7 minute read
“It’s Not the Plane, It’s the Pilot, Mav”
By LT Nick "SEGA" Padleckas
“It’s Not the Plane, It’s the Pilot, Mav”
“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot, Mav.” Rooster, Topgun: Maverick
It was a bright and sunny day, not a cloud in the June Nevada sky. We had just begun the first Air Wing Fallon I would participate in during my sea tour, and my singlepoint qualification sheet was as fresh as Alden “CaSPR” Marton’s mustache on November 1st. I was on for a dualship introductory daytime terrain (TERF) flight and combat search and rescue (CSAR) grade card, and had gone through the Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS) ringer to perfect the route to the ever-dusty terminal area. As we flowed through the Fallon ranges, I was instructed to adjust our route to Silver Springs Airfield (KSPZ), well west of my carefully constructed flight plan, and to incorporate the standard range wire crossing points into the route adjustment. I saw a spark jump past my ear cup and ignite the helmet inferno that consumed all of my efforts over the next 10 minutes in the lead navigating aircraft. I remember struggling, grasping at every straw, pressing every button I could find that had something to do with navigating. I even pressed the “DIR” button a few times, thinking that it would allow me to proceed direct to KSPZ like every other aircraft I had flown, but all that did was drop a few stupid asterisks on the mission display. Finally, after I beat my visor against the display a few times to see if that would work, the Tactical Navigator set the arrow straight to our surprise intermediate stop. I was embarrassed, defeated, and crestfallen. How could it have been so tough to add a simple waypoint to a route? What did that say about me as a pilot? Well, my instructor had a few debrief points on that…
Since the beginning of flight school through all of my first sea tour, I had been conditioned to think, “this is hard, therefore I need to: study harder, know the system better, conduct more thorough preflight planning, make the brief longer and use one of the 15 “technique only” techniques shown me by the last 16 instructors.” While all of these are true to varying degrees, there is a catch-all phrase for these actions – compensation strategy. Learning these compensation strategies are critical to establishing airmanship baselines for student pilots in flight school, and the staples of “study harder” and “know the aircraft better” should be central in focus, if not a lifestyle. But after flying a 1982 A-36 Bonanza to Placerville, CA for a ski trip and only needing to press a “D→” hard key, tap KPVF, and press “enter” on the GTN-750 ($13,789), I was baffled why the route planning was so difficult on our MH-60 flight management software (tack more than a couple zeroes on). I was baffled why it was as much art in the aircraft as pre-flight planning to guarantee hitting a time on target for a direct-action mission, or why adjusting the infil route for a pop-up threat was always the most difficult part of a CSAR scenario, and not reacting to contingencies in the terminal area.
It sadly took a year at the U.S Naval Test Pilot School, receiving instruction from some of the most brilliant and experienced instructors in helicopter aviation to break me out of the “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot” mentality. Through rigorous study, flights that made me question if I had ever flown a helicopter before, dozens of reports that made me question if I knew anything about the English language, and bouts of reflection, I realized this critical flaw in my thinking. Applying these hard-learned lessons to my experience that fateful day, I determined that the reason I struggled with adjusting the route or changing the flight plan in the MH-60 was because it is hard to do! This observation is not a mid-debrief defensive gripe however, and I have had the extraordinary opportunity to test and collect data to back this statement up. During flight test, several Test Pilot School graduates with thousands of collective MH-60 hours studied the route planning system in support of certifying an upgrade. We collected pilot workload ratings, quantified buttons pressed, and measured mission task durations to reinforce the qualitative observation that “flight plan route adjustment is hard.”
In our effort to Master the Machine, we need to take note of when we find ourselves beating our helmet against the headrest during our missions. I present this vignette as an example of why struggling or needing several different “techniques, only” to complete a task in the aircraft may be a sign of a deeper deficiency than a junior pilot’s helmet fire. As a brand new LTJG at my first Air Wing exercise, I was certainly still learning the mission and the aircraft and had hundreds of firehose lessons from incredible instructors to take in, but reliving the same struggles as a member of the MH-60 Developmental Test Team proved that something is amiss under the hood.
While it took a year of specialized training to break Rooster’s paradigm in my thick head, we all have the opportunity now to document these struggles and relay them to our system developers to improve our mission effectiveness. We don’t need to accept compensation strategies as our doctrine. In this new age of GTN-650 trained MH-60 JOs, the flight plan deficiencies are just a glaring and obvious issue to which everyone can relate. However, these same hurdles exist all throughout the aircraft or mission software, and they will surface as our mission changes to counter our adversaries. With our platform in the sustainment phase of the system development lifecycle, this process cannot start at NAS Patuxent River or in Owego, New York. It needs to originate from our brothers and sisters flying in the fleet. We will do everything we can in flight test to document and resolve deficiencies, but principle power and funding lies in fleet users writing “Software Trouble Reports (STR)” for issues that they observe. Processes that degrade mission effectiveness, or require unsuitable compensation strategies are prime candidates for these STRs. Only the Fleet can write these reports, and they contain the power to direct systems change.
Generally speaking, these STRs are managed by our respective aircraft program offices. For the MH-60, STRs are managed by PMA-299. An STR documents a detrimental software problem for mission readiness related to flight safety, survivability, availability, and effectiveness. The report is comprised of a title, description, and mission impact. The title is a clear, one sentence description of the problem. A description is comprised of the conditions during which the problem was discovered, the configuration of the aircraft at the time of discovery, and the desired behavior of how the software should have functioned. The mission impact summarizes the degradation imposed by the observed deficiency in terms of either how the deficiency actually did impact the mission or how it will in future tense. STRs are reviewed and prioritized annually through the Software Naval Aviation Requirements Group (SNARG). Though the STR process may change between platforms, the best community points of contact will be squadron Super JOs, Weapons School Staff Officers, and previous Operational and Developmental Test Pilots. Each PMA will have a point of contact (POC) that manages these reports, and the community POCs will be able to assist and facilitate their development and submission.
Despite what Topgun: Maverick purveys, our means of “Mastering the Machine” cannot be rooted in extreme compensation. The plane does not make the pilot, but when the plane and pilot are not at odds with each other, mission success ensues. Identifying when the plane is making the mission difficult is the first step, and there is no one better to recognize it than our frontline operational JOs.
