To Teach a
Dinosaur
By Cdr. Joseph K. Blanchette
Fly the airplane Silence the bell. Confirm the emergency. These memory items should be familiar to everyone who flies most large aircraft. t was Presidents’ Day, and for most Navy folk in the continental U.S., this meant a welldeserved holiday. For those of us in logistics, it meant yet another day of getting people where they needed to be, when they needed to be there. I fly the DC-9/C-9B, a soon-to-be dinosaur; it’s being replaced by the C-40, a newer, more efficient 737. My squadron is one of the last hanging on to the mighty Skytrain II, a bird that has served all the armed services worldwide for three decades. 20
On this Monday, while most people were asleep, dreaming of barbeque and a favorite beverage, my crew of five were up at 0400 and briefing at 0515. We expected as routine a day as it gets: Take 17 people and their cargo from NAS Whidbey Island to NAS North Island, then pick up 20 people and take them home to Whidbey. The crew consisted of full- and part-time reservists. The transport safety specialist was an experienced P-3 flight engineer with a ton of hours but new to C-9s. The loadmaster had more than 20 years’ experience just in VR-61. Our crew chief was the youngest salt of the bunch but still had more than 3,000 hours in the C-9. The copilot was a newly qualified second pilot (2P) but had been a P-3 patrol-plane commander. I was just a dinosaur flying a dinosaur. I’ve been with Approach
