Risk Management Magazine

I showed up at my first assignment as an aviator right as we were headed out the door for a deployment in Regional Command East. I was excited and nervous. My Readiness Level 3 to 2 progression took two flights and suddenly I was flying combat missions with my troop standardization pilot (SP). Flight school had given me just enough experience to make me dangerous, so there were good days where I was nearly competent, and bad days where I was a liability in the cockpit.

Nothing will make you reflect on how lucky you are more than escaping a bad situation unscathed and beating the odds that were stacked against you. Predicting weather in Iraq was difficult at best. And even though the Air Force weather forecasters were highly trained professionals, if they gave you a weather brief, it could change quickly.

As an aviation safety officer at Kandahar Air Base assigned to Task Force Out Front, I was a pilot in command (PC) and air mission commander (AMC) and flew more than 150 combat missions responding to numerous troops-in-contact calls in Kandahar province. During my deployment, we had a mid-air collision with an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) because communication and tracking of UASs between ground units within the same brigade was ineffective. Here’s what happened.