Photo By Petty Officer 3rd Class Joshua Murray | ATLANTIC OCEAN (Oct. 2, 2017) – Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Handling) Christopher...... read more read more
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Primary flight control – also known as pri-fly – is the ship’s control tower, watching and communicating to ensure the safety of flight deck personnel and equipment.
“When we’re up here during flight ops, the air boss and I are maintaining situational awareness of the flight ops that are going on, talking on the radios to the aircraft, and talking on the 5MC to the personnel that are down on the flight deck, basically to ensure safety,” said Cmdr. Jonathan Biehl, Ford’s mini boss. “During that time, we’re also running a series of checklists to make sure all of the equipment is in proper working order and everybody is in the right place.”
The air boss, the head of air department; and the mini boss , the assistant air officer, are set up with a team of Aviation Boatswain’s Mates of varying specialties, but are all trained to work together to ensure flight operations go smoothly.
“We’re not up here by ourselves. We have about five or six Sailors up here helping us: forward and aft spotters and the overall tower supervisor who’s making sure all of the equipment is working for us. I don’t think flight ops would be able to happen safely without people up here doing what we do.”
The forward spotters assist the mini boss in monitoring the launching systems on the bow of the ship, ensuring the aircraft and personnel are in place and ready to go. Aft spotters watch and identify aircraft as they approach the ship to land. Identifying the aircraft is crucial, as the arresting gear has to be adjusted for different types of aircraft depending on their weight. Using binoculars to spot the aircraft, aft spotters can identify and report back to the air boss.
But it took different forms of training to qualify and ready this team to conduct flight operations onboard Ford.
“I went underway with [USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 74)] for a month and got some qualifications there and I finished the rest of it on [USS George Washington (CVN 73)] during a ten-day underway,” said Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Fuels) 3rd Class Chelsey Rary, one of Ford’s spotters. “I went out and saw it in the fleet before we got commissioned and got underway. We got to see aircraft landing on the flight deck and launching, which helped us piece all of our training together for when we were ready to launch aircraft ourselves.”
Through on-the-job training, quizzing, deployments, and underways, the team in pri-fly were ready to come together.
“I think as a department, with all of the Sailors up here with us in pri-fly, we’ve done so much training and drills and practice, quizzing ourselves to make sure we’re ready,” said Biehl.
“I’m very proud to see my team perform,” said Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Handling) 1st Class Leti Seloti. “Some of us haven’t done this in a long time. Some of our junior Sailors just came off deployment. To see the difference and see them be able to work with each other despite the differences that they have or different towers that they’ve worked in and to get together with air boss and mini boss and fix the issues that we have, it’s pretty amazing to see the transformation of our Sailors.”
| Date Taken: | 10.21.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 11.13.2017 10:30 |
| Story ID: | 255098 |
| Location: | AT SEA |
| Web Views: | 60 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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