Approach articles from December 2003

Approach archives from December 2003

Work zone: reducing mishaps by 50%.
December 1, 2003... Safety Stand-Down Do's and Don'ts Once upon a time, a safety officer had a skipper who told him to do a stand-down. "I'm sick of the same old stuff," the skipper barked. "Do something different." The safety officer, anxious for a fitrep...

Toward the goal: what our surveys show.
December 1, 2003... When a squadron schedules and receives one of our Aviation Safety Surveys, the squadron skipper ends up with a snapshot of his command's safety posture. The relationship of the survey team to the surveyed unit is that of a consultant to a...

Christmas in January.(Crew Resource Management)
December 1, 2003... Assertiveness Decision Making Communication Leadership Adaptability/Flexibility Mission Analysis Situational Awareness Just another duty day at Coast Guard Air Station, Barbers Point, Hawaii, and I was the duty...

Habit patterns, who needs them?
December 1, 2003... Being a first-cruise JO brings many challenges. You have the whole flying-around-the-boat thing, getting used to living at sea, working with all the other guys in the air wing, learning the general ins-and-outs of mission planning, and doing...

Almost had it.
December 1, 2003... Fresh off a 10-month extended deployment on USS Abraham, Lincoln (CVN 72), the one thing we didn't do a lot of was landing on runways, much less on wet runways. The idea was to crawl, then walk before we start to run; this flight was supposed...

Buckeye brake failure.
December 1, 2003... Our division was scheduled for an early morning launch. We briefed the standard division-training flight, except that we would launch and recover as sections because of the weather conditions. The flight would join in the area via a TACAN...

Bravo Zulu.
December 1, 2003... The crew of Venom 512 was conducting a routine, functional-check flight south of Naval Station Mayport, Fla. Shortly after the main-rotor, smoothing-VH, data-collection run, the aircrew heard an increase in the overall noise level. All crew...

Risk matrix-reloaded.
December 1, 2003... At a seminal moment in the movie "The Matrix," Morpheus offers Neo the choice of taking a blue pill and returning to the cocooned world of seeing what he wanted to see, or taking a red pill to see the world as it really is. I was sitting...

Too much excitement.
December 1, 2003... The first night of the "big show," and I was part of many packages going downtown. From the time we prepped for the mission through execution, I knew it would be a mission I never would forget. I was right but for a completely different reason....

Are you ready to fly?(ORM Corner)
December 1, 2003... I walked into the brief with my Cat. I aircrew student, who was ready to knock out his SAR 2 syllabus flight. It was a typical MH-60 flight day: brief at 0900, launch at 1130, and land at 1530. My student and I had tried twice the previous week...

Another cracked windshield.
December 1, 2003... Before Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off, our ready room had discussed how we would deal with emergencies during combat operations. When an aircraft had a system degradation or emergency and couldn't be flown, our options were to use a spare...

What was that noise?
December 1, 2003... It was a nice afternoon off the Virginia coast. The first at-sea, work-up period for our carrier and air-wing team was a Tailored Ship's Training Activity I/II (TSTA I/II). Because of recent work-up schedule compression, some perceived, if not...

Blue-water-divert operations: TACAIR's classic oxymoron.
December 1, 2003... How many times have you heard the CVIC briefer say, "Mother is working blue-water operations; your primary divert is NAF Western Pacific, bearing 350, degrees for 300 nautical miles." When conducting true blue-water operations, divert...

Cobra off the cat.
December 1, 2003... The carrier and air-wing team neared the end of a two-and-a-halt-week at-sea period off the east coast of Virginia. The weather was beautiful, and I was scheduled to lead a division of Hornets on a routine air-to-air mission with a Case I...

Say it ain't so.
December 1, 2003... It already had been an arduous night of deck-landing qualifications. The latest home-field weather report relayed by the ship was 900 feet overcast and visibility unrestricted, so we were planning on a painless trip home. The remaining tasker...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... I just finished reading the October 2003 Approach magazine and saw your "Mishap-Free Milestone" page that lists various squadrons, their years of sate flying, and total hours. I noticed VAW-115 was mentioned and that they are celebrating 18...

Brownshoes in action comix: "the kind real aviators like".
December 1, 2003... One Day in the Safety Department... All right, let's make this safety stand-down a real grabber. Yeah, there's nothing worse than the same ol' safety routine. It's snoozola. We need to really give the message some oomph! ...