Shell Game

Back when I was flying the C-141 Starlifter, flying a mission for the air force was much less complex. When I left home station, we typically kept the same jet the entire trip. Crew rest between flights was dependable, we always had hot meals, and we could leave some of our professional gear on the aircraft instead of taking everything with us once we landed. There were times when we’d change jets in the middle of a mission, but it was quite rare.

In the C-17 Globemaster III, however, the opposite is true. It is a rare event when a crew keeps the same aircraft for an entire mission, especially those transiting the Sandbox. When we land at the end of our day, we have to haul everything we have with us and we are often on call for hours waiting for a jet to arrive so we can pick up the mission.

The concept of the airlift stage is simple in theory; the jets keep moving after a crew change at an en route location. That way, cargo and troops reach their destination with little delay. It requires significant coordination at the local and global level, as well as “seed” crews to ensure that a fresh crew is available at any given time. To do so, we are often placed in a bravo status, in which we are placed on a standby alert. Since we are never sure when the phone will ring, I find that I am never well-rested, since we must be ready essentially at any given time.

Furthermore, when C-17s depart stateside bases, they are flown by crews stationed at the same base. However, since any crew can fly any jet from any base once in the system, sometimes a crew from a West Coast base ends up arriving stateside with a jet based on the East Coast (or vice versa). The stage manager, the local representative responsible for the stage at a given base, attempts to pair up jets returning stateside with crews from the same bases, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Like the victim of a shell game, the losing crew ends up at a base on the opposite coast with no ride home.

As luck would have it, we took off from Spain for an East Coast base with an East Coast jet. Originally, we would have returned to Germany following our stop in the Sandbox and probably would have been paired up with a jet from our home base. However, due to weekend operating hours at several European bases, we were flying back across the Atlantic with the wrong jet.

We arrived stateside in sunny South Carolina and immediately set out trying to find a ride back to the Pacific Northwest. The ramp in Charleston was full of C-17s, but unfortunately we couldn’t fly any of them. We decided to wait a few days in case one of our aircraft came through, but it was soon apparent that we’d be dragging our bags and gear home with a civilian airline.

So after two days of fun and sun in Charleston, we booked a flight to Seattle with a stopover at Atlanta. Usually, flying commercial from Charleston meant a cramped flight in a puddle jumper, but we lucked out with a Super 80, an older model full-sized aircraft. The hardest part of flying commercial with all of our military gear is merely checking in and processing through the TSA screening. Between the five of us on the crew, we probably had 20 bags, and we were booked on a one-way flight – a typical red flag for additional screening. But once we checked in our bags and endured the TSA’s additional scrutiny, it was smooth sailing.

It was worth the hassle; we were going home.