What strikes me as odd is the fact that when we enter Camp Lemonier, the Kansas guardsmen always say something different. What makes it more odd is that none of our officers just get up in their faces. We were told once that it was due to a new Lieutenant that we were being screened. Then it was that the scanners for the bus were down during the early morning hours and hand screening was required. We even had one of these idiots tell us an "incident" had occured earlier in the evening that required us to be screened. Then of course we had sargeant Hyde tell us that was procedure.
The ironic thing is the Djiboutian bus drivers never get scanned and the bus never gets searched. We're screened by a bunch of Djiboutian idiots and the military security just sits behind the glass not even knowing what the hell is going on. I say idiots, before you get offended, because the other day a strap from one of our bags got hung up on the conveyor just outside the exit to the bag scanner. The man turned the machine off and tried to reach in and undo the strap. The woman walks over and gets in on the action and turns the machine back on with the guys arm inside. I would have slapped that bitch silly!!!! When you see how they scan our bags it's obvious that they are getting paid and aren't effective at all. They have no idea what they are looking for. We carry knives as an occupational hazard and they never asked to open one bag. We had knives on our person and they let us walk through the metal detector and it beeped. The part that enrages me most is they are scanning us with x-ray machines for full body scans. The dosage isn't as big as an x-ray for medical purposes but who oversees the machines? I'm sure it's my favorite contractor to the government: Halliburton. Their business slogan should go something like this: "If we can't electrocute you while your deployed, we'll radiate you to death. Remember, at Halliburton NOTHING is TOO good for our troops!!"
Of course that made us 15-20 minutes late to ATOC for the cargo brief, fuel request and flight plan, but we got there and made due. Since the galley is closed from 2-4 am we had no chow whatsoever for the flight; it's the Navy's way of helping us out. I will be posting my pictures for this trip on Picasa and if you see one that shows three styrafoam containers with eight pieces of bread, six pieces of cheese, ten pieces of lunch meat, and enough Miracle Whip to cause a marathon runner to have a massive coronary, that's the "Quarterdeck's" answer to food for 15 people for a 16 hour day.
We arrived at the airplane and loaded the cargo for the assault strip and some cargo for Nairobi. In spite of team Djibouti once again trying to make us late, we took off 15 minutes early and flew an uneventful trip.....did I say uneventful? I meant a very EVENTFUL trip to Nairobi. I'd use mark through, but wordpad is a tad lean on fancy touches. As we approached the airport from the west, a commercial airliner kept querying Nairobi approach about some traffic that was potentially conflicting with his approach. In true Kenyan style, the controller shrugged off the warning and told him the traffic was "no factor", which means it will not converge. Well, Nairobi is one cloudy place on most days and today was no exception. We had mostly cloudy conditions at our altitude and we were searching for this traffic on our TCAS (Total Collision Avoidance System) and we saw some traffic at our 10 o'clock position. The captain of the commercial airliner by this point was very adamant that this was indeed life threatening and he was about to take evasive action. About that time our TCAS alarm sounded and we spotted a small commuter aircraft flying co-altitude left to right in our path. JESUS! Are you kidding me?!!!? The controller then instructed us to evade, but of course we never wait to do what these controllers suggest. We do our own thing because quite frankly, they have no idea how to conduct the flow of air traffic. The ring on our TCAS display was set at 40 nm. At 210 knots of indicated airspeed we could have easily converged at 3 nm per sec in just over 12 seconds. What the F over? Many midairs have happened over Africa. The best known for the US Air Force was a German TU-154 and an Air Force C-141 over west Africa. The controller cleared both to the same altitude. The Air Force crew was ending a very long day and probably didn't hear the other exchange. At the time TCAS didn't exist let alone on Air Force aircraft. Even today we have it, but it requires the other plane your conflicting with to have a transponder capable of "chatting" with the TCAS computer.
As if we didn't have enough of a bad morning, we landed at Nairobi after a shortened final approach that put us too high and too fast. We continued the approach because their is 13889 feet of runway available and we could land on the 10000 marker and roll out!! We did almost that. As we shut down and the crewchief's installed our wheel chocks, one of the loadmaster's yells out over the intercom, "We're done!!!! We blew a brake line and there is hydraulic fluid all over the ground!!" One of our other crews had just had the same problem three weeks ago in Entebbe, Uganda during their rotation on the HOA. Back at home I told people that I would request to cap the brake and take it back to Djibouti versus staying wherever I was and waiting a week for the part to arrive; that was of course hypothetical because it hadn't happened to me yet.
Now my moment had come. I told my aircraft commander that we should cap it. I explained to him how it would be done and what kind of aircraft performance we needed to have. This is a flight engineer's bread and butter. A good engineer can move the aircraft, SAFELY, and accomplish the mission. A bad one can get someone killed, or delay a mission uneccessarily. I got my performance manual and calculated my takeoff parameters and determined we'd have enough runway to abort the takeoff if we had a catastrophic failure prior to our liftoff speed. I also calculated what landing distance we'd have if we had to execute a no flap approach back into Nairobi. We had more than enough runway for that as well. Armed with those numbers and the airfield information, my aircraft commander made the call back to the unit that has operational control over us and our mission. As always there is one douche bag back there who feels "uncomfortable" with the idea. It is not a normal procedure. It is considered a "hostile equipment repair" or better known as "combat" repair.
We waited agonizingly long for a decision. Seven and a half hours we gyrated. We couldn't put gas on to go back to Djibouti because if we did and they wouldn't let us, we would have too much gas onboard when we were finally repaired and ready to go to the assault strip. If we didn't put the fuel on and they let us do it we wouldn't have the time in our crew duty day to get the gas and takeoff. For you Star Trek fans that is the Air Force operations version of the Kobyashi Marue; completely unwinnable. We were on the satellite phone because our cell phones wouldn't call out. Then they would call us on the cell phones and ask questions like, "would you be carrying passengers?" and "what do you need to get it fixed there?". Both really bad questions when your leaning toward going. Yes we hade passengers and we were able to tell them what we needed.
The problem with staying and getting fixed is really simple: IFA! That's short for In Fucking Africa! If a brake assembly was even on the continent, the unit at Djibouti wouldn't fly it down because they are special operations and their mission of personnel recovery, PR, is paramount. They literally stand by day and night in case one of us goes down so that they can fly in to help protect us if we're alive and get us out safely. God him/herself could not order the HC-130's sitting alert to take a lesser mission and I for one am glad. If I go down and actually live, I don't want to die at the hands of the enemy knowing that the bird that could have gotten me was busy taking a brake to some crew sitting in Nairobi. So, the brake would have to be flown in opportune cargo. That means either a plane is coming down to the HOA, NOT, or they'd have to task a mission special for that purpose only. The last crew languished seven days and were only a couple of miles from the bombings in Kampala!!! I'd say that's reason enough to get out of there!
Eventually the AC kept talking to someone who assured him that we were leaving and that they didn't want us to stay there because of how long the repair took last time. But that isn't the same as the A3 for the MAJCOM (major command) actually putting it in writing. The A3 is the director of operations for whatever MAJCOM is tasking us. He finally put it in writing in the late afternoon and by then we wouldn't have the crew duty day so our AC had to request a waiver for a two hour crew duty day extension. We got it and the ball started rolling. They never refuse the crew day waiver requests. They always grant them and when a crew does something really stupid because their tired....they hang the crew out to dry!!!!!! We all felt rested and ready so it was no big deal (really mom)!!!
The crewchiefs capped the lines and I verified there were no leaks. They then fueled the aircraft and we started her up and taxiied out. We finally got to line up and we did a standing takeoff which involves holding the brakes until power is set. Even at reduced power the aircraft crept forward, but we had to take what we could get because we had only 2000 feet to spare, which I wanted every bit available if we rejected. That way we could coast to a stop and reverse whatever engines were operating (in case we aborted for an engine failure) and not using the brakes as much. We took off and flew four hours back to DJ landing at 18 hours into our day.
The next day the crewchiefs went and got the part. They had a brake on DJ and all the equipment to change it. Thank God for Moody Air Force Base maintenance. Our guys had us repaired less than 24 hours after we blew the line. We were set for an early morning alert to finish the mission we started, but that's another post.
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