Passenger Briefs

Creativity, in a professional sense, comes from understanding a task beyond rote and into the realm of correlation; an appreciation of the relationship between different tasks, the equipment available, how much time is required versus organizational goals, and how to make sure that the instruction is as memorable as it is efficient.

It also comes from a level of boredom. There are only so many times that one can conduct training and/or evaluations before something must be changed to keep the instructor/evaluator from losing their damned mind, especially when the training schedule is upside down prior to a deployment – more students than time available.

One of the tasks the nonrated crewmembers were responsible for was “Perform Internal Load Operations” – conducting a passenger briefing as well as load and secure any internal cargo prior to flight. For everyone involved, it was boring: read from the Checklist, make sure that the math worked out for however many 5,000lb cargo straps were needed, and generally take charge of everything in the grey area of the helicopter. By 2003, I had been either end of this task – performing or training/evaluating for six years… something needed to change. The comedy sketch show “Who’s Line is it Anyway” became part of that change.

Crewchiefs could be a difficult bunch at times… we were pranksters, we were territorial, we were hoarders beyond any and all stretches of the imagination (I once worked with a Tango who had an entire auxiliary power unit stashed away in his wall locker), and we were simultaneously independent and cooperative. We were vicious to each other while fiercely protective of our own, and it was the former that worked in my favor when it came to annual evaluations.

When there was a break in maintenance or the flight schedule, I would put word out that I would need “passengers” for an eval – after the first iteration, it was not hard to find participants… to the point where even the pilots were joining in once the name of the backseater being evaluated came up. While the person being evaluated headed out to the helicopter to prepare it, I would assign and solicit different roles for the participants.

These roles were either based upon passengers I had come across or heard about – and some that were entirely made up: the hot, attention-seeking female Air Force Lieutenant (true passenger)… the pissed off Sergeant First Class who was always walking away to take a call on his cell (true passenger)… the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Private with C4 and blasting caps in the same package (semi-true situation)… the Polish chaplain with Tourette’s (loosely based on our own unit Chaplain)… all were assigned with the freedom to improvise and run with their roles. The intent was not just to make things amusing but to evaluate how well the person giving the passenger brief could keep it all under control. It was a messed-up Pass/Fail situation: lose your cool (like the participants wanted – and provoked you to), you failed and had to start over.

It went about as well as expected. There were times when my sides hurt from laughing so hard at the lengths some of the crewchiefs went with their roles:

I wanted the laughs, but most importantly, I wanted them to understand that they were in charge of the back of the helicopter and everyone around it. Between 1996 and when I stopped flying in 2013, there had been six Class A accidents in the UH-60 community operations involving main rotor blades and personnel – all but one of those fatalities were all aviators or aviation-related folks… people who were the absolute last ones one would think of who would have that tragic of an end.

What is noteworthy for this approach is that we all enjoyed it – you played your role to the limit to break the concentration and bearing of the person giving the brief knowing full well that your turn was coming up. Everyone ran with it to try to tear each other down a bit… either for amusement or to make them better because of the experience… possibly just because it was a break in the routines we got into during that deployment…

That was the last time that evaluation technique ever resonated the same. Once we redeployed – everyone went in different directions and I found that that subsequent units I was part of ever had that level of camaraderie. Perhaps, like this post, the humor and unity felt was something only I appreciated or understood… but revisiting some of these pictures makes it hard to believe that I’m not the only one who can’t see them and wonder: “What in the hell were they doing out there??”