Photo By Staff Sgt. Katherine Forbes | Chief Warrant Officer 2 Mike Colone, a pilot with C Company of the 2-238th General...... read more read more
SHELBYVILLE, Ind. - Chief Warrant Officer 2 Dave Kinyon, a tactical operations officer for the 2-238th General Support Aviation Battalion (GSAB), straps himself into the pilot’s seat of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter in the airfield at the National Guard Armory in Shelbyville, Nov. 7. He checks his navigational instruments around the cockpit while radio chatter buzzes through his headset from air traffic controllers, operation officers and other pilots in the area. All are coordinating for the approaching two-hour training mission. When Kinyon receives the all-clear, the aircraft’s rotor system picks up speed. The spinning blades’ velocity beats the wind into submission, and Kinyon begins a controlled ascent. The 7.5-ton helicopter effortlessly floats to 800 feet above the ground in a matter of seconds. When the stress of takeoff fades, Kinyon takes a moment to glance over at his copilot and grin at him from beneath his visor.
“We’re getting paid to do this,” he says.
A typical training weekend in aviation operations can be a rewarding yet tasking job for National Guardsmen in the 2-238th GSAB and other units with the 38th Combat Aviation Brigade. Whether it’s an assault mission or answering a call for a medevac, being prepared to react to emergencies during a flight requires a great amount of reliance between soldiers.
1st Lt. Bernard Hainen, the Operations Officer for C Company of the 2-238th GSAB, said aviation operations consist of far more work than just flying. For every hour spent in the air there are at least two to three hours of preparation time spent on the ground beforehand. Designating crews, maintaining the mechanics, and completing necessary planning for the mission are all routine procedures for every flight. This requires constant communication between the pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers and all other soldiers involved.
“Interaction is so heavy with everybody. It takes every single person to play their important part on that aircraft,” he said. “You want to be able to trust that person right next to you,” Hainen said. “That’s where that constant training, evaluating and communication comes in. You have to be able to do it flawlessly.”
“You can have fun with your job, though,” he said with a laugh. “Sometimes you sit back and think about it, and you think, ‘Man, I’m getting paid to fly a $15 million aircraft.’”
Sgt. Lou Torres, a crew chief with C Company, said the entire team, including pilots, flight mechanics, and medics, plays a crucial role for the unit to perform successfully. In this field of work, soldiers’ lives depend on everyone performing their job.
“It’s not just us, it’s not just our air crews,” Torres said. “We have other soldiers from around the world who are depending on us to have safe, reliable and functioning aircraft. When you get in that type of first-responder environment, when you go on a medevac shift, it’s very much like a firehouse. We’re all sitting together; the pilots, the crew chiefs, the flight medics, and we eat together and sleep in the same room, ready to answer a call at a moment’s notice.”
Torres said that the closeness of his team results from their high-stress jobs that require extreme attention to detail.
“Once the work is done, you’ll hear us joke and cut up with one another,” he added. “We have to. I think it’s a coping mechanism.”
Sgt. Ron Johnson, a flight paramedic with C Company, deployed to Kuwait from 2012 to 2013. Throughout that deployment, Johnson treated numerous patients: U.S. troops, coalition service members and local nationals. Being ready to give medical attention to anybody in the area, including enemy combatants, can be a difficult mindset to adapt to, he said.
“That’s one thing with medevac; you never know who you’re going to get,” Johnson said. “Initially it’s kind of hard as a medic to think about that. I was a ground medic before, so I’ve been in the role where you have somebody who just killed or wounded your buddies, and now you’re trying to take care of him. But if you can keep that guy alive and get him stabilized to the point where Intel can talk to him and gather him, you’re effectively taking more combatants of the battlefield that way.”
Per Army doctrine, when a casualty evacuation is called, the helicopter has to be off the ground within fifteen minutes. Johnson said his team was usually en-route within seven minutes after receiving the call.
“Outside of special forces operations, flight medics are the pinnacle of care,” he said. “Pretty much everybody in the military…will call Army medevac when they need them. People count on you. So you’re always on your toes, you have to be on your A-game all the time, so it drives you to be the best medic you can be.”
Aviators in the 2-238th GSAB constantly train to be prepared to react to a sudden state of emergency in Indiana or anywhere else they’re needed, Hainen said. Most guardsmen in the 2-238th GSAB spend more than their mandatory one weekend per month training in order to be prepared for a mission at a moment’s notice.
“You never know what can happen, so you have to be ready to perform your task,” Hainen said. “If you’re called in on any given Sunday, someone tells you ‘hey, you’ve got to be here,’ … you have to be ready to take that order.”
| Date Taken: | 11.07.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 11.08.2015 14:26 |
| Story ID: | 181330 |
| Location: | SHELBYVILLE, INDIANA, US |
| Web Views: | 708 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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