We're are officially Mi-17 qualified pilots...after a mere 23 hours of training & 2 hours of evaluation. The best part was the extra 4 days we got to spend here, instead of home...because the Air Force sent us to here to fly with no idea who was going to give us our checkrides. Good plan. So after bullying the company that was giving us our training into letting an evaluator from a competing company give us our checkrides...we have our certificates for the refrigerator. (okay, he didn't actually work for the competing company, he just owed his GS-13 government job to them) ....and four days late.
The company that provided our training was great. The instructors were outstanding, even if one of them was retired Army. The facilities were great, training excellent, maintenance was awesome and they even had a spouse flying training program...
This is Kellie's first flight in the co-pilot seat of the MD500...
This is Kellie flying over the water...Magnum PI style, no doors on the bird.
She got to do low level on the beach, rocket attack profiles, hovering practice and some loop-tee-loops. Thanks JT and James!
So now she's ready to rock. The plan is...we'll keep the little bird (a nickname for the MD500) in the back of the Mi-17, so if we go down because...like if we ran out of gas or...something, we can pull the little bird out of the back and Kellie can fly us back to base...it'd look kinda like this:
Our training included Emergency Procedures (EP's), instruments (which would be an EP if you went into the clouds for real on those 'instruments'), low level formation and NVG flying...good thing the EP's are easy, since the switches are in Cyrillic and the gauges are in units of measure I've never heard of. The good info is in our Dash 10, Army flight manual...like where it says the rotor turns the opposite way it does in real life. They've been using that manual for over 10 years! You'd figure simple concepts like counter clockwise vs. clockwise would be easy, even for the Army, but maybe all of their clocks only have numbers, no hour and minute hands? Those can be confusing...for kindergartners.
Here are some good formation pictures...
Down the beach in front of the condo...looking for sharks...& not bikinis.
Oh yeah...the checkride. We were given bogus information on the evaluator pilot...he told the guys here that he was just coming to an 'over the shoulder, make sure it stays greasy side down, spinny side up' kind of check ride. A gentleman's checkride...like as in EASY. I knew it was gonna be all down hill when the as the big guy was strapping in, the evaluator says, "So, tell me how far do the tail rotor petals travel"...are you joking?!?! Then he asked how the pneumatic brakes work...we said 'air'...he only asked a few more questions and quit...when he realized we where lucky to find the right helicopter on the ramp.
Those pictures are incredible! It looks like they might have actually taught you to fly them... unless those are just stock footage kind of thing!
ReplyDeleteDude! Even russians don't know that sort of thing about this aircraft! Fuel goes here, Oil goes here... and if there is a problem with any system the answer is always clean the filter! Done!