We see them every day, the planes bearing the letters “VN” on their tail, signifying they are from Vance Air Force Base.

We hear the roar of their engines and see the sun glinting off their wings as they traverse the skies over northwest Oklahoma.

But another large part of the base’s pilot training mission is carried out far from public sight, inside Vance’s Ops Group building.

In this building, in rooms chilled year-round no matter the temperatures outside, a dedicated group of men and women work to keep a vital part of Vance’s training mission up and running.

They are the simulator technicians.

Much of each student pilot’s training is conducted inside these multi-million dollar machines, which are used to teach pilots to cope with all kinds of different situations they will encounter in an airplane, all without leaving the ground. In a simulator there is no danger to the student or instructor, and the lessons can be conducted without burning any fuel.

The people charged with keeping these sophisticated machines up and flying have to be versatile, able to deal with computer, electronic, visual and even mechanical issues.

Ron Hall has been working on simulators at Vance since 1977, when instead of computers, terrain model boards and closed circuit TV cameras were used to simulate flight.

He is one of three T-1 simulator technicians at Vance employed by L-3 Communications, who maintain two full training simulators and 3 part-task trainers. Part-task trainers are used to teach students to program their onboard computers to guide the plane to 100 waypoints around the country, but can’t simulate takeoffs or landings.

Ron Hall said maintaining the T-1 sims keeps him and his colleagues busy.

“There’s quite a bit (of maintenance) because you have alignment in the visual systems,” he said. “Your hydraulic systems have to be tweaked or aligned, all your (control) surfaces. Your power supplies, there’s tons of power supplies, computers, fans.”

The T-1 sims were built in 1988 and installed at Vance in 1990. Trying to maintain them is like trying to keep a 20-year-old PC running.

“I have diversified 486 and 386 computers in my sound system,” Ron Hall said. “Try to find old hard drives to work in that kind of equipment. They sent us a lot of used F-16 visual systems that we use to keep the T-1s going. They don’t manufacture tubes anymore so we have to rely on older tubes or older remanufactured tubes to keep our visuals going.”

The T-1 simulators are being upgraded, however, a process expected to be completed by 2013. Vance normally has three full training simulators, but one has been removed for an upgrade.

The T-1 sims are operated 16 hours a day, meaning there are two shifts of technicians working to keep them flying.

“We have an hour and a half in the morning for maintenance to get them up and ready, and two hours at night to put them to bed,” Ron Hall said. “I really enjoy keeping the simulators working. It’s a lot of electronics in all kinds of fields.”

Vance’s T-6 and T-38 simulators are maintained by 13 technicians employed by FlightSafety International. Michael Oaks, the site manager, dubbed his men and women, “The Trunk Monkey Squad,” after the stars of a series of TV automobile dealer commercials depicting cars that carried magical chimps in their trunks, who came to the rescue in difficult situations when the drivers pushed the “trunk monkey” button on the dashboard.

“I have absolutely the best crew, anywhere, and I’ll stake my very reputation on that,” Oaks said. “They don’t get the recognition, they do the grunt work of the simulator world, but it doesn’t happen without them.”

There are 17 T-6 simulators. There are five operational flight trainers, which feature high-resolution graphics and a 270-degree field of view that give students the closest experience to actually flying. There are seven instrument flight trainers with a cockpit and forward visual display and five unit trainers, with no visual systems but fully functioning cockpits designed to teach cockpit familiarization.

“As parts fail, we spend a lot of time on them,” said T-6 technician Ben Tucker, “but we have preventative maintenance we follow on a daily, weekly, monthly and semi-annual basis. We have checklists galore on all our preventative maintenance.”

That is the routine maintenance, but there is plenty of the non-routine type as well.

“When one of those projectors just decides to not turn on one day, we get to figure out why,” Tucker said. “If we’re bringing them up in the middle of the night, we can have a couple of hours, but if it happens at 11 o’clock in the morning we have 15 minutes to get it going before we start losing missions and devoting our entire day shift to fixing it.”

“As a general rule we’ll have at least one or two system failures of some kind a week,” said Oaks, “be it something small like an instrument or something big like a computer or a projector.”

Day shift technicians, Oaks said, “sit around waiting for the fires,” while night shift techs “do all the dirt and grime.”

T-6 and T-38 simulators are used in a daily 12-hour window, from the time of the first flight to the last.

Technicians don’t only fix simulators, they have to be able to fly them, too.

“We do daily pre-flights to make sure that every device is fully functional and operational for the next day of training,” Tucker said.

The T-38 sims, said technician Phil Johnson, “are pretty well built, they don’t require really high maintenance.”

Vance has two T-38 weapons systems trainers, which allow pilots to dogfight against one another with full simulated weapons. These have 14 projectors and 18 computers to produce the full wraparound graphics.

There are two operational flight trainers, without the weapons and with a 216-degree by 135-degree vertical field of view. And there are three unit training devices, a cockpit with a 40-degree field of view.

There is one big advantage to being a simulator technician, Johnson said, particularly in the summer. The simulator rooms always are kept cool in deference to the delicate equipment.

“They worry more about the equipment than the people,” he said, laughing. “It’s fun to keep it all running.”

“I enjoy puttering around and fixing all the small problems,” said T-38 technician Mark Ewald.

“The best part of this job is the diversity of the things you have to do,” said T-38 tech Robert Hall.

Source: The Enid News and Eagle
Byline: Jeff Mullin, Senior Writer

Those that have chosen to make their living amid the mayhem and random murder of post-invasion Iraq call it the BIAP-dash. It is the journey to Baghdad international airport, along the most dangerous highway in the world. Three British Shia pilgrims travelled it this week and paid with their lives when their minibus was ambushed. For the growing number of Britons working in Iraq’s burgeoning security industry, escorting diplomats, politicians and senior executives along it is the job they relish the least.

“There is always something going on,” said Jason, a former elite British soldier who works on personal security detail for a major engineering company there. “It could be an improvised explosive device by the side of the road, people taking pot shots at you or a truck loaded with explosives trying to ram you. The danger is there all the time.”

Those who have worked in Iraq are unmoved by the so-called “trophy” film captured on the airport road that emerged this week. Apparently taken from an unofficial website run by former employees of Aegis Defence Systems, the firm owned by Colonel Tim Spicer, the film shows a private security convoy shooting at what appears to be a civilian vehicle.

For the convoys, firing on vehicles that threaten the safety of their clients is the final sanction in a standard operating procedure drilled into them during weeks of intensive training. Andy, who trains security staff specifically to work in Iraq, said: “Our guys are trained to shoot if required. These local vehicles can be acting with bravado or they can be probing, planning a later attack. They are all perfectly aware that they must stay back. If they don’t they are dicing with death – they know that.”

According to Jason, the rear gunner, or trunk monkey that accompanies each convoy, moves through a special procedure to warn off unwanted motorists. “If they ignore the Arabic warning signs, we use a hand signal, then if they persist we fire a warning flare. If that doesn’t work it’s a bullet to the radiator, then the engine block. As a last resort, we’ll shoot the driver.”

The footage, which has been circulated among security personnel on e-mail for some months, has prompted fury from British politicians. The Conservatives even compared it to the scenes captured at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail. Critics of the private security firms say they are maverick forces, unregulated and operating beyond the law. Iraqi security sources say that as many as 60 civilians have been killed in similar shootings.

Aegis Defence Systems won a $150m (£86m) contract to provide security services to the US military last year. The company said it has set up a “formal board of inquiry” to investigate the matter. However, it refused to comment on allegations, which surfaced on the internet yesterday, that the man responsible for one of the shooting incidents was a South African employee of the company who worked out of the company’s Victory headquarters. It was claimed that attempts to sack him had failed after his convoy threatened to quit. Despite the dangers, security jobs in Iraq are vastly oversubscribed. A typical eight-week posting can see staff come home with up to $30,000 (£17,000) tax-free. There has been a boom in training courses that teach potential applicants everything from the use of firearms, to battlefield first aid and defensive driving techniques. There are even Ministry of Defence grants to help ex-soldiers retrain. A typical five-week course to operate in a level-five hostile environment – London is ranked level one – lasts five weeks and costs £4,000.

Jason insists the training is rigorous and firms stringently enforce discipline. Every time a firearm is discharged, staff must account for the ammunition. “This is no place for rampant egos or wannabe Rambos,” he said. “The insurgents are becoming better trained, their technology is improving and their weapons are becoming more sophisticated all the time.”

Andy agrees: “Egos are what get people killed. That is what we try to get across to the guys. The terrorists are not stupid. They are making their own videos and are doing their own training. They are well trained and well motivated. Our guys are on the job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you cannot relax, not ever.”

Jason added: “After a contract out there you are exhausted but no one is forced to be out there. We are not mercenaries but protection work can be boring in Britain. Out there, it is never dull.”

Source: The Independent
Byline: Jonathan Brown

Michael Price felt driven to perilous security work

Michael Price’s father offered him $100,000 if he would leave Iraq.

His mother begged him to come home.

But the 33-year-old Concord resident told them he was doing what he wanted to — providing security for a company destroying Saddam Hussein’s munitions caches.

Early Friday, his parents’ fears were realized when their son died of injuries suffered earlier in the week in a deadly roadside bombing.

“We tried to persuade him not to go — it’s scary over there,” said Joyce Bakersmith, who is married to Price’s father, Vernon. “We’re going to miss him.”

His father, who was so upset he could barely speak Friday, had planned to leave that day for Germany where his son was to be flown for medical care.

Before leaving for Iraq in January, Price was a weapons instructor for HALO Group Inc. in Concord for two years. The private company trains law enforcement and others in shooting and defensive tactics.

In January he left to work for Cochise Consultancy Inc. out of Florida, one of many private firms providing security for contractors in Iraq. Cochise is protecting USA Environmental of Tampa as it removes explosives under a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The roadside bomb that killed Price also killed two colleagues traveling with him. His family has been told that despite severe shrapnel wounds to his head, he tried to help those men.

In an e-mail to friends and family on April 20, five days before the bombing, he described his job as “trunk monkey” or rear security to the convoy.

“Our job is basically to protect the convoy vehicles, personnel and certain cargos from the little nasties that plague us here. I cannot be specific as to who, what, when, or why, so just roll with it.”

Friends and colleagues describe Price as having little fear of things often terrifying to others.

After attending high school near Los Angeles, he entered the Navy as a medical technician on the USS Midway during the Persian Gulf War. He won a presidential citation for pulling two shipmates out of a burning ammunition storage facility.

He then became an expert rock climber and lived in Yosemite National Park, where he and his friend Mark Peters did searches and rescues off the highest rock formations, which park rangers couldn’t reach. Once, Price found a lost boy alive, “which is quite rare for a search and rescue,” said Peters, who grew up with his friend in Dallas, Texas. Their families both moved from there to outside Los Angeles and later the two friends moved to the Bay Area, where Price has lived since 1995.

Price took up the rare hobby of hunting boars with a spear, although Peters said he never actually killed one. He sailed, was an expert scuba diver and once swam the Carquinez Strait from Crockett to Glen Cove during shipping traffic, just for the heck of it.

“We used to ask him if he had a big read ‘S’ on his chest,” said Kevin McMahon, a friend and HALO spokesman.

When he wanted to go to Iraq with Cochise, it didn’t surprise Peters. Price, he said, was a natural protector, and the money was good. He estimates Price was making $12,000 a month. It was enough, his family said, to pay off his bills and get on a firm financial footing so he could take care of his 11-year-old daughter in Southern California. She was born during a brief marriage while Price was in the Navy.

That’s why Price’s father offered to give him $100,000 to come home.

“He didn’t have to do what he did to do that,” Vernon Price said from his home in Pomona.

Price kept in close e-mail contact with both of his parents while in Iraq. When the four American civilian contractors were killed March 31 in Fallujah and their bodies mutilated, his mother, Alice Smith, e-mailed him and begged him to come home. In a response that he also sent to his father, Price wrote in part:

“You must understand that it’s not just the money that drives me here. … I know and understand your concern; if I was in your shoes, I would feel the same way. I am sorry to put you through this stress, and you know it is not my intention to worry you. I just can’t help who and what I am, and as crazy as it may sound to some, there is no other place in the world I’d rather be at this moment. I will be home soon. I don’t know when, but I promise I will be there. I love you.”

Source: CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Byline: Carrie Sturrock