Last weekend saw Adventure Girl and me make our way West to the Rapid City area for a joint search and rescue exercise (SAREX) with our fellow South Dakota Civil Air Patrol squadrons. The original plan was to spend Saturday working on various search problems, take Sunday morning to learn about CAP’s burgeoning sUAS (drone) program, and then drive home. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans for Sunday.
For me, the plan was to be aircrew again. I’m still working on my Mission Observer qualifications, and this would be a good opportunity to pick up a couple more required skill checks. Also, successfully qualifying for Mission Scanner meant I was now authorized to wear a flight suit, and I’d just gotten mine back with all the relevant patches and ranks sewn on. I wasn’t going to pass up that opportunity, obviously. I should add too, that I’m still smarting from our group failure to find the lost airplane in Aberdeen last month. It wasn’t just me who failed to spot that crash, but I really want more spotting practice to try and get better at this.
Saturday dawned calm and clear, although the weather forecast had high winds moving in at the advance of a major winter storm due to hit Sunday. As aircrews, our mission was to find a simulated piece of wreckage (a 3’x5’ silver space blanket) with an ELT training beacon sitting atop it. That… didn’t exactly happen. I learned a bunch about triangulating a functioning ELT beacon with our direction finding equipment, but I never saw that space blanket. It did make me feel a bit better than other folks had similar difficulties, but still, I’m batting .000 on visually spotting things and I’m not sure how to get better, beyond more flights and practice.
The air was seriously rough though. I came out of my seat a couple of times, and other aircrew had similar experiences. A lot of folks kind of staggered out of their aircraft looking a bit pale or greenish. I probably looked pretty pale, but I also had a bag filled with the liquid remains of my breakfast that I had to toss. Yup, airsick and puked again.
This is the most frustrating part of aircrew for me – I’ve been either nauseous, or straight up puking, almost every flight. It wasn’t like this when I was learning to fly. Ginger chews haven’t worked well for me, eating a light breakfast and having a mostly empty stomach hasn’t worked, and neither has eating a big breakfast and having a full stomach. I’m not willing to give up though, and if they’d asked me about a second flight that afternoon, I would have said “I still had two barf bags left, let’s go.”
I really hope this is something I can work through, because I love doing this stuff.
Unfortunately, the afternoon flights were cancelled due to the incoming weather front, as was the Sunday training. Rather than having a relaxing evening, all of the East River squadrons and aircrews packed up and headed for home as quickly as we could.
For me, the big takeaway was working on my spotting skills, along with some good learning of how to use our airborne direction finding equipment. Hopefully I can have some better success next time!