CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER 4 JONATHAN CASE
I was told by a sage instructor pilot early in my career to be careful when I go on an extended training cycle, operation or deployment. He told me it had been his experience that when pilots had a lot of meaningful repetition, they got really good.
“Be careful, because you are going to get good,” he said. “Being good is one thing, but you have to be careful because it can breed overconfidence and complacency.”
I always worked arduously about making sure I — and when I became an IP, my guys — was not taking shortcuts. Something new to train or think about was what I tried to keep fresh in the troop. I never really gave much thought that overconfidence could be a bad thing. This aspect was pointed out in an after-action review one dark, rainy night in Mosul.
On a January night mission, two AH-64As were flying as a convoy escort from Kirkuk to Mosul. The weather had been overcast for about three days with an almost continuous light drizzle. We launched from Tikrit and refueled on arrival at Kirkuk. Our link up with the convoy was uneventful and, initially, relatively smooth. About midway to Mosul, the rain increased from a drizzle to heavy downpour. Visibility began to drop at a constant rate, but our focus was on completing the mission and getting back home. We had a couple of maintenance issues with both aircraft, and the troop needed ours back for follow-on missions the next day. We were confident we could get it all completed.
Despite our lead ship’s best effort, and due to the deteriorating weather, the convoy’s lead Stryker took a wrong turn on a road that ran parallel to the military supply route. This road became one lane onto a bridge that was under repair and did not reach across the river. This chain of events led to about an hour-and-a-half delay to get all the vehicles that went on the bridge turned around, back tracked to the MSR and on our way once they were back in chalk order.
About five kilometers from Mosul Airfield, a Stryker broke an axle. The ground commander determined the ground convoy would continue while two Strykers and the air team would stay on station until a wrecker could get back to the broken vehicle.
We were mission first, so we stayed on station and delayed our mission about another hour. By the time we escorted the remainder of the convoy to Mosul and refueled, we were pushing a three-hour delay from our original time table and the weather was deteriorating. We knew we could stay in the transient aircrew containerized housing units and talked about that option before moving to the forward arming and refueling point. We were confident we could get home because we were getting good at this, after all.
After refueling, the radio conversation was brief. If we were going to make it home, we’d have to go now. And with that, we pulled pitch.
Since the weather was getting so bad, we came up with an IFR (I fly roads) plan. We set out to follow the MSR from Mosul to Tikrit. Our initial 300-foot altitude turned into 200 feet and then below 100 feet. Both our pilot night vision system pictures were subpar to say the least. I instructed my co-pilot gunner to put on his goggles to see if it improved our situation.
It is a funny thing about the space/time continuum: the exact point that Chalk 2 went inadvertent IMC was exactly two seconds after Chalk 1 realized they were IIMC and announced, “We just punched in!” I was looking down and left toward the MSR when I heard the IIMC call and shifted my focus to see if I could locate the lead aircraft. Anything other than the green blob in my eye would have been nice. Just to be sure, I checked with my CPG, and by the time he goggled up, he was seeing the same as me. Our troop had a policy of keeping the road between us while traveling and whenever the tactical situation allowed. It always reduced the workload of deconflicting the aircraft. This night, that tactic worked out well for us. Lead turned left and started to climb, and I turned right.
I was out after about two minutes; lead was only in it a few minutes longer. Both aircrews came to their senses and we decided to head back to Mosul for the night. We also determined that trying an in-flight link up was a risk that was not worth taking. We split our altitudes by 1,000 feet and contacted Mosul approach. As we approached the airfield, we were able to pick up the ground lights and preceded VMC back to the airfield. During our AAR of the flight, we realized there was not any reason to press to get home other than it would have been an inconvenience to stay in the CHUs.
At the end of the day, we thought that getting the convoy escort in bad weather and all the setbacks completed was something to build on, but the overconfidence that led to the decision to launch for home was something we all took with us as something to watch out for in the future. We ended up sleeping in the same transient CHU we had hoped to avoid, and it only took two ships going IIMC — and our confidence in our skills — to get there.