A Day of Homeland Security training

The alarm went off at 5 a.m., which is not an hour I'm really familiar with on a Saturday. I had committed to spend the day at the Squadron doing air training, so I needed to be there sharp for a 0700 briefing. I didn't get to do much of this last year because of the Congress campaign.

The sky was clear but a front was forecast to roll in and I wasn't sure if I'd get to do everything I needed to stay qualified as a Mission Pilot. The nuke plant at South Texas almost had a release a couple days ago I kept thinking we needed to have detection gear for our aircraft to make survey flights in case people needed to know.

I ended up being a co-pilot observor on one sortie and flew as pilot on the other. We responded to a simulated terrorist attack on an airport, took digital photos and did an ELT beacon search for a simulated downed aircraft.

We were turning steep 360's at 1,000 feet. At that angle it's hard to see oncoming aircraft.  On the way back to base my co-pilot casually said at one point: "The other plane just passed below us about a 100 feet - going in the opposite direction." Whew. Another USAF plane was running the same mission and ended up on the same patch of sky--like two cars passing each other at a high combined speed. We need anti-collision devices on these planes, but I have to get more influence before anything will happen on that. I happened to be flying about 100 or so feet ABOVE the attitude my co-pilot had requested. Lucky for 6 of us in two planes.

For some reason nice people kept stopping me today, in between flights, once when I had to pop in a store to get some chap stick - and another on the way home when I ducked into a Kroger to buy my wife a dozen roses ( her daughter had announced today that she was thinking of getting a divorce so I figured I better show up with roses to try to improve the mood around the house). One guy insisted I go ahead of him in the line when I was buying the roses.

The rains are coming in tonight. A lot is happening I can't talk about yet. Anything could happen.

Stay tuned...