I am sitting in the cockpit at 21000 feet flying over the Red Sea after just exiting the Egyptian FIR (Flight Information Region) boundary. We're headed almost due south. The sky is absolutely clear tonight. About 30 minutes ago I decided to play with my NVG's because I was bored and the stars are spectacular. Tonight you could see the Milky Way so crisply it was absolutely breathtaking!! We were all sitting there silently when we looked to our left and watched the moon begin to creep above the horizon. You get a sense of how fast the moon is moving relative to the earth when you see how long it takes to move above. As I speak it's already a few degrees above the horizon of the earth. The color was a brilliant orange due to the moonlight passing through the atmosphere and the curvature of the earth. It's nights like these that I feel so blessed to be able to fly.
Flying has been the best job I could have ever chosen for myself. It didn't start out that way, but somehow I fell into it. I'd say I can't imagine doing anything else, but I can because I quit for awhile. I can't regret that decision because it led me to the most wonderful human being on the planet: my beautiful wife. However, I can say that there are absolutely no regrets for having jumped back into the game. I am having the best time on this deployment and as everybody's widgets on their computers count down the time until we are reunited with our loved ones I am struck with a sense of sadness. The guys on my crew are the best I've ever flown with. We have gotten the job done time and time again and we've had an absolute blast regardless of the shit we're in. I truly am going to miss flying with them.
It's not that I'll never fly with them again. It's that I probably will never fly with these exact crewmembers in a deployment again. Anyone who has ever spent a lot of time with the same group of people over a long deployment the wrong people equal a very large ass pain. Not once has anyone jumped in anyone else's shit over something. When one of us is angry about something we all just make him laugh and then we give him shit later once he's cooled down. We move as a group and we're flexible as hell. No matter what has occured this deployment we just shrugged our shoulders and made a funny comment and moved on.
Now we are on our last rotation to the Horn of Africa. It's a melancholy feeling coming down here one more time. The squadron we are deployed to is deactivating at the end of our deployment and the active duty squadron at Ramstein is going to take on sole responsibility for Africa missions. This is probably the last time we will see Ramstein either. I grew up in Europe. I have spent much of my career flying in and out of Ramstein and though much has changed over the last 23 years of my career, it's still like home to me. When the lights go out for the last time at the squadron a lot of people are going to have hay fever all of a sudden!!!
Things have gone wrong since the start of this trip. 617th the squadron responsible for flight planning us has fucked it up again. How many colonels can you get in one room without it collapsing due to them sucking the air out? Right now the answer is.....no shit.....about 15 full bird colonels. No wonder nothing gets done. They had us fragged for an earlier departure and we had hazardous cargo. Rockets and lots of em, but some shithead didn't contact Souda Bay in Crete to tell them until later. It was then they learned that there is no haz cargo ramp because of construction taking place. WTF? Don't you call, because it's required, and notify the arrival station that your coming loaded for the Taliban? Apparently not. Way to go team Ramstein. Your country can be proud of the way you impede Operation Enduring Freedom. Who needs the Taliban when you have 617th.
So they pushed us back a day and we have no haz on board. We have nothing on board for the DJ. That feels so strange because usually we have cargo and passengers. Not this evening. Tonight we get there, jump off the aircraft, get to our tents and run to the chow hall for midnight chow. I can almost taste my roast beef and provolone sandwich....mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! I was worried for a bit because we have several runs to make while we're down here and I didn't want them to short change us as some of us need a few more missions for aerial achievement medals. Also we get back to back months of tax free. It's the little things that count. Hot chow and tax free.
In addition to 617th doing the haz dick dance, they also showed us flight planned to complete the trip in one day, which we usually do, but that was with us still going around Italy, through France, along the Med to Souda. The shot to DJ was straighter until Cairo redirected us away from Luxor. Weather ahead I'm jumping off so that my laptop doesn't go flying. I should have just picked up my nogs and taken a look. We hit a cloud layer and so we climbed out of it at 23,000 feet and road on top of the cloud deck.
After almost seven hours of pain we approached DJ. The copilot was fllying this approach and he briefed it for runway 09 and commented that it will obviously change to 27 once we contact approach control. Sure enough the DJ controller calls 27 the active, but we were able to get the visual,which cuts out a lot of ass pain. We landed and had a bus waiting. Got to our tent and that's another post.
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