Nobody Asked Me…

To all those who are flying, maintaining, and supporting the search efforts out of RAAF Pearce for MH370…

HERE is a report from BBC World as they tagged along on one event.  This is truly a multi-national effort, with US, AUS, NZ and others flying.  It’s one of those evolutions that is by turns, boring, mind numbing, exhilirating, and scary as hell…

Just to get out to the OPAREA is 2-3 hours to the ‘new’ search area, and those not actually flying are trying to nap, relax or just keep busy depending on their personalities…

Once onstation, they descend to search altitude, as determined by their specific service component and set up the search pattern (usually a ladder track going down sun, e.g. sun behind the aircraft).  We used to search at 500-1000 feet depending on turbulence…  And occasionally descend to 200 feet if we were trying to ID something.

Every window was manned, usually in shifts of 30 minutes, to prevent people from becoming ‘scope locked’ e.g. looking but not seeing…

And the techniques used are kinda counter intuitive…  Extend your arm to full length with two fingers parallel to the ground, now imagine putting the top finger on the horizon, and look under the bottom finger, that was the ‘effective’ search range where you could actually recognize things.  Also, you were constantly moving your eyes, either in a ‘sweep’ back and forth, or an ‘X’ pattern.  The reason you do this is because you have a blind spot in the center of your vision (Link HERE)…

And strange as it may seem, we normally didn’t look with binoculars, because the field of view was too small, you only used binoculars if you DID see something…

And you never stare directly at anything you saw, you wanted it on the ‘edge’ of your vision to actually be able to track it.

If you saw something, you’d call the clock position, e.g. 60 degrees off the starboard side would be 2 o’clock, and a guesstimated range, color and shape.  In the old P-3s we also had the capability to fire a smoke from each window and the flight station to provide a reference point to the flight station so they come back around to the same point.

If you weren’t on the window, you might be sitting radar, scanning for returns, or acting as the photographer (trying to get photos for further analysis on landing), or documenting the location and description of the object…

Flight was basically hand flying the airplane, also looking out the windscreen and on alert to react to any sighting by the crew…

For six or seven hours this was your entire focus until you had to climb out and RTB.  And do it again and again day after day, as the folks are doing now…

And once back, the maintainers have to fix any problems, prep the airplanes, and turn them around for either the same crew, 12 hours later, or a new crew to take it back out.

The folks at the base are providing fuel, maintenance support, logistics, briefing/debriefing and fending off probably hundreds of requests for media and others…

And they all do this without complaint, because it’s their job first, and secondly because they WANT to help the families get closure…

My hat is off to the ‘kids’ out there today… Fly safe, and keep up the good work!

Bravo Zulu!

At breakfast yesterday I was talking to a couple of the pilots of one of the ‘contract’ search acft, they are orbiting at altitude an hour short of the search area, providing comms links to allow the onstation search acft to ‘phone home’. He was commenting on how bad the satellite situation is due to the low angles of arrival for most of the satcoms links.  He was telling me they were actually in much better shape than most of the military aircraft, since they were able to use ‘company’ satellite services and actually do skype calls from their iPhones direct to RCC to provide quick updates for any sightings.  He was also pleasantly surprised at how well the coordination was going with multiple entities involved, and said the RCC was doing an excellent job of managing it.

So kudos to all those folks too…