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Off station training mission puts aircrew members through the paces

  • Published
  • By Maj. Wayne Capps
  • 315th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
BOGATA, COLOMBIA --  Not your typical C-17 training mission, this one swapped out four helicopters, five aircraft engines, two very large water filtration systems and endless smaller pieces of cargo all while fighting the language barrier in five different countries.

For Capt. Nick Frank, a reserve pilot with the 317th Airlift Squadron at Joint Base Charleston, S.C., this difficult mission was not only his first trip to South America, it was part of the process to upgrade him to the position of aircraft commander.

"There were three examiner pilots onboard and me," said Frank. "They put me through the paces!"

Frank is undergoing the roughly four month training process to upgrade from a copilot to aircraft commander. He recently completed aircraft commander school and according to Frank, is going through an observation period of sorts where he will fly several missions under the watchful eyes of instructor or examiner pilots.

Lt. Col. Mark LaVerne, from the 317 AS was one of the examiner pilots in charge of Frank's training. "Normal war-time missions are well regulated. Flying in South America, he has to learn to operate without the normal command and control infrastructure that we are used to, and it is difficult," said the colonel. "This is one of the hardest types of missions we do, and we have to prepare him for that," he said.

The mission seemed like a logistical nightmare where helicopters and aircraft engines had to be moved and swapped around like pieces on a chessboard at nearly every stop.

"This was a difficult load," said Tech. Sgt. Joe Poltor, one of the three loadmasters from the 317 AS on the crew. "A lot of time was spent planning this load. We had to deal with winching helicopters, moving large pieces of shoring around, constantly loading and unloading engines, working with passenger and dealing with the language barrier. On a difficulty scale of one to 10, this load would be about a seven," he said.

Adding to the already complicated mission, Frank had to work through the different host country nationalities who were on the receiving end of the cargo. "Dealing with the host countries was hard," said Frank. "My biggest hurdle was the communication; they spoke broken English and we spoke broken Spanish... But, we made it work."

"We wanted to broaden his capabilities so he can operate in a difficult environment that we typically don't operate in," said LaVerne. "It all boils down to giving him the skill set of taking a C-17 into these types of places with little to no support," he said.

Frank said, overall the mission was a good experience for him and he was able to learn from "three great examiner pilots with more than 30,000 flight hours combined." "My job was to have good mission management skills and to safely run this mission to get the crew back home to their families," he said. "I think we did that."