Darrell's weblog

I’m heading back home tonight, finally, but I almost got stuck out here for another 4 days.
Last night we took off on a normal resupply mission up a particular river valley, but roughly halfway into the flight, we received a radio call that an American soldier had fallen into the river during a training exercise, [...]

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 [...]

I’m back on the road. Every couple of days we get a new cargo plane to come in with supplies. Usually, it’s an Air Force C-17, but every now and then we get planes in from Volga-Dnepr, a Russian air transport contractor. Usually, the aircraft is one of their An-124 cargo planes, [...]

It’s cold here. We fly at night, and for the past week, it has been hitting -16ºC during our flights (That’s 3ºF for you non-metric types). That doesn’t count the wind chill when we have the doors open. It’s pretty miserable if you don’t have enough clothes on. I’m actually pretty [...]

I haven’t made a blog post since my return from overseas, so I have some catching up to do. Heather is much better about posting in a timely manner at her blog, so you should be reading her blog, too, if you don’t already. Anyway, here goes…
1) I got back from [...]

Well, I’ve been out here at my new “job site” for almost a week, and I’m starting to get the hang of things. I’m flying pretty much every night, so that’s good. All in all, it’s a pretty smooth operation they’ve got going on here. I took a few pictures of my [...]

I’m currently in training again. This time it’s a two-week field maintenance course for our Super Puma. I’m not really into the Puma. It’s very pretty and all, but I still prefer the Mi-17. Speaking of which, I’m up to 40 hours of flight time, which is pretty good considering it’s [...]

My current job is the first I’ve had where I get paid overtime. Overtime, I’m discovering, is rather nice. I had 35.5 hours of overtime last month, which made for a nice jump in my paycheck. Speaking of overtime, I just worked two 15-hour days in a row, so I am already [...]

Well, I’m finally starting to fly more often. (yay!) I’m not overseas yet, but I’ll be going on my first trip soon enough. Of the 9 work days so far this month, I’ve gone flying on 7. In those 7 days, I’ve racked up 22.2 hours of flight time. The above [...]

I am now, officially, an FAA-certificated* Airframe and Powerplant Mechanic. I just flew back from a two-week crash course in Nashville (and boy are my arms tired!) and I have to say that I have never studied for anything so hard in my entire life. Ever. I must have gone through 30 [...]