. And that's something that most people get. Everyone has high hopes to always get what they want, get to go where they want, fly what they want. But at the end, there's no bad flying jobs in the military. There's perks to everything.
Right? And John's not just saying that. John's lived that.
I'm currently living that where the current posting may not be the ideal fit for my, uh, life. Presently, however, it has its perks, it has its ups, its downs. At the end of the day, it is what you make it. So if you go into a situation feeling that I don't want to be here, this isn't what I want, it's miserable, well, you can expect that kind of satisfaction in return.
So let's move on to the C 17. What exactly does the C 17 do?
Uh, C 17 does provide strategic airlift to the Royal Canadian Air Force and its commonwealth partners. Strategic being different from tactical. So we take cargo from a main hub, for example, CFP Trenton, which is the air mobility hub for Canada, and we'll bring the majority of that to countries around the world or forward operating bases. A prime example of that is the conflict in Ukraine right now. So the C Seventeen's primary role for that is to carry cargo from CFB Trenton to presswick where the forward operating base is currently stationed out of. And from there, the cargo gets distributed and sent out on J model hercs or other assets, um, forward into the combat.
What is the training and upgrade process like for a C 17?
Pilot training, uh, process. So there's an on the job training package which is quite, quite hefty. I remember printing it off and looking at it and thinking, that's not too bad, I should be able to get that done in a reasonable amount of time. I was wrong. Very wrong.
How long did it take?
The pencil? Allotted time for it is two years. So a 24 month upgrade process. Realistically, you're looking closer to 36 months. So you start off as an Fo one fresh off of PIQ, which is pilot initial qualification. Um, I did mine in Altus, Oklahoma. Unique thing about the C 17 is it's a global fleet operated by seven or eight different nations. Off the top of my head, majority of them who subscribe to this kind of main training program, the ones we use was put on by the USAF. We've since, uh, entered an agreement with the RAF as well, so now we can train pilots initially with the RAF, or we can train them with the USAF.
USAF or USAF is the United States Air Force. So we're still doing our training out of country?
Yes. We have no capacity to do the initial training in country.
That makes sense. We have five C 17s.
Yes, we have five C. They're all.
Either tasked or in maintenance.
Yes, very, very busy squadron PIQ. Unlike all the courses prior to this, it's 100% self study. There's no formal in classroom study. A lot of computer based training. Uh, you get all the Aois, you're expected to read through it.
Aois are aircraft operating instructions, and they outline the systems and operating procedures for an aircraft.
You go for after the first month of doing nothing but 8 hours of computer training a day, then you start getting into a SIM a day with some CBTS and mixing it up. You get to do a familial flight, which for me was very cool to do in the USAF. You go up with a bunch of other instructors who were there getting their quals done up. They do everything from low level, high speed flying 300ft, 310 knots, so that training was a lot of fun. I got to do three flights down there again, fly it like the USAF fly it. So you do timed low level routes, 310 knots, 300ft off the ground.
Wow.
Ripping over the Texas countryside, 60 degrees, pulling two G's, just like you were in the Harvard. Oh, it was an absolute blast.
That is so cool.
Absolute blast. And then you come back and you start your upgrade process. Here's your upgraded paperwork whenever you can find an AC, find an instructor pilot, find an evaluator pilot, start getting sign offs. So every single time you go oceanic, every single time, you get a hot minute, uh, hey Mr AC, do you want to talk about the HF radios? And they sign off the system after a lengthy discussion?
Yeah, that's fairly similar to how we did things as well.
Yeah, it takes a significant amount of time, there's various upgrades, so you'll do I think the upgrade from Fo one to Fo two was done in the SIM, fo Two to Fo three again, was done in the SIM. And advance handling SIM quite difficult.
And again, Fo being first officer or copilot.
Yes. Then finally, when you are deemed ready to advance, you, uh, start doing acting ACS. So acting aircraft commander missions, up to five of those, I believe. Then you go on your recommend ride, which always is cursed. The recommend ride always has something go wrong with it.
What went wrong on yours?
I think mine was eight days, every single day, had two legs into it. There were complications with the cargo. We ended up going into Kosovo, which I'd never been to before, and I remember the night before going through all the paperworks, making sure all the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed. We found one document hidden away deep, deep within the football saying the crew is up to speed and familiar with the special orders for this area of operations. And I'm like that's. Interesting. I haven't read any of that. Luckily for us, it was available on Google.
Oh, my gosh.
Uh, yeah, and then I remember on the way back, we got a request to stop short in Halifax to drop some of the passengers off to save them from hopping on another flight. Sure, yeah, no problem. Day of Halifax weather limits was coming in at, uh, a quarter statute mile and 100ft vertical vis. So I got to do my first Cat Two Ils on my recommend ride, two minimums.
So what that is for listeners is Ils is Instrument Landing system. And it's a precision way of guiding an aircraft into a runway in bad weather. When you can't see, uh, when he says cat two, there's cat one, two and three. And, uh, you're able to take it down to progressively lower weather limits, which I think is it Cat Three. You don't have to see the runway. Like, you just touch down.
Basically, Cat Three is straight auto Land. You'll know, you're on the ground when you feel the ground kind of thing.
Cat three is black magic.
Yeah, absolute black magic. Then, uh, we got back, that was that one. That was exciting. Rec ride was long.
Yeah. And so what happens after your rec ride?
After the recommend ride, you go on to your formal aircraft, uh, Commander Upgrade Ride, which is done with Terset. What's Terset? Terset is Transportation and Rescue Standards evaluation team. Okay. Basically, this is the individual designated by the Standards Evaluation Team in Winnipeg to issue tickets or whatnot. They are the riding authority for specific aircraft. So we go on forward and we do a check ride with that. And if you are successful, they hand you the keys. Now you're an AC and now you're an AC.
What does a normal day look like at Four two Nine Squadron? Like, you walk in the doors and what are you doing?
Depends on what kind of day it is. If it's an office day, if it's a training day, if it's a mission day. They're all kind of very different. Office days are generally spent catching up on whether it be claim, admin work, secondary duties, or tertiary duties, whatever you have to do. So I was the, uh, unit flight safety officer for a pretty good stint of my time there. I also worked in operations and in planning. Um, so it all kind of depend operation and planning was basically looking at missions and making sure they make sense. Like, is this crew duty day make sense? Is this time allotted to get from point A to point B? Is that feasible?
So kind of like, what the flight ops, like, flight Planning Center does for an airline.
Yeah, very similar to that. So both of those jobs, those often involved answering emails, um, actively working through flight plans or if it was a unit flight safety stuff, going through uh, investigations, ensuring things are moving forward, keeping a uh, positive flight safety culture at the unit. If it was a training day, depending on when if it was a day trainer night. Trainer you'd show up approximately 4 hours prior to brief up the mission, walk out to the aircraft about 2 hours after that takes about an hour and a half, 2 hours to spark up the plane and get it going. And you'd be doing whatever kind of training it was necessary. Whether it be uh, Tactile flying training, you might just be shooting an instrument approach, uh, you might be doing assault zone landing training for that would be more senior Fo three S and aircraft commanders. Uh, those maneuvers are limited to them or any other upgrades, whether it be uh, annual proficiency checks, there's current profiles for that.
Are those maneuvers you mentioned that are limited? Is that because they're more like aggressive and dynamic?
They're very aggressive, very dynamic. Having to recognize how the aircraft is reacting to inputs, the external weather factors. The limitation on the ground for an assault zone landing is a 500 foot box, um, on the runway that you have to land inside of, um, so that level of precision, it's kind of reserved for the more experienced C 17 pilots. Again, weather PC in your Fo three S into ACS, all ACS are qualified for that.
That makes sense on a typical week, if you're not on the road, how many times can you expect to fly in a week?
You can expect probably one. It depends on what level. Like, if you're a junior Fo, you can expect I believe it was three trainers a month. Approximately once a week ish yeah, there's not a lot of opportunity for that. Once a week ish and the further up you go on the Fo chain, the fewer trainers required and the less you can be expected to fly. Like sometimes you would be jumping 30 day takeoff to landing to 30 day takeoff and landing. Um, on top of that, with the training, there's quarterly SIM requirements. So right off the bat, a month out of the year, we're gone down to McCord, which is near just south of Seattle in Washington.
Okay.
You'll be going down there for a week to do SIM training. You'll do phase SIM training, which is something that Boeing put out and on the third day would be whatever other currencies you needed. So that's when we would be banging out like emergencies. Emergencies. So three engine landings, hydraulic, uh, failures, nonstandard configurations, cargo jettisons, et cetera.
So you mentioned the flying can be a little sparse at home. Does that mean a lot of the training is happening on the road?
Not so much maneuver training, but more in the books. The soft skill training happens, the system discussions, that stuff happens on the road where the actual aircraft handling, like repeated circuits will happen. The further along you progress, more infrequently.
So when you started flying on the C 17, what did you find was the hardest part of the job?
The steep, steep learning curve, not only from a systems perspective, but from a regulation perspective. So here I am, happy flying around Moosejaw prior to happy flying around Portage, flying around southwestern Ontario in a Cessna, Bonanza, or a Baron, whatever it may be. And then now taking a pilot that is extremely domestic and hasn't had any formal training on international flight rules, whether it be the Nat tracks was the huge one. Actually, that was huge. That was my first mission. And the C 17 was taking off from Trenton and going to Constander. Romania was the first one, and I was nothing short of a passenger self loading baggage. I knew how to push the buttons and I knew how to talk on the radio a little bit. But in terms of the flight training.
And the process for crossing the ocean yeah.
The formal procedure as to getting a clearance, uh, how to request it, who to request it to, what rules are involved in the Nat tracks, what to do for a weather deviation or an emergency, if you have to turn all that stuff way over the head.
And Nat tracks are North Atlantic tracks. They're the way that you cross the ocean above certain altitudes, in certain airspace. We actually didn't use them in the Aurora because we flew lower than that. But for airliners, for large aircraft like the C 17, you would follow those, and they're very regulated in terms of where they are on a given day, because they do change. They select certain tracks depending on favorable winds and things and weather. And then also, as John was saying, if you run into weather and you have to deviate, how do you do that if you have an emergency and you need to not follow the track anymore, how do you do that safely so that you're still deconflicted from other traffic?
And the big kind, uh, of got you there is it's outside of VF radio coverage. So there's HF radio, which is spotty at best. Um, and when I first started CPDLC, which is controller pilot data link, it's like text messaging from the ground to your airplane computer. Mhm, that was just it was in its infancy, so it wasn't even really readily available. It wasn't mandated, where as I went through four, two nine throughout the years, it gradually became more and more of the norm. Um, that would be easier to communicate. So you can't really deviate from a clearance all willy nilly. That's why these procedures exist.
That's right. And you're off radar. That's another important thing for people to realize as you cross the ocean. Not only do you have kind of spotty comms coverage, you're also not being tracked on radar. So they're relying on your estimated time to your next point. And they basically interpolate where you'll be when based on those timings that you give them.
So back to the original question, what was the hardest part? Definitely the steep learning curve. Taking responsibility for all of your own learning was the biggest part. No one's going to be coming looking after you like, hey, have you discussed the landing gear system with such and such?
No.
Uh, the only indication you're going to get is after a year, if you do an upgrade from Fo one, someone's going to come and be like, how's your upgrade going? Look at your package. Oh, it's only half done. Okay.
Yeah.
Does not look good on you.
Would you say that's where most pilots tend to struggle on the C 17.
There definitely is a struggle there and you can identify who's accelerating faster than others. That being said, if you got all your sign offs done miraculously in a couple of months, you still don't have the necessary experience to advance. You got to slow your role. It's that time on the road. It's seeing all those different experience. This takes me back to my private flying is you can fly at the same airport 100 different times, you might get the same experience 100 times, you might get 100 different experiences. So it's that kind of broad exposure that's really going to make or break it, because the system knowledge is only one piece. But now you need to apply that to various different encounter or very different circumstances.
So what's the best thing that, ah, a new pilot on the C 17 can do to help them overcome that?
You definitely need to take the initiative. Any opportunity, and granted, not every opportunity is going to come up and be like, uh, I need to hear someone, I need to go talk to someone. Absolutely. Take the time to look out the window every so often. Enjoy yourself, enjoy time. But at the end of the day, you're the one that's ultimately responsible for your own success. The instructor pilot is going to send out a message and be like, who needs what? And it's up to you to number one, track your what seems like hundreds of currencies, making sure all those are valid, because those get fun when they start to expire one after another.
And it's on you. If you go red, if you expire on a currency, that's your fault.
That's 100% your fault. You wear it entirely.
I remember that was like a constant fear. It never happened to me. But, uh, having, uh, one of your currencies expire is like a big mark of shame unless it was totally out of your control.
I mean, aircraft service ability being what it is, that happens and people get it. But yeah, the big thing is. You're an adult, you need to deal with it yourself.
Yeah.
You need to take the initiative.
How much would you say you're away? Let's say on a monthly basis on the C 17?
A monthly basis, that can be a couple of weeks, might be a week, might be a couple of days. It all depends how busy the squadron is, how many people are on leave. I made myself almost 100% available to the unit to fly over my first couple of years because this was it. Uh, like, I'm living my dream now. This is what I always wanted to fly. I'm finally getting to do it. I'm not going to squander my time sitting at home in Trenton drinking beers on a patio when I can be doing the exact same thing. In Germany, for example, my busiest year was 2019. I was gone for about 200 days of that year. Wow. Uh, but I was one of the high time flyers as well. You got to be prepared to be away from home. That's part of the job.
Yeah. And especially if you're flying, I think anything in air mobility, anything that takes.
Cargo, I would say anything multi engine, outside of 402 or an instructor gig, any of the multi engine jobs, you can expect to be away from home. That's just part of the monster.
Yeah, definitely. The C 17 is capable of some really impressive short field landing and takeoff performance. Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah, the big thing is the landing performance on the C 17. 1st up, all up weight, 585 thousand pounds. You, uh, can fit £167,000 of cargo.
In the back, which is insane. That's more than the all up weight of the whole Aurora maxed out.
As for the shortfield landing, about 3000ft on a 90 foot wide surface, provided it has 500 foot assault zone markers. And you can land that at £502,000. Basically touching down in the size of two hockey rinks in the 500 foot in the 500 foot box, two and a half. And then immediately getting on the brakes, putting it in a maximum reverse. You get thrown up against your straps, everything in the back. There has been times when things haven't been strapped down quite so as tight as they should have been and did not depart the aircraft in the same condition they were put on the aircraft in.
That gives you another job as flight safety.
Yes, that gives me another job as flight safety. Yeah. So that's the most impressive thing. That's the assault zone landing I was.
Speaking about earlier on, that 3000ft just for the listeners. That sounds like a lot of distance when we're talking about there's. A lot of numbers have been thrown out there. But £500,000 is huge for an aircraft and 3000ft for it to stop in, that is insane. It's amazing. And if you are curious, uh, what we're talking about, I'm sure I'll put it in the preview for this episode. So if you haven't watched the preview videos that I make for these episodes, check out our social media on Facebook or Instagram at at podpilot project and you will get a chance to see one of these. It's very cool.
And uh, for the takeoff, takeoff is all weight dependent. That's, uh, why runways are long. Runways aren't long for landings. Runways are long for takeoffs. If you're taken off out of Kuwait at 48 degrees at max weight, you're going to use all 11,000ft of that runway. It varies heavily on what's going on.
Another, uh, really cool thing about the C 17 is you can put it in reverse in the air. Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah, so it's something pretty unique to the C 17. Only probably a few other aircraft can do that. Uh, I've never used it in execution. Use it, practice it a couple of times on those few and far between trainers that we do. Basically, you'll start a descent in the aircraft and then you can bring two or four engines, uh, into reverse idle. The thrust reversers deploy. And the way the reverse thrust in the C 17 works is it doesn't push the air back forward. It actually pushes it up at about a 45 degree angle. The whole center core of the engine, the, uh, whole nacella of the engine will slide back. And just the way the reverse kind of meshing and grates, it redirects the airflow kind of up at a 45 degree angle.
Very cool.
So that, coupled with the actual descent of the aircraft, can push you up to around 20,000ft/minute in the descent.
So you're saying that the thrust is not just reversing, but it has a downward it's pushing you downward.
It's actively pushing you down towards the ground.
It's like pointing your thrust up into the sky to help you go down faster.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
The wings shake, everything inside the aircraft shakes. It's pretty violent. Uh, that's why we don't really use it. I wouldn't call it difficult to control, because it is rather easy to control. But you need to be out of it pretty early.
It sounds pretty intense.
You think 20,000ft/minute down, you don't have a lot of time. Yeah.
Like how quickly you would need to be bringing yourself out of that would be pretty quick.
Yeah. By around 10,000ft. So you can think if you're cruising at 30,000ft, you're probably on the ground from cruise in about three and a half, four minutes. If you do everything right, bang on by the numbers.
Wow.
Which is nutty.
That's wild.
Absolutely wild.
What is the coolest or strangest cargo you've ever had on a C 17?
So some of one thing that was pretty cool that I hauled out to Comox one time was and this kind of closes the whole loop on being an air cadet and then starting off super small. And what was it no, it was a 233. Schweiser 233. I got to carry one of the airframes for the West Coast gliding program in the back of the C Seven.
Oh, cool.
Not the wings, it was just the airframe, like in this big aluminum cage. So that was really cool to carry. Um I've carried helicopters. You can fit three Griffins in the back of a C 17. I've, uh, carried Shinook helicopters, which barely fit. The nicest thing I like to carry, though, is seacans, because you can string a hammock up between the tie downs perfectly.
Oh, nice.
Very comfy. Yeah.
Finding rest on a cargo aircraft can be tricky.
The floor is cold. This is a cargo aircraft, not a passenger jet. So it's very, very noisy. Absolutely everywhere.
What about first ranges? Cargo? Did you ever have anything weird that you brought on board?
That's the thing about cargo aircraft. Uh, you carry everything. I've carried fire trucks, fuel trucks. I've carried a fleet of little dune buggies out of Roswell, New Mexico, which they were clearly just bouncing around the desert in. I've carried a pallet of pallets multiple times. Those are always fun. It's basically the things they load all the other cargo on, but when they're done with them, they got to go home somehow. So they just stack them all together and load them back on the airplane. Uh, all cargo is unique and strange in its own weird way.
What is the coolest location you've ever flown into? And why? And you can list off a few if you want.
Oh, yeah, that's one of the beauty things about the C 17 and it's really long legs, is you can go pretty much anywhere. I've been all around the world except for South America. I never made it down there. Uh, Canoe Bay in Hawaii, right next to Honolulu. That was one of the cooler approaches. You end up doing the approach and in order to land on the east facing runway, you have to carve it inside of this massive mountain ridge. So that was a lot of fun.
I've done that. Uh, we flew over there for Rimpak and it is really cool.
Yeah, that's a really cool spot. Singapore was awesome. Flying into Seychelles is probably one of the most scenic things I've ever done. The same place they filmed Castaway. And let me tell you, it looks exactly like that. Uh, crystal clear beaches in the Indian Ocean. Absolutely gorgeous. One of my favorite spots to go is obviously Cologne, Germany. Athens, Greece is also a great spot. And, um, then there's always something unique about landing up an alert in the wintertime. Yeah, landing on that 5000 foot ice runway, same technique that we use to stop in less than 3000ft, but, uh, you need the full 5000 to do it. Up there, the brakes don't do anything.
Yeah, no kidding. So you guys would be all on thrust reverse.
You land, you hit the brakes immediately. Nothing happens. The airplane just slides, keeps on sliding. And then when the TRS come out, thrust reversers. They slowly start to slow down. Eventually the brakes start to grab a little bit, but it's all thrust reversers up there.
Wow. What's the craziest situation you've ever found yourself in on the C 17?
Couple of crazy ones. There's so many times where it comes off the rails so quickly. And that's why it's back to this experiencing. It's not just getting the checks in the box. You have to have that exposure to various different locations, various different experiences, different clearances to see what you're going to do. But, um, the one that always kind of stands out to me is on my first flight as an AC. It's always on the first flight as an AC. This is where things go sideways. We took off from Belfast in Northern Ireland and we were just about to coast out over the ocean when we got a warning queue up on the warning enunciator panel because makes a little bong sound. Look up. APDMC one. Air Data Propulsion Management Unit One. Okay, no problem. First thing you do, pull out the checklist. C 17 is full of redundant systems. Like there's multiple different ways to power every single flight. Surface powered. There's four hydraulic systems, there's four generators. Every engine has two fire bottles. So, uh, multiple redundant systems built anywhere. So this is APDMC one. I know there's a second one. Okay, everything's fine. Just a little app queue. We'll pull out the checklist and see what happens. Pull out the checklist, run through it. It basically says, this one's not working. It's not in agreements with the other one. So pull the circuit breaker, cycle it. So we pull it up for 5 seconds and then you'll push it back in. So, okay, call it Detect Crewman because we're both flying up front, myself and the copilot. Hey, can you pull AP DMC one? Which random it's? Tango 37 for example. Right, EPC? Tango 37, sure, no problem. He pulls it m autopilot, auto throttles WAP the enunciator panel lights up. It has both of them on there now. They're like, oh, okay. So first off, up at altitude, we're always flying on autopilot, like from 200ft to about 1000ft. Pretty, um, much flying on autopilot. Everything's coupled up to the mission computer. You're sitting there monitoring the systems, making sure everything's happening the way it is. So when you hear the autopilot, auto throttles thing, that'll wake up an aircraft commander that's sleeping in the bunk. That's just one of those things that in the back. The second you hear that, you spring into actually like, what the heck is going on? Yeah, it's a very big deal. Uh, why did that happen? Yeah, so that goes off, we're out the controls. Okay, I have control. I'm um, hand flying it again. Flight director disappeared. Uh, we see n two mode pop up on all the engines. So all the engines now go into a degraded mode where they lose a bunch of their individual protections. And we're like, oh, God, what's going on here? Look up on the map. The first thing up there is APDMC one and two. Okay, well, let's just everyone calm down for a second. We're getting close to our coast out point, so we requested a hold from Wick, where I get we need present position hold. We got to deal with something.
You're getting close to which position? Sorry?
We're getting close to our, uh, oceanic coast out point, where now we're on a separate clearance and you have to go. But we're still talking to someone right now, so it's easy to coordinate. So we get a present position hold and we pull up the next checklist. Well, the first line on this next checklist is not necessarily something you want to read on your first flight as an aircraft commander. Warning proceed with caution. This procedure is unverified. Oh, yay. So these two systems were never really supposed to one of them was never really supposed to fail, but now we've had both of them go down, so okay, cool. Let's run through the checklist. I'm paraphrasing here, but it basically says, you have lost, uh, autopilot function, you've lost auto throttle function, you've lost flight director function. All of your engines will be in degraded mode. You need to move the power levers very, very slowly and very carefully so that nothing overheats. Yeah, EGT was one issue.
I believe EGT is exhaust gas temperature.
Off the top of my head, I believe, uh, overspeeding was the other big one. Or if you retard the power too quickly, you can induce a stall or a surge, which those get really ugly on high. Bypass turbofan engines. Okay, um, so now we're sitting here, however many miles away, we can't go oceanic anymore. We don't have the required systems for it. What do we do? Well, we're turning back and we're going to Belfast. Okay, no problem. One thing you don't ever do in the C 17, just because you never really have the opportunity to do it, is you never really do a hand flown descent from altitude unless it's a tactical descent. So now I'm hand flying this 585,000 pound aircraft from the oceanic coast out point back to the airport, down from altitude and flying an Ils, of which I would normally be coupled up for. But that's okay. We can fly Ils by the hands.
We're pilots.
Uh, we're still pilots. We can still do that. So, yeah, I think that's one of the craziest things that ever happened to me. This isn't even a checklist you run in the SIM because it's like that's in there, because the lawyers told us to put it in there.
And of course, it happens on your first AC.
Happens on the first AC trip, where.
I feel like the first AC trip is cursed.
It's definitely a rite of passage, if nothing else, on that one. That's the one where the second something goes wrong, guess what? You can't look back to the guy behind you.
All eyes on you.
Everyone comes to you. Both the texts come up front. What the hell was that loadmaster over the radio? Hey, is everything okay up there? Even the Fo is looking over. He's like, uh and then this is where you need to take that nice deep breath and be like, okay, everyone calm down a second. This is what we're going to do. This is what we got. Does anyone have any other ideas?
That's right. Which is an important question to ask, right? Even in those moments, you're a team, right?
That's the whole point of resource.
You've got a bunch of people with various experiences on board, and, um, if you don't ask them for their input, you're the poorer for it.
Absolutely. Like, not to disclude anyone from it either, because you might have a loadmaster in the back and be like, oh, we had a flight, however long ago. And you know what? This same thing happened. They did this. There's always the option to call home if you really get stuck. But at this time, it was like, we're hand flying. Like, I don't really want to hang out up here.
No. And the checklist was probably pretty clear as to what had to happen next.
It was very clear.
Sometimes you get emergencies right out of the checklist and it's no big deal. And sometimes you get an emergency that makes no sense at all, and it is a bigger deal out of the.
Checklist that has never been verified. That's right.
We all love to fly, but sometimes we get ground jobs. You deployed to the Middle East in support of Op impact in a ground roll. How did you end up tap for that?
Luckily enough, so, uh, right after getting my wings and moving to Trenton, there was a year and a half projected weight for my Otu date, my operational training unit date. So where you get to the initial go down to Altus in this case, and get trained upon the C 17. So initially, I was tagged to go fly multi engine utility flight for a while. Brand new slick King Air 350s Garmin 1000. Had, uh, the best avionics in the Air Force to the point where, like, getting back onto the C 17, I was told by multiple people, congratulations, you now need to learn what the C 17 can't do. But after that, given the weight, we kind of got an email, just kind of an overhead, hey, would anyone be interested in deploying DOP impact for a little while? You'll be doing, uh, an air op, so a job for the Polaris, the tankers out there. And I was sitting there thinking like, well, could be a good opportunity. I know the C 17s are out there pretty often, so I kind of raised my hand up for that and volunteered for it.
And, uh, how was that experience?
It was long. It was seven and a half months in the desert.
It was supposed to be six originally, right?
It was supposed to be six. Um, things got extended due to personnel issues. Trying to get a replacement out, um, that was the main reason for that. So it wasn't the end of the world, but it was definitely a very long time to be away from home. Working seven days a week. Yeah, that's the big thing. Very repetitive. Just getting into a groove is how you got through it. Wake up, eat, go to your work, work out, have an hour or two of alone time.
Yeah. Watch a movie or play a video game or something and go to bed.
So when I went to that deployment, I actually ended up getting a lot more out of it than I initially thought. I thought I was just going to go over, at least deal with the playerists, maybe get to fly once or twice as a passenger, but it's a ground job. But I'm still dealing with airplane and doing airplane things. That was a really cool part. But what I ended up doing was dealing a lot with secret, uh, products. Air tasking orders, air coordination orders, seeing how Four Three Seven Squadron flies in the Middle East, all that experience for the seven and a half months. Set myself up really well for going back there as a C 17 pilot because the exact same thing would happen. C 17 crews would come through. They'd get the same briefings, they'd go through the same intelligence briefs, they'd go through all the same, uh, CSAR stuff. So combat search and rescue, uh, coordination pieces. Uh, so all that stuff benefited me greatly moving forward, just as a member of Four Two Nine. So little happy payoff there. And the pay is good. Met some really good people. So that all helps too. Yeah.
So a positive experience overall?
Positive experience overall. Definitely. Long I would recommend maybe finding a deployment in Hawaii for Opera Impact opposed to the Middle East, but teach their own.
What would you say are the most memorable flights you've had on the C 17?
There's quite a few of them. There are definitely highlight missions, one of them being, I went to Singapore. We were slated to circumnavigate the globe. And days before the mission, like, very, very close to the execution phase of the mission, we got a message saying, we need you to go to Singapore twice so you can no longer circumnavigate the globe, which the whole crew we were taking two crews on this. This was going to be epic.
There's going to be, like, an experience.
Don't use that word lightly, but this was going to be epic. This was going to be absolutely incredible. No, you need to go to Singapore twice. We need you to take off and go west. Uh, no way, that stinks. But let me walk you through the ITIN before you get too upset here. So we took off out of Trenton and we go to Comox. Always a fun spot. Mountains are fun. Very nice. Then from Comox we went to Hickham. Hickham, Hawaii.
Yeah, Hickham. Um, Air Force Base, which is Honolulu.
Then after that we went to Guam. And then after that we went to Singapore for the first time. Had 40 some odd hours off.
Nice.
Which was excellent. So we toured around Singapore quite a bit. Then after that we went to Say Shells. So we got some time off at Seychelles. Beautiful beaches. Then we went back to Singapore for another 40 some odd hours off, which was again just excellent. And then we retraced our steps all the way home. So all in all, it was about a two week trip.
That sounds amazing.
It sounds amazing. And keep in mind whenever you're on trips like this, airplanes never tend to break. We didn't so much as get a warning queue the whole time. You're like, Come on, give me one, give me like uh, an extra day in any of these places would be excellent. No? Perfectly happy as a clam all the way through. Other memorable trips. I think one of the other ones is where you'll get some of the footage from was uh, the Abbotsford Air Show in 2019, just prior to COVID. That one was absolutely incredible. This was an air show. Massive trainer that myself and a bunch of other pilots were a part of. We were going there, we were an aerial display. So we finally got to show off. That was pretty sweet. Being a, uh, checked out pilot for the aerial display was awesome. Talking to the public there was a lot of fun. Uh, we got to talk to the other air crew afterwards. Look at all the new airplanes. Abbottford was great. Then after that we ended up going to a place where, quite frankly, we never thought we would ever get to in the squadron. Seems easy, seems reasonable, but Dublin, Ireland, reason you can never get there is they don't like people stopping whenever you're in support of a named operation because they're neutral. No, uh, it's just something in the Diploma Country file where you can't even overfly the airspace. If you're a part of any named operation, you're carrying munitions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this time we're just AC 17 on a trainer ripping around. So we're like, we're going to Dublin. Those are the big highlight trips for me. Those are the ones that really stand out as soon as someone asks, what are the coolest trips you've done? Where coolest places you've been? Like, yeah, almost went around the world, but still an awesome trip. And Abbotsford air show. Oh, I guess there's another one. Actually. Uh, I was part of the air crew that attended the Riad 100 Air Show.
Can you tell people what Riyadh is?
Royal International Air Tattoo. Celebrating 100 years of the Royal Air Force in Great Britain. That was incredible. Walking the lines there, seeing the thousands upon thousands of people funnel through that place every single day, that was a really unique experience.
Yeah, I remember when Riet was on, and I was so jealous of the guys who got to go.
Yeah, parked right beside the, uh, other guys.
The photos that people got coming through as well, like, there's professional photographers, they came away with some incredible photos of the Aurora doing its thing.
It was queued up for all the arrival times as you would basically be flying into the air show, and you had a slot time with an aerial photographer. You would meet up with them, do your thing over the English countryside. There were little puffy, cumulus clouds kicking around, too. So it had an excellent backdrop. And you're basically getting up close to this sky van with the back door open and photographers literally falling over each other trying to get shots of you there. It was excellent. It was so much fun.
Yeah. The photos I saw from that were amazing.
All of the tactical flying, too, definitely holds a pretty good spot. Tactical flying is where you really got to earn your bacon, so to speak. Disconnecting maneuvering the aircraft to make sure it's, uh, inside of a safe area of operations. A, uh, lot of that was in Africa, Middle East. That stuff was a lot of fun.
What is the most fulfilling part of.
Your job generally, day to day is looking back and seeing my advancement as an aviator. We're going all the way back to cadets at this point. So 20 years ago?
Yeah, we've been friends now for almost 23 years.
Yeah, that's wild. But yeah, 20 years ago, sitting in a glider, barely knowing the first thing about what it is to fly, even going back further and being like, I want to fly airplanes. As long as I can remember, I want to fly airplanes. And then getting to this point and seeing the career develop, thinking about all the fantastic people you've met, the impact I've had, especially in my closing days at four two nine. Those are the really big pieces that kind of stick with you. It's what keeps me going in the organization. The advice I've gotten is I wouldn't think, like, direct airline or anything. Like, there's corporate aviation, there's airlines, there's cargo. There's so many different options out there. Um, but what I've been told by multiple people, actually a bunch of people I look up to a lot from my four two nine flying experiences. Keep doing it till it's not fun. Once you hit that point, then you need to maybe either find a ground job or get to change a pace, go find something else. In terms of missions that's most fulfilling. It came pretty much at the end of my four to nine career. So I already had a posting message to come out to Portage, knew that the time was cutting pretty close to that, and that's when Op ages kicked off. It was for the evacuation of the Afghanistan refugees from Kabul. So there was a number of different air crews. It's the first time in my entire time at 49 and in recent history, that the squadron is actually deployed to help with whatever effort it may be.
What do you mean by that?
So generally, we're strategic airlift. We operate out of domestic Canada or anywhere else in the world, and bring massive amounts of cargo forward to a forward operating base to, uh, another deployed debt. So for example, Kuwait is one of the big ones that's still going on with Op impact. But there was Op presence, uh, down in Maui. We would fly cargo from Canada down to Senegal, and then sometimes we'd bring it in, other times we'd leave it there. And the J model hercs that were deployed there would disperse it around Africa as necessary. So kind of in that sense, we don't really deploy. We always kind of go drop off our stuff and then return back home. But in this case, the turnaround, the ops tempo of this evacuation was so high that they needed the aircraft to stay in Kuwait, essentially. So there were multiple different air crews effectively deployed to Kuwait who would fly from Kuwait into Afghanistan and bring out as many refugees or whatever cargo, uh, personnel we had to, uh, that's where we were bringing out record numbers of people on C 17s for Canada. Uh, there's no seats at this point. We would funnel people, funnel refugees into the back of the aircraft, into this falling airfield, close up the doors, get them all to sit down and fly them out in the must have been.
Uh, a very emotional thing to be involved in.
Yeah, emotions were high on every single front. It was hands down, the most dangerous flying I've done. It was hands down the most rewarding, the most complicated, because now you're taking the rules that generally dictate how you can operate a mission. And you have to find ways to safely and effectively operate just outside of those rules. Mhm, so for example, 500 people there's not 500 seats on a C 17. You're not getting that. So how do we do this? It's like a wartime, a wartime effort. So people come in, sit down on the floor, grab onto a cargo strap on the floor for their seatbelt. Uh, flying in very intense, the adrenaline gets flowing. You're flying into an active, active war zone. Um, there's shots, I was going to.
Say, did you see signs of the war that was going on?
Absolutely. Um, uh, we're flying in, in a tactical setting. We're flying in a tactical configuration in the aircraft on. NBGs and NBGs are very good at highlighting very good hotspots on the ground, which tracer fire. Tracer fire, um, to air or ground to air fire of sorts. There's, uh, only one airport in Kabul. They kind of know where everyone's coming from. This place was an absolute zoo. You'd have vehicles taxing across the runway. Uh, aircraft are moving around without their lights on to remain tactical. Uh, this was a multination support effort in and out of there multiple, multiple times. And I think one of the almost want to say the cherry on top, but very poetic end to it all is we brought out at a battalion of, uh, US. Marines, as one of the last chalks out, and got them back. And you could see as they're all loaded up on the aircraft, we had them sitting up on pallets and everything because there's not enough cargo, there's not enough places to sit. But everyone had to get on. And as soon as we take off and as soon as we get out of the threat environment, deal with all the issues that are going on there, whether it be aircraft being the aircraft are getting old, the aircraft are getting overworked. So there's certain things that were going wrong. There constant fear of engagement. Uh, it's a very high terrain, it's a mountainous terrain, it's at night, there's no lights on. All these different factors working against you. But together as a crew, the pilots, all three of us, we had the crew or we had the TCMs on board. We had security, uh, personnel on board. We had medics.
What are the TCMs?
Uh, the tech crewmen.
Right.
Tech crew. We had them on board. We had the loadmasters, we had security personnel, we had medics on board to attend to the refugees. And, uh, again, the battalion, we were flying out. But on that last truck out with the battalion, you can look at once we finally got out of there, once we finally got up at Cruise, kind of like, Kate, you have control. Get up, take a walk around. You couldn't really walk around, but we have in the back of the cockpit, behind the bunk, there's a little dome window kind of like roll up the curtain. You can look out. We had the red light on all of them just finally, like, peacefully asleep. Uh, yeah. Quite poetic.
Yeah. Did you find it was difficult knowing that there were more people there than you could possibly evacuate? Or did you just focus on the people you were able to save?
I was heavily focused on our operation at hand. Um, at the end of the day, I knew we were operating at 22 hours crew days, well outside of our prescribed maximum. That was the waiver given. We were doing everything we could as not only a squadron, but as a nation, to get as many people out as we could. And the airfield was completely at capacity. So even if there were more assets available, the likelihood of us being able to do anything extra again, I wasn't a planner. I wasn't involved in that. I was just pointy, end of the stick. But I feel like we did pretty much everything we could and still had a very positive and successful outcome.
That's a hell of a story. That's a very unique, uh, experience. To be present as, uh, a country is evacuated. That's m quite something.
It happened out of nowhere too, and it was me getting ready to move. Have a phone call, like, hey, we need you to, need you to go to Afghanistan. We need you to go to Kuwait and Afghanistan for two weeks, open ended, no questions asked. Um, done. Let's go. Yeah. Sort everything else out later.
That's how the job goes.
That's exactly how the job goes.
So this is your chance to set life on the C 17. Now, I know lots of people want to fly the C 17, so it's not like you have to sell it. But I always think this is cool to do so in 30 seconds or less. If I'm a pilot in training, why should I want to fly the C 17 and what makes it unique or who would it appeal to?
The C 17 is one of the greatest opportunities to go and see the world. There is the Airbus, which will form. You still get to go see the world. You're going long distances, but the C 17 does the same thing, but applies a very more real and gritty military aspect to it. It's a brute aircraft, it's stubby, it's incredibly capable. It's a four engine heavy Boeing jet, which is just awesome in itself. You get to go to amazing places, you get to meet amazing people, but at the same time, it still makes you feel like you're a, uh, part of the big machine that is the Canadian Armed forces. So to me, that's the big appeal to it is I get to go to these really big cool spots, but I still get to do very cool military like things. On, um, side of it. You can't fly a C 17 civilian, so I got that going for you too.
And ah, what kind of person do you think the C 17 would appeal to?
C 17 definitely appeals to someone who wants to go see the whole world, but wants to actively engage in military operations as well. Not to say that other aircraft don't, but this is one that definitely involves a lot of flexibility. So leaving on the Monday and plan to be home on the Thursday isn't necessarily something that's always going to come to fruition. You have to be able to have the support system back home that is flexible with you being away, understands the importance of what you are doing, because at the end of the day, you're serving the country. It's not just for self gain. It's not feel righteous flying a big, burly, gray aircraft through the sky. Yeah, it's incredibly cool. And I will never say anything else about that because it is incredibly cool. But you have to be able to accept that you are going away. You are in very dynamic operations. You're in a very dynamic environment with a very complex machine that is getting older. Like all the other equipment. It's been written very hard. It's done a lot of very hard work for this country and for all other nations across the world. But at the end of the day, I would recommend the C 17 to pretty much anyone who wants that top tier military flying experience. You get to go see the world. You don't get to deploy as often as you would on a J model, for example. But there's a lot of variety involved. Big, burly, fast, heavy. If that's your thing, that's what the C 17 is.
It sounds like a big thing in terms of personality. You need to be kind of flexible and you need to be okay with being away.
You need to be definitely okay with being away. And you have to have the discipline for the self study, because at the end of the day, your career progression is 100% on you.
Well, that might actually go into our next question, which is, what is the most important thing you do to keep yourself ready for the job?
Doing your best to maintain a high degree of proficiency in the academics and the soft skills. So engaging with the Aois of the aircraft, reading through those, making sure you're up to speed on all the knowledge, the tactics that you have to employ, but also engaging with your peers, sharing experiences that you've had both good and bad. One of the prime examples I have there is a flight safety that occurred going into Consanta. Actually, as an aircraft commander, I was flying with a junior Fo, relatively new to the aircraft. So getting up to speed on the standard operating procedures, the call outs, the systems knowledge, the general flow of a mission was, uh, incredibly tricky. Like I mentioned earlier on very, very steep learning curve. There's a lot to take in, and it's very easy to get oversaturated, overwhelmed with the amount of input that you have to process at any given time. So I was doing a lot of the work, ended up setting an altimeter setting from center that I thought was correct, had it transcribed the way I had it set. And we're shooting this non precision approach to a runway knowing full well we're not going to get in. The actual weather from the METAR or sorry, from the Edis was below mins from this approach.
So a METAR is a weather report of conditions currently at an airport used almost exclusively by aviators for flight planning. ADIs stands for Automated Terminal Information Service and is a recording of current weather conditions, as well as any important information pilots may need to operate at an airport. Pilots will check ADIs before departing and before conducting an approach into an airport.
Going to go in, we're going to try it, see what we got. So down we go. Making SOP calls, I was backing myself up, essentially, unfortunately, acting as more of a single pilot in this case, just trying to make sure all the calls are done because part of the aircraft commander gig is something called reverse follow through. So not only doing your job, but ensuring that your other crew member is doing their job effectively. That goes for checklist items, that goes for call outs. That goes for everything.
Yes.
Ultimately, you're the individual responsible. So I'm making all these calls. We're going in 100 above, and I hear go around. First instinct, go around. Okay, go around. No problem. Pause the rate.
Gear up.
Flaps one half. We start climbing away. And I noticed on my side, we were still like, 50, 60ft high. And I'm like, huh. Okay, so why'd you call it go around? And the individual, the rattle seemed a little bit low. And I remember discussing, well, we got to be careful. Like, there's lots of rolling terrain. The rattle can read erroneously at that point. At the end of the day, we're going off of a barrel mins. So minimums off of our altimeter, not the rattle. Still to this day, I can't quite recall what the individual said, but I was like, which ultimate setting? They say 1001. I'm like, I have, like, 1011 center. What's the current altimeter setting? 1001. And in that moment, it was incredibly clear. It was like, oh, jeez, I've been flying off the wrong altimeter setting this whole time. So having gone in, we ended up going well below Mins mhm as a result of that. But that's something.
Good backup, though, considering that that person was, like, feeling behind.
Yeah, excellent backup.
You get that feeling that something's not right. Go around.
Yeah, a little spidey sense. Yeah. I wish I could remember what that individual said, but to this day, I.
Can'T just I want to explain a couple of things quickly. So Rad alt is a radar altimeter, and it reads at that second height above the ground. So it's going to go up and down as the terrain rolls underneath you. Whereas he said, Barrow, that's your Ultimeter that reads from air pressure. And that one is going to be just showing you your height above sea level. So they're both matter for different reasons, but there's minimums that we mark down that we know on either one of these. I need to go around at this altitude, basically, or I need to hold that altitude if it's a non precision.
Precisely.
Uh, and there was a discrepancy. And once you start realizing at low level that something is not right, it's just time to go around and climb get away from the ground.
Yeah, get away from the ground. Because again, we couldn't see it. We were in Cloud at this time, so never really a good feeling, as I was saying, so talking to your peers. So this is one of those things. It's like, hey, I made this mistake. Let's all discuss it to make sure that you don't make that mistake. That's something I would say is definitely one of the bigger things, is being able to admit your mistakes, wear your mistakes, and learn from them. And also help everyone else around you learn from them. Because at the end of the day, just because they may not be in your crew today, they're still all part of the same unit. They're still all part of the same lifeblood of, in this case, four two nine. So keeping everyone read up, that's something that I would say is one of the most important things to help keep ready for a mission, is always continually engage with your peers. Not only other pilots, but you can talk to the technicians, talk to the loadmasters, talk to the chain of command. There's always something to be learned from someone else. Keep an open mind and continue to learn. That's probably one of the biggest things.
I like that. What do you think makes a good pilot?
The ability to overcome being one of the big things. You have to continually want to learn. You have to have that drive to perfect your craft. Because at the end of the day, it's an art, it's not a science. You can go up and perform the same maneuver, the same sequence twice, once after another. It's not going to be the same. 1 may not be better than another. As long as you're constantly learning and improving, that's the big thing. Finally, with that, especially gearing towards this multi engine platform, the C 17 that we're talking about, the ability to work as a crew, you have to accept criticism. You have to be able to brush off the bad, thrive on the good, and remain flexible.
Those critiques along the way, you just got to take them in and use them in a positive way. All right, final question. I love this question. I always save it for last. I want you to think about, uh, if you were talking to, say, an air cadet or somebody who, for whatever reason, is interested in joining the military, interested in becoming a pilot, what advice would you give them? What advice would you give to a new pilot?
Go get it. Seriously, you got to go get it. You will know if it's not for you the day you lose the passion for it. But if you're ever outside and every time you hear an airplane, you look up mhm, you should probably be trying to find a way to fly one way or another. Yeah, but I've said it multiple times through this show. It's all on you. Of course there's a support system to help, but the only one that's going to make it happen is you. So you need to want it enough to push forward, reach out and grab it yourself. So keep pushing, keep going, keep reading. Always keep reading. I think that's what I'd say.
Yeah.
And take lots of pictures. Nothing's worse than thinking of a place you were getting, just the feeling of whether it be shooting that approach, like busting out of men's at the last second and being like, uh, where was that? Oh, yeah, that was here. Uh, I don't have a picture. I thought I had a picture of that. Take lots of pictures. Spend the time instead of laying in bed and sleeping in. I always would take the time, no matter where I am. Didn't matter what the crew rest was. I would wake up an hour early and go for a walk, taking some of the sights, even by that stupid little magnet. Souvenir if that's what you want, just something to remind you of the adventure that you've been on, that's pretty good.
That's great advice, I think. Lauren also said, take lots of pictures. And it's crazy. I've been in the Air Force now for almost 17 years, and I look back and I'm like, where are all these great pictures? Where are all the pictures of all these places I've been and things I've done? And I got a handful, but I wish I had a lot more.
Yeah, sure. It's always great to remember them in your head, but I have thousands of pictures. One of the things I did when I first got on Squadron and started flying all over the place, I can't remember when I kind of slowed down on this, but I would climb up top in the C 17. You can get up, climb on the bunk beds, then you get up to the top escape hatch. I would crack the top escape hatch, poke my head out, and then I'd take a picture off the front of the aircraft in every location, every time I landed, I did that.
That's awesome.
It's pretty cool. I'm sure it'll make a really good slideshow if ever we get around to it.
All right, John, that's going to do it for today. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciated you taking the time to be here and appreciate your insight on the C 17 and on flying. Uh, so thank you so much for being on the show.
Thanks for having me. It's been a blast.
Okay, that's going to wrap up our episode with John and the C 17 Globemaster. Did you know May is Mental Health Awareness Month? For our next episode, we'll be getting personal as I discuss my journey with PTSD and anxiety, as well as my experiences with mental health in the military. As a special twist, my wife Melissa, who's been with me all throughout this journey, will be doing the interviewing and I'll be her guest. Do you have any questions or comments about what you've heard or suggestions for the show? You can contact us at thepilotprojectpodcast at uh@gmail.com or on all social media at Atpodpilotproject. Once again, the show has been experiencing awesome growth and I can only thank you, the listeners, for that because we rely entirely on word of mouth for growth. We'd like to ask you for your continued support with the Big Three that's like and follow us on social media, share with your friends and follow and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts. That that's all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up.
See you.