What misconception about your occupation would you like to clear up?

Posted 7Nov2017.

After 20 years, I can say that there were a lot of misconceptions about being a crew chief on many of the Army’s UH-60 Black Hawks…

“Oh, like in ‘Black Hawk Down’?”

If it is possible to cringe and roll one’s eyes in the most professional manner, this would be a part of my response. Ugh – Hollywood. Off the top of my head, there is only one movie I feel even came close to being in a Black Hawk, and that was a Coast Guard movie. Most of the time, the people I am with are telling me to “shush” as I grumble about the lack of accuracy in representation.

“You guys have it lucky – all you do is drop us off and go back to base.”

This one was usually muttered by the infantry guys we supported when I was still in an Assault unit. Now, I rarely disparaged our customers – to do so would be unprofessional and discredit the sheer amount of all that is Combat Arms-related. They have a crappy job, sometimes, and getting into a “distance-based urination competition” was always pointless. However, I would quietly remind them that they were always free to swing by the hangar in the evenings, on Saturdays, or during holidays, where they would usually find us there working on the same birds they rode on. For some of us, we would land and immediately start scheduled maintenance on the birds in order to have them ready to be flown (usually by us) the next day. Switching to Medevac in 2005 brought the level of chaos to a more frantic pace – the few aircraft assigned to a small portion of the larger company was often responsible for medical coverage of a very large part of the assigned theater; therefore it was imperative to the ground commanders and supporting units that we were available 24/7. Even though our support was increased, the demands never ceased – in fact, the longest time I have ever spent awake (about 36–38 hours) was while pulling Medevac duty in Iraq in 2007.

“You have to be super-smart to do something like that, right?”

Ha. As an instructor, I tried to have a very reasonably high standard for those crew chiefs and flight medics I trained. Jokingly, I would say that I had “Buddha-like” patience when it came to taking on those deemed “untrainable” by other instructors… though finding that one kid who really struggled with the problem of “six… times… two…” tended to negate the idea that there were vocational testing restrictions for our particular field.

“All you have to do is sit there and make sure the helicopter won’t hit anything.”

For this one, my previously stated patience would rapidly shift from “Deity” to “Demon” as the statement was usually muttered by the lazier crew chiefs. The Department of the Army progressively increased academic requirements for crew chiefs from the simpler days of “Here’s a helmet” to “Discuss the anatomy of the eye” and “Describe the route a drop of fuel takes from the fuel cell to the exhaust.” Sure, not hitting anything is the ideal goal of every crewmember, but it was never that simple; for those who figured it was, I was probably the last person they wanted an evaluation with. I saw the relevance behind what the Army expected us to know, and it was my job not just to hold those I trained to those standards, but to understand why those academic requirements existed.

“It must be nice to be paid to do that for a living.”

Nonsense.

It was amazing.