Photo By Warrant Officer Patrik Orcutt | A group of UH-72 Lakota helicopters prepare to land at Sheridan Barracks in...... read more read more
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GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany- Joint Multinational Readiness Center’s Falcon Aviation Team has been supporting the COVID-19 response task force in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. The Falcons have been flying personnel from Hohenfels training area down to Garmisch via rotary winged aircraft on April 1, 2020.
Even with much of Germany being slowed down by COVID-19, the Falcons have found many ways to stay busy and keep training.
“Even though we have a lull in our traditional training, we have still been pretty busy, we still have the day to day responsibilities of maintaining our fleet, so there’s no staying in the house all day and waiting for something to come up,” said Cheif Warrant Officer Four, Adam Bercot, who is the production control officer for the team. “We still have to maintain our level of readiness with our aircraft. This additional requirement to come down to Garmisch has also seen a spike in our flight hours.”
While flying the Eurocopter UH-72 Lakota to Garmisch, the team will be taking more than one helicopter per trip. This formation of flying is called multi-ship and allows for multiple pilots to communicate with each other allowing them all a better visual of the air space they are inhabiting.
“The missions in Garmisch have been relatively straight forward,” said Bercot. “The only thing demanding about this flight is the fact that we are flying multi-ship. You need to be paying attention to the other aircraft while also transitioning through Munich Airspace. Typically its a very busy class of airspace but since they are seeing a lull in traffic right now they have been really helpful letting us move through their airspace.”
Even if the Falcons were not running these flights down to Garmisch they would still be conducting readiness training and logging flight hours.
“We still have a training schedule so even if COVID-19 wasn’t happening, or these missions we would still be flying, but this training gives us a little more focus, a little more purpose,” said Bercot.
| Date Taken: | 04.01.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 04.02.2020 08:43 |
| Story ID: | 366399 |
| Location: | GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, BAYERN, DE |
| Web Views: | 770 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, JMRC’s Aviation Team supports COVID-19 assistance task force., by CW1 Patrik Orcutt, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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