New Job, New Stories, Maybe*

(Sept. 15, 2009) Capt. Ross Myers, right, commander of Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5, explains the F/A-18 simulator to U. S. Ambassador to Japan the Honorable John Roos inside Naval Air Facility (NAF) Atsugi's simulator building. (U.S. Navy photo by MC2 Steven Khor)

* Just to be clear, this would be The WSO with a new job. Not Your Humble Scribe. I envision my next job as being a man about town, a man of leisure, in short - retired.

Back in '13 I had the opportunity to fly the F/A-18 simulator out at NAS Lemoore, current home of The WSO and her branch of the tribe. Okay, technically it's where The WSO and her husband Big Time both work. He as a uniformed Naval Aviator in the naval service, she as a newly minted contractor working in, of all places, the F/A-18 simulator.

I wrote about my inability to land on a simulated aircraft carrier while flying a simulated aircraft here. Not only was I unable to trap, my attempts to do so got progressively worse. Which I fessed up to in that post I linked to. I think. If not, I do so now. I suck at carrier landings. I wouldn't even make the greenie board, let alone ever score the coveted "OK 3."

Now before LUSH, as she demands the students call her (as opposed to Ma'am, which pisses her off), got out of the Navy (oh yeah, The WSO and LUSH are the same person, in case I confused you there, that person being my youngest child and second daughter) she had heard tell of this rather lucrative position in the flight simulator building. As she was getting out, she thought about being a stay at home mom for a while, then decided that losing her salary as a lieutenant might be painful, I mean who can live on the salary of a Hinge, er, lieutenant commander anyway? (Well, I could, but I'm used to enlisted pay. Then again, we never lived in California, which, in case you didn't know, is pretty deuced expensive.)

So she interviewed with the head guy, a former Naval Aviator yclept Dude. As that moniker is in italics you may rest assured that that was (and still is) his callsign. How did he get that, you might wonder. Has something to do with this, well, dude -

(Source)

I can't wait to meet this guy. A most laid back, well, dude. Anyhoo...

You might wonder exactly what it is The WSO does in the simulator. Well, she flies it.

Uh, wasn't she a backseater, hence the nom de blog of The WSO? She didn't fly the bloody thing just gave directions, twiddled with the knobs on the radar and the bombing computer (yes, twiddled is a technical term). Yes, yes she was a Naval Flight Officer, aka NFO, aka WSO, aka backseater. But no more. She has been civilianized (as opposed to civilized) and now has the enviable task of driving the simulated jet so that brand new WSOs can learn their trade. They taught her to do that without doing the whole controlled flight into terrain thing. (Heck, even I can do that in the sim, well until I run out of go juice as I can't land it.)

Mind you, she's not actually training the new kids to be WSOs, she just drives the bus while they do their WSO things in the back seat (ya know, twiddling). Essentially, she does what any nose gunner, er, pilot does and that is do what the backseater says. So that the backseater can learn their trade and develop unreasonable expectations that someday their GIF (guy/gal in front, aka pilot, aka stick actuator, aka stick monkey) might, in real life actually listen to them. (HA!)

So okay, the GIF and the GIB (guy/gal in back) are a team, they fight the jet together, etc., etc. I get that, I am not biased against pilots, not at all, the aircraft will not, no matter how much the backseater wishes, fly itself. Someone has to point the bird in all the right directions so that the honed and professional GIF/GIB team can deliver ordnance onto the misbegotten hoards of anti-freedom, anti-social bastards who mean to cause the collapse of Western Civilization.

What's that? No, I didn't mean Democrats. I meant foreign bad guys. And yes, some are bad gals, just to be all inclusive here at The Chant, and I'm sure some of those bad people might identify as being non-gender specific or something so here on out let's just call them assholes. While this is a kind of family friendly place, they actually use that term on TV and the radio, so...

If they ain't heard it by now they will soon. (And I'm pretty sure no Amish read the blog, they can't have computers right?)

I see I have digressed. Apologies, where were we?

Ah yes, The WSO in her new job is a simulated naval aviator. Simulated as in she can't actually crash the sim bad enough to break things and hurt people. I discovered in the sim that one can actually tie the low altitude record and walk away to fly again another day. (Provided the sim operator actually resets everything properly.) Oh, and did you know that the engines on the F/A-18 simulator will actually run on seawater, I know, I tried. I guess it might depend on the "realism" settings being employed but my sole time in the cockpit did see me flying at sea level, or slightly below, scaring the crap out of the wildlife. Not to mention myself. Big Time had a chuckle over it, I'm just glad he didn't refer to me as "the U-Boot captain."

So that's The WSO's new job in a nutshell. She's basically a chauffeur for WSOs in training. One thing about the job though is that she has to do what the WSO tells her, that and no more (and no less). So if the GIB gets target fixated or perhaps has a helmet fire (so task overloaded that confusion sets in) she simply maintains course, speed, and pitch setting. So if she's got the bird in a dive, like when simulating dropping ordnance, she stays there. No matter how close the simulated flying machine gets to the simulated ground.

Can't do that in a real jet, well you can, but only once.

So it seems the other day she had a student in the back and she was merrily toodling along (another technical term), pointing the simulated bird wherever her WSO told her and said WSO got a little distracted. As our own LUSH (said tag I will use when she is in the simulated cockpit) watched the altimeter wind down, and watched as the pretty simulated terrain got closer and closer, she was sore tempted to point out to the student that perhaps the ground was getting a might close and was there anything in the way of "stick back, throttles forward" that she could do to perhaps keep them in the simulated sky a while longer? At least until said student finished the day's lesson.

She sat there, wondering what the protocol was, this was her first time chauffeuring an actual student. Should she yell at him? Should she just pull up? Or should she obey her training and let the poor student fly them into the ground, learning (perhaps) a valuable lesson?

She adhered to her training and just about the time she resigned herself to ending the day's mission on a low note, the student in the back came out of whatever reverie he was engaged in and gave her instructions to pull up, rather abruptly I gather. Seems he'd got hung up on some task in the back cockpit and lost situational awareness momentarily. Of such things obituaries are made in real life.

But in the sim, it's lesson learned, move on and oh yeah, don't do that in the real jet, your real pilot will obey your instructions but he/she will (if they're smart) preserve themselves to fly and fight another day.

I trust and hope that LUSH will share stories of the simulator in the future, bearing in mind the needs of the service and the need to preserve operational security and all that. Uncle Sam, and my current employer, often stress the need to keep a secret. I'm pretty good, check that, damned good at keeping a secret.

So I've got that going for me.

And, perhaps, a new source for stories of the naval service.

We shall see.