Who's in charge here?

Flying Safety, July, 2004 by Jennifer Fiederer

The KC-135 community, like many of the air-frames in Air Force today, is undergoing a climate change that may inevitably change our culture. We have evolved from the SAC alert bird to one of the most tapped resources in the Air Force.

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As our operations increase, however, unfortunately for most, our experience and knowledge base is decreasing. How can this be? Gone are the days of learning from Friday night's "There I Was" stories at the bar and weeks of alert with IPs readily available to play 20 Questions. Today's crews spend 200 days in the AOR, training requirements have been slashed in half, and copilots head off to be aircraft commanders with little to no experience dealing with TACC, other than deploying to the desert and back. Leadership is fighting to season their aircrews, but only experience can teach some lessons.

The following is an account of one of my eight deployments into the AOR. I hope some lessons can be learned from my inexperience.

Last December, I was on a jet headed to U.A.E. There were two crews on board, and I was in the jump seat headed into Moron. Our weather brief earlier that day called for 8000-foot ceilings and 10 miles visibility at Moron, and the ATIS indicated the weather to be better than 5000/5. It sounded like another uneventful landing. As we arrived in Spain, there was cloud coverage that seemed to be lower, but since the ATIS was current, we didn't foresee any difficulties making our scheduled landing. We shot the approach, and as you might guess, we did not break out of the cloud layer that seemed to be sitting just over the airfield. As we went around, we queried tower about the weather. A fog layer had rolled in and covered three-fourths of the runway. We went back to approach, called metro and decided to make a second attempt at landing. On our second approach, the fog only thickened. We decided to hold over the field until either the fog lifted or we reached our divert fuel.

While we were holding, we contacted metro again to check on the weather at our divert field, Rota. The weather was VMC, but fog was expected to roll in within the hour. We held for 45 minutes in hopes the fog would lift. We contacted tower to check on the conditions, but they were not improving. As a crew, we discussed our options and decided it was time to press towards Rota before the weather crumped there also. We called Moron command post and requested they contact TACC and let them know we were diverting and to fax our orders to Rota. Control vectored us to Rota approach. While on final approach into Rota, we received a call from Rota command post: "Reach XXX, TACC directs you to turn around and land in Moron. They say you have the weather to land there."

I responded to the call from command post to confirm they knew we had already made two attempts at landing in Moron and had to go around for weather on each approach. Needless to say, the cockpit was a bit silent, and the other aircraft commander and I just looked at each other for a moment. We only had the fuel to make one more approach, but unfortunately the cockpit was filled with instant emotion. How could someone on the ground, thousands of miles away, dare to tell me to turn around? We decided to make one more approach into Moron, then go back to land min fuel at Rota. On the third approach into Moron, we broke out of the fog at 1.3 DME and 255 feet, barely picking up the runways lights to the airfield. Bottom line, we were on the ground in Moron.

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After a phone call back to TACC, the duty officer there profusely apologized for any confusion and the undeniable breakdown in communication between the TACC and the information passed from command post. Regardless, what lessons can we take from this fiasco?

First and foremost, emotion is very hard to keep out of the cockpit. Unfortunately, emotion drove our decision to make another approach into Moron. Was returning to Moron the safest option? Absolutely not; we got lucky. What if we returned to Moron and didn't break out and then weather rolled into our divert, not allowing us to land there (oh, by the way, now we are min fuel)? We allowed someone, safely on the ground thousands of miles away, to fly our jet and put us in a less than desirable position. We file weather diverts for a reason; use them. Emotion has no place in the professional aviators' cockpit. Indeed, emotion will often blur your judgment and the safest course of action, as it did here.

Secondly, as a community we are becoming very proficent at filling out ORM worksheets before we step to fly, but are we really internalizing the ORM process? I believe there is an application failure in our community, and perhaps in the Air Force as well. How did we fail to use ORM in this situation? The sixth step of ORM is to "Supervise and Review." On our final approach, we were 10 hours into our sortie, 14 1/2 hours into our duty day, it was night, the weather was bad, and we had been attempting to land for an hour. Dare I mention our own personal ORM factors of fatigue and emotions running high? If we had simply taken the time to run through the very same ORM worksheet that we had filled out twelve hours before, I think it would have flipped the light switch. ORM is not just a piece of paper that you fill out so you can go fly. It applies to our lives in the air and on the ground, on duty and off. As aircrew, we have learned to be very flexible and to "make the sortie happen." But we put our safety at risk because we did not update and reanalyze our ORM.