Just an Introduction

[The Trinity Kid]

Greetings all. 
 

I’ve been lurking for a while, thought I should probably get around to posting something. So here’s an introduction. 
 

I’m not super interesting, but I have an hour of rotary time, 50 fixed wing. Current E3 in the Air National Guard, and working on a WOFT packet as an IST to the ARNG. 
 

My aviation goals are to spend my 20 years in the guard, and fly some sort of utility for my civilian job, and maybe move over into the fire world after my military retirement. 
 

So there you go. That’s me. Thanks for the nice forum.

[Fred0311]

So I'm going to piss some people off here but some food for thought on going from military to civilian fire/utility flying... In my experience military pilots have a hard time making that transition for a few reasons. They are taught to fear the "dead man's curve", The height velocity diagram should be avoided as much as possible but as a long line utility pilot you'll live in it. Respect it, but you'll have to be able to work in it. They have a hard time with vertical reference. When military pilots fly external load its usually a short line and they have a crew chief giving them instructions while they're looking out the front window. They're not head out the door looking straight down. Also I've seen them struggle with a high workload. I worked with an army pilot who had never solo'ed until she retired and went civilian. Her flight school solo had another student on it and one flew the leg out and the other flew the leg back. So while they may have great crew resource management they can become dependent on always having someone to manage coms or watch a torque gauge for them. Its a whole different world when you're trying not to over torque with your head out the window and listening to four different radios. All of this is pretty premature when you haven't even started woft yet but maybe you'll loolkout for it during you're career. And disclaimer, there are many great military pilots in utility, but the biggest problem is when they get out and they're still the Colonel. I can't tell you how many times I heard "thats not how we did it in the marines..." Well Colonel you're not in the marines anymore and thats not how the forest service wants it done, so if you want to fly here you're going to have to listen to this pilot who got out of the marines as a terminal lance.