Right before I got out, I coordinated with TACC to get better start times for our C-5 OEF/OIF and Pac Channels out of Travis. So they are willing to work with you if you can show ORM data to back up the fatigue. I also elevated the issue with a general from TACC that came out to Travis to get input. That helped as well.

 

Unfortunately, I've seen this many times too and this is wrong for several reasons. As I said before I know we have the safety of flight card but the current culture keeps people from using it when perhaps they should.

 

If you can put other crew members that are rested in the seats, do it and get your sleep on the jet. Otherwise, you are taking a chance that I know you friends, family, and the leadership wouldn't want you too --- not to forget the people you fly overhead, the passengers, and your crew members family and friends.

If you are that tired, call crew rest. Plain and simple. If your mission or cargo was that important, you would have had a spare plane and crew. But it isn't so don't kill yourself.

-Fatty

 

As a guy that used to hope for AMC to get me to "the World" from Diego Garcia, AMC = Airplane Might Come

Not trying to start a USN vs. USAF thread here, but the comment about noisy dorms gave me a chuckle. USS Nimitz, during flight ops, was a pretty noisy dorm.

 

You might be reason.... AMC picked up a policy that augmented days were only allowed when transiting to/from the AOR. Sounds good on paper but then you get to Alaska. Can't go stateside and Europe in a basic day. Mission originates at user's location in lower 48. So we preposition the night before. The problem? They'd go from planned takeoff, back it up for our flight time and crew rest. Solution? Take off home station at 1 am, fly for six hours, then enter "crew rest" to take off and fly all night across pond.

On paper it looks like I had two humane basic days instead of a long augmented one. In reality I just stayed awake for two nights straight.

 

All I have to say is...thank God for ambien!

 

Which is the real reason they went to AMC from MAC "Maybe Airplane Come"
I guess that the non-deploying leadership was tired of the poor grammar of our users...

 

I thought AMC stood for Another Missed Christmas.

 

Alcoholics Moving Cargo?

 

This is the exact thing I was asking them to fix. They were doing this for all our channels. Our ORM scores for basic Pac Channels were worse than for the OIF Channels. I told the general that they were alerting us at all hours of the night on Pac Channels when we had the min crew rest. After they fixed the Pac Channels I figured I might as well ask about the OIF/OEF Channels. They had us alerting out of Travis at around 6pm to preposition to CHS, then min turn to cross the pond. All of this was based on land time in the sand box. With a little adult conversation about safety and ORM, they modified our alert times to around 9am out of Travis. Needless to say, the crews enjoyed this a lot better. Basically, TACC asked me what alert time I would like and I also got to build extra crew rest into the stops at Rota and Ramstein.