Risk Management Magazine

The date was April 26, 2023. I was TDY and had just returned to my hotel room after having dinner with a co-worker. About 7:45 p.m., I received a phone call from a number I did not recognize. I answered it anyway. The person on the other end of the line identified herself as a representative from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and explained she obtained my number from one of their patients. That was the moment I knew something terrible had happened and it wasn’t going to end well.

I know you’re already thinking, “Here we go with another story about a basketball injury.” To some degree, you’re right. Midway through our second game, another player undercut my jump shot, causing me to land hard on the outside toe-end of my running shoes. I crashed hard to the ground. My right ankle ballooned instantly, the pressure chipped a bone, and for the next month, my whole leg looked like a scene from a zombie movie.

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.