AirBear

That's strange about the standardization in the USAF. Back when I flew C-130's in the 1980's we were very standardized. During my 2nd tour of duty at Howard AFB, Republic of Panama we often flew with crews from other bases as we only had 1 special mission plane that was our own, and we couldn't use it for proficiency work due to sensitive equipment on board.

Sometimes we swiped a plain cargo C-130 that was laying over and used just our own crews, other times we used partial crews that brought that plane in. As safety officer I even did an Embassy Run to South America with a McChord AFB crew with a PIC that didn't have the quals to fly South American trips. No problems at all.

Now fast forward to my early days at USAir flying a DC-9 out of PIT with the DC-9 "Sky God" Captains. I was astounded at the lack of standardization. Checklist usage was dismal, everyone did a before takeoff and before landing but all others seemed to be considered optional. After the series of accidents we had things got a lot better.

USMCFLYR

KC10 FATboy -

I thought that was a good reply too and appreciate your insight over the last many years of the evolution of your community.

I will say that one part that stuck out to me was your comments about the 'Immediate Action items' or whatever they are called from a particular community.

This was one of the biggest eye openers that I experienced when transitioning to my 'civilian flying' (non-airline world - but P135 type at least). My military community was all about how fast you needed to knock out those immediate actions items! They wouldn't be immediate action items if they weren't important to the safe outcome of the emergency requiring such time sensitive action - and this include of course rote memory recall down to the EXACT VERBIAGE on the written tests!

Now I get the - 'don't toucha' a thing' till 1,500' for example, or some bumbling through the recitation of the steps, etc.... It is hard to argue with this methodology since the civilian world has such a good safety record so I've worked to change my mindset through the years.

I don't know much about USAF flying - especially the heavies like you mention, but I was very surprised to hear that you found KC-10 flying to be so NON-standardized. I would have bet a $1 that standardization was strict across the board. Have you not found that to be the case in the earlier parts of your career? Think all the way back to UPT - were T-37s not flown exactly the same throughout all of the UPTs bases? Maybe former FAIPs will speak up here - especially any that flew at the different bases.

Thanks for sharing again.

TankerDriver

In the heavy world, we rely on the FTU's for standardization. The problem is, you have tech order and technique. Lots of technidures out there amongst the individual airframe communities, but nothing real standard MAF- wide. We're getting there when it comes to VVM and CRM. We've finally adopted VVM into our Vol 3's in most, if not all heavy MDS. When you have 20+ some odd KC-135 units out there across the Active and ARC units, you will definitely find differences in the way people do things from one unit to another. When it comes to the ARC, you'll definitely see some airline influence in the way we do things. I think the USAF got used to all of their pilots having aerospace engineering degrees at some point and had -1's written accordingly. Most -1's are written for engineers and not pilots. The KC-135 -1 is horrible when it comes to EP's. We don't use QRH's (but should).

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