Times like these...
Times like these... make me sleep all day! I hate buffoonery, and that's exactly what I believe is the only thing that the Air force leadership is capable of. I'll just lay the whole story down for you if I can recount it correctly. On the 26th of August our crew found out that we were going to have to stay a little late, because there was a plane that was broke in Canada. That's understandable that there is a plane broke, because they brought over 62 and 63 model aircraft. However what was not clear was why they decided to put two crews on that plane when they knew that they needed to be here to take over our missions. That buffoonery made us fly up until the 29th of August. Leadership said that once that plane got in that we would be cleared to leave Iraq. Funny thing is that once they got in one of the crews that came in was only staying over night and taking one of our H models to Afghanistan. Even funnier is that their plane had two trim tabs that were broke. So what does upper management do? They take two good trim tabs off our perfectly good plane and put them on that one because they consider it higher priority. So that means our plane is broke. Well they say that they have some on order, but they have to get them from Afghanistan. Ok, maybe a day or two at the most of a wait. We wait... and wait.... Still no trim tabs. OK while we're waiting on those parts they decide to do something else to us. There is another H model plane that fly's in to Balad and it's broke. They need a Transformer Rectifier "TR" unit. Guess where they look first? You got it, they take it off our "broke" plane. The reasoning is that we were already broke, and they didn't want to take away from their already bad Fully Mission Capable E model status. Well that's turns out not being a big deal because we're still waiting on the trim tabs, but really why would you authorize something like that, it's nuts. Well here's the kicker, our aircraft commander calls up maintenance yesterday and asks what's the status of our parts. He says that they never got ordered, that they were still in Afghanistan. He said that Air Mobility Division never got wind that we needed the parts. It's like a kick in the nuts. They completely forgot about us. Well anyway with all that said, we had a lightening storm last night. We found out that another H model got struck by lightening and completely fried their electrical system. We suggest that they take off those trim tabs and put them on our plane while they wait on them to come in. No such luck. Whoever is in charge absolutely is an idiot. Well today we find out that the parts are on their way and should be in by midnight tonight. But there's two different results. If they are painted they will take only 6 hours to put on, but if they are unpainted it will take 15 hours to repair. So we're going with the later thought and giving them enough time and just leaving out early on Saturday morning. This has made us miss a lot of stuff that we've planned, and it's just depressing at this point. We've been here going on five months and when you're only slotted for four, it puts a damper on your spirits. I just want to sleep the rest of the time away, I just hope tomorrow goes fast and we'll be on our way. Thanks for reading my rant.