My official retirement from the Army began at age 60. Since then my wife and I have made a lot of hops, they are called in the vernacular, with the Air Force and the Navy. The Army flies helicopters and they are too scary for me. And they usually don't go anywhere.
There are some real advantages to this kind of travel, together with some real differences which might be considered disadvantages unless one has the right attitude about it all. First some of the advantages.
The biggest advantage for me is psychological. In one sentence, you don't get the bullshit from the military that you do from the Corporations. Example:
We were going to England from Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane. I need to fill in some stuff here for background. The airplane is a converted 707 named KC-135 by the Air Force. It is decades older than anyone flying it. Its job is in-flight refueling and it's called a tanker.
It has a crew of about four, two pilots one engineer/navigator/whatever and a boom operator. The boom operator lays on her stomach in the very tail end of the airplane and operates the nozzle to refuel the smaller airplanes. They slow down and snuggle up under the tanker to get a load of fuel. She flies the boom carefully into their fuel tank opening in the nose of the fighter plane, or whatever it is.
It's all very exciting to watch but it isn't going to happen while we are on board. So her second job is flight attendant. She minds the passengers. Or rather we mind her. On this flight there were three of them, one official enlisted boom operator and two volunteer extra pilot captains helping her.
The rules say that there has to be one passenger attendant for every ten passengers. There were thirty of us in the waiting room hoping to go to England so the pilot decided that rather than tell twenty of us to go home, he would enlist help from a couple of spare captains to be assistant flight attendants and that way we could all go to England.
We took off fairly late in the afternoon and about an hour out I saw the flight attendant going down the airplane speaking to every passenger. When she got to me, I pulled out my ear plugs and she yelled that some of the navigation equipment wasn't working and the pilot didn't want to fly over the north pole without all three systems functioning so we were going back to Fairchild to get it fixed and try again tomorrow. I nodded that I had heard and she went on to the next passenger.
You don't see that in Corporation airlines. They make up some sort of BS and you never hear anything real. You never know why you turned around. You never know that you will be flying again tomorrow.
We landed, checked into base housing and the next day sure enough we flew to England. I bought a key-chain compass from the Base Exchange, just to back up the pilot if he needed it. When I showed it to him the next morning, he was quite pleased. He said, "That's all we need, help from the Army." But he made it without my help.
The actual flight is also a lot different from a Corporation airplane. First, there is a lot more room. You take off strapped into webbing along the side of the airplane. Once up in the air you come loose from all of that and relax for the flight. Mothers spread blankets on the floor and put infants and toys on them. They sit next to the blanket and watch the baby. Just about everybody on the airplane watches the baby, there really isn't much else to do. My wife Paula sat on the other side of the airplane from the blanket and played peek-a-boo with the baby.
Military people of every persuasion fly military space A. Spouses with children, retirees like me and my spouse, military personnel on leave or on orders to somewhere, and assorted flying people who just want to go somewhere. Often it doesn't matter much where.
I think it was this flight while still in the waiting room one of the pilots came out and said that the weather in England was uncertain and we might be landing in Scotland instead and did anybody mind? We didn't. There are trains in Europe. It didn't happen anyway, we landed in England about 7 AM London time.
Once we got tired of watching the baby, or the baby got tired and went to sleep, however that went, we unrolled our sleeping bags onto the webbing along the side of the airplane and went to sleep. There really isn't much else to do.
You can look out the window. There is one on each side of the airplane towards the front. You can also look out the front of the airplane, the pilots never close the door to the passenger compartment.
If you look forward, you see the three crew sitting there turned around facing about six extra pilots standing in a half circle talking to each other. Nobody is flying the airplane, but it seems able to find England without any help. The pilots, all eight of them, are just communing with each other and paying no attention to the airplane. When the sun comes up, they cover the windshield with paper maps to keep the sun out of their eyes.
The psychological impact of this open door policy is tremendous. If they aren't worried, then neither am I. You can walk up and peer at the instruments if you want to.
As a funny little aside, there isn't any official representation from the Queen at that hour at RAF Mildenhall AFB, so we didn't get welcomed and more importantly our passports didn't get checked or marked. This came up later on our return from France. The customs woman on the English side of the channel looked very carefully at our passports, every page. Then she frowned as only they can and said very seriously, "I see how you got to France, but how did you get to England? There is no entry stamp." I wanted to tell her, "Rowboat," but I didn't. I might as well have. She didn't understand anything about RAF Mildenhall being a United States Air Force Base in England. Parenthetically, it's been there since world war two. She didn't like hearing that there was no one representing England or the Queen present on our arrival, and nobody asked us anything when we took the free bus to Heathrow from the base.
So there we were, appearing from nowhere, just to disturb the customs official. She couldn't think of a reason not to let us back into England, but we were warned that that there would surely be trouble ahead. But there wasn't.
Now for a bit about why all this is possible. Doesn't the Air Force and the Navy have anything better to do than flying us all over the world? Why all this flying around empty except for us free flyers? Well it has to do with the job. The airplane and it's crews (there are always at least two on board) live at point A. In this flight it was Fairchild AFB in Spokane. The "mission" is to fly from point B to point C to accomplish something, like carrying people or things somewhere where they currently aren't. Then once this is accomplished, the airplane flies back home to point A and everybody takes a few days off. The important part about this is that the flight from A to B and from C back to A is basically not a military mission, it's just getting there. So why not carry a bunch of people, you're going there anyway? It isn't the same situation as civilian flight, where every flight is supposed to make money for the Corporation.
Civilians don't like us space-A people. I remember flying with the Navy from Fort Worth Naval Air Station back to Whidbey Island. My checked bag was carefully weighed by the civilian. It weighed 42 pounds. That's two pounds over the limit. The civilian wasn't going to let me fly on the airplane.
This one decided to call the Load Master of the airplane to tell him about the overweight problem, and why two of his passengers wouldn't be flying with him after all. I heard the Load Master say, "It's an empty 737. I don't care if he loads a grand piano on it." And so, reluctantly, the civilian let us on the airplane with our 42 pound suitcase.
It was a new airplane. It smelled new, like a new car. I've never smelled a new airplane before.
If you fly in an actual cargo plane, you have a whole lot more room. You can play basketball in the middle of a C-17. The biggest airplane is the C-5. It has a 72-passenger compartment which takes up a quarter of it in the back on the second floor facing the tail. So you go everywhere facing backwards on a C-5. You don't notice it after they close the door. The seats are regular airline seats, like the old days, with lots of leg room and room to tilt back the seat.
We once flew in a C-5 from New Jersey to Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany. It took several days to get all 4 engines on the C-5 to start at the same time. We languished for days in the 4-star hotel they called base housing, drinking at Starbucks and eating in the dining hall. It was just awful. For nearly a week it was another day, another engine. I'm told that's pretty normal for the C-5.
Once they got all four engines going though, it went to Germany without a hitch. It is a monster of an airplane. It can carry anything the army owns, drive it on and drive it off.
When you fly military you learn how stuff works. You get to help load your own bags. You walk around to the back of the airplane and hand them up to the guy inside, so you see where they actually go. You repeat the procedure in reverse when you land. In the case of a tanker, all your "checked" baggage is piled in the middle of the airplane right over the wing under a cargo net. You get to look at your bags all the way to England. To get on the airplane, you walk out onto the field and climb the steps to the airplane. No fancy tunnel on wheels. Somebody at the top helps you if you need a hand. You get to watch all the cargo get loaded through the big doors in the side of the airplane and tied down.
All this adds reality to the whole experience. No magic. Nothing behind the curtain. It's very comforting to me at least. Then, once in flight, you see a red handle sticking out next to the cargo door. It's about three feet long and obviously would open the door. You are flying 600 miles per hour at 39 thousand feet and there isn't even a sign telling you not to pull that handle, not to open that door. You are expected to have sense enough not to do that without being told. Everyone ignores the handle, of course. It just adds to the reality of the situation and the confidence everyone has in each other. The Corporations will never figure that out. They are afraid of the passengers, who in turn are afraid of each other and the Corporations.
That's why I haven't flown Commercial for twenty years and am not looking forward to having to do that in future.
Security:
The rules say that security on military flights is to be the same as security on civilian flights. Period. It's a joke. Period. I helped the sergeant load the checked baggage once. I put the bags on the conveyor belt which led through the x-ray machine. He took them off the conveyor belt and stacked them. Nobody looked at the x-ray screen. If you are military, it is expected that you are not a terrorist and that nobody, repeat nobody, wants to interrupt the flight or blow up the airplane. This also produces psychological comfort. I can really get used to that feeling, of not being afraid of anyone. I don't know these people, and I do know them. They are all military people. So they are as safe as I am.
Flying home from England one time I was stopped at the x-ray machine in Mildenhall. The x-ray spotted the water bottles in my backpack. The sergeant said I couldn't carry water bottles in the backpack. He said, "Take them out, empty them, and hand-carry them through the line, that would be all right." Once through the line, I was invited to refill them at the water fountain and put them back in the pack.
Passports:
We had to show military ID and passport to get on the plane to England from Spokane. We had to show passports to enter France and re-enter England. Beyond that, I don't remember showing my passport to anyone.
The Navy Experience.
The Navy doesn't get the recognition for flying that the Air Force gets. I really believe the Navy has an inferiority complex about Space A. Our first attempt was a Navy one. We drove to Whidbey Island Naval Air Base hoping to fly to Texas to see our daughter. When we got there and went to the waiting room the next morning we found that the flight had been canceled. We were devastated. There was no flight planed. Nobody could guess when there would be another flight to Fort Worth. We had no choice but to give up and drive back to Missoula.
Weeping, we were spotted by an air crew across the room. The pilot came over and asked us what was up. We told her our sad tale. She invited us to fly with her instead, that we could get to Fort Worth from some other Navy base. We took her up. We wanted to try this space A thing out and this seemed to be the only way. She and her crew were delighted. They flew us on an actual passenger airplane, 707 again I think, to Brunswick Maine with a stop off at Fallon Naval Air Station (east of Reno) to pick up a tool box. When we got to Fallon, we had to get off the plane because it had to be fueled and you can't do that with passengers on board, apparently. So the pilot stood on the field with us while the truck fuelled the airplane. We saw fighters take off and land from our little spot of grass. They go about 50 feet down the runway, then shoot straight up until they are out of sight. If you haven't seen that, you've missed something.
There is a difference from Corporation flying and Navy flying. The Corporations serve you a package with exactly 7 peanuts in it. It used to be 9 peanuts, but they had to cut back. In the Navy, one of the crew walks down the aisle with a big sack of peanuts she bought at the base commissary and everyone grabs a handful. That's the difference. It really counts.
The Navy was very excited to have passengers. Everyone on the crew, both crews I mean, there are always at least two crews to relieve each other on long missions, came by to talk to us. Who were we? Where were we going? Had we ever flown military before? Were we enjoying the flight?
When we got to Brunswick Maine, the crew took us to their hotel for the night. I think we even got their rate. Having no car isn't really as much of a problem in the military as it is flying civilian. The next morning, they were going to Italy and we were cordially invited to go with them. We had to decline, with regrets. We had no passports, and were expected in Texas. I imagined the conversation with my daughter. "We meant to go to Texas, but the airplane went to Italy instead. We'll be there when we can get there."
The flight back from Fort Worth NAS to Whidbey Island didn't go as planned either. The airplane landed instead at NAS North Island in San Diego. All the airplanes in the Navy landed there that day I think. The carrier Lincoln had just returned to its home port after a year and a half at sea and about three thousand sailors needed to go back to their home base, or somewhere.
I joined the huddle of pilots while they worked out their flight plans.
"You take your bird to such and such and I'll take mine to wherever, then somewhere else. OK?" I listened in without contributing for who was going to Whidbey Island. That was the one I wanted and it wouldn't make posting on paper so I had to hear it from the pilot's meeting. No flight plans prepared, no schedules posted, no formalities at all. I really thought we were all going to clap our hands when we broke up out of the huddle.
But then I knew who we were flying with and where to take our bags next morning. Sure enough, it happened that way and we made it back up the coast to Whidbey Island. The important thing about Whidbey Island, of course, is that our car was parked there. It's something to think about when you're flying space A on one whim after another. Where did you leave your car?
I've threatened ever since to go to Whidbey Island and wait for a hop to Italy. They have to fly there eventually, there's a navy base there. Or maybe Guam. They go there too. But Paula says never Guam. She doesn't want to go to Guam. And I have to admit it would be a lot easier to get to France from Italy than it would be to get there from Guam.