Naval Helicopter Association Scholarship Fund Grease Doesn't Lie Life in the Mail Room of Naval Aviation By CAPT Arne Nelson, USN (Ret.), President NHASF NHA LTM #4 / RW#13762
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ast year, I embarked on a mission to swim 100 miles and win a commemorative tee shirt or watch cap. Four to five times a week, I braved the elements to swim my daily mile, and then take satisfaction in capturing my mileage on a plexiglass status board, containing name, daily distance covered, and gross total. Name Ragman, J. S.
Daily Yards 1600 2000
etc etc etc 750
Total 109.75
But working the grease board at the pool brought back forgotten memories of life in the Mail Room of Naval Aviation. Adding up the swim board took me back to my first job out of flight school at HM12...I was assigned as the Logs and Records Officer for a 95-pilot squadron. I was responsible for manually logging yellow sheet flight info to logbooks and maintaining the flight info on a large grease board. The scheduler used my info to prepare the daily flight schedule and truthfully, there are only five or so top JO jobs in a squadron, so speed of posting the past-day yellow sheets and accuracy were key components in the daily routine. HM-12 in 1976 was a place where: • CNO’s mission capable rate was 35% and we struggled to meet that standard. • We had no call signs yet; we had 95 pilots, and 35-40 of them were named Dave. As a new guy, if you wanted to hail a fellow officer, you’d call out “Hey Dave” and have a good chance of connecting. • Ops (schedules and logs and records) became the quasi-ready room after the wardroom closed at 0800. Pilots got on the flight schedule by being seen at the scheduler’s desk, as verified by your strip on the grease board, and take care if the entry was late or worse, inaccurate. Now the grease board contained all the information you’d need to schedule flights, mission and fam/instrument type training, night flights, instrument hops, check rides, cross counties (RONs and ROLs) much of it based on the numbers of an accurate grease board. One entry though was the block for quals –the board’s legend showed various coded quals: A (AMCM Mission Commander), B (HAC), C (Copilot), and D (Pilot under Instruction). We did not have an H-53 RAG until 1978. There were other codes for functional quals including: FCP, NATOPS/Asst NATOPS and Instrument Check Instructor. One morning, preceding the end of the fiscal year when instructor pilots were scrambling to use up our quarterly fuel allowance, one of the surlier "Senior LTs" of the squadron entered the Ops Office. He told the schedules writer to put him on for a trainer as his monthly flight time was low. As he scanned the board, he looked at his strip and added the numbers and then looked at the quals sheet – he had quals as a Mission Commander, FCF Pilot, Asst NATOPS and Standardization and then he noted that his quals had been erased and replaced by one letter. The letter “J.” He scrolled eyes down to the legend and read the notation: J = A**H***. Bingo, in an instant, J-Codes were born and earning a “J-Qual” or becoming “J” Qualified, from some egregious faux pas was not a good thing. At best, J-qualified became an unofficial censure quickly taken up by a group of LTJGs known as the Gang of Four. That's a story for another time. "Lesson Learned. I once asked a JO to lay out the most important JO jobs in the squadron. ”Skeds… no, ACFT Division… no, QA… no, First LT… no, Legal… no.” The most important job in the squadron is your job…make it so!" Rotor Review #162 Fall '23
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