Darrell's weblog

Just two more weeks and then I head back home. I miss home. I have a Twitter account now, but it’s hard for me to use with such spotty Internet access. But that’s not the point of this update.

Today was a fun day at work. We have an old beater helicopter that is on its last legs (only 15 flight hours until it has to go back to the factory to get rebuilt) and we used it to do some training. The highlight was before the training, when two pilots and I took it out for a spin during the day to make sure it still works. After about 3 minutes of hovering, one of the pilots suggested, “Hey, we should let Darrell fly this thing.” So they put me up in the front seat and let me hover and fly around the pattern for 30 minutes or so. At first the other pilot just gave me the cyclic, but after I seemed to hover fine, he also gave me the collective. After hovering and sliding left and right and doing a few landings and takeoffs from a hover, the pilot taxied out to the runway and let me takeoff and fly around the pattern a couple of times. I never did get control of the pedals, I had my hands full with just the cyclic and collective. It was a lot of fun.

Later that evening, we went over to one of our customer sites (with me safely back in my crew chief seat) and did some insertion/extraction training, with about 15 dust landings, so I got a lot of good training as well as our customers.

All in all, it was a fun day. We don’t get to do training as often as I’d like, as we spend most of our time doing logistics runs, so it’s a real treat when we get to go out and “play in the sand.”