Photo By Capt. David Chace | U.S. Army Spc. Talia Semien, a flight operations specialist assigned to 1st Attack...... read more read more
MORRISVILLE, N.C. - Behind the North Carolina National Guard’s fleet of AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters is a cadre of Soldiers dedicated to keeping aircraft in the air and operations on track.
These Soldiers are part of the “1st of the 130th” – 1st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, 130th Aviation Regiment – based out of a flight facility in Morrisville. At any given time, residents of North Carolina’s Triangle region may hear these Apache attack helicopters overhead during training flights. The support personnel who make each takeoff possible remain in the background, focused on highly-technical duties in order to ensure the safety of North Carolina’s combat aviators.
Saturday, Jan. 10 marked the first drill weekend of 2015 for the Soldiers assigned to the 1-130th. On a cold yet sunny Saturday morning, lines of parked cars flow down the street leading toward the battalion’s compound, which is shared with the 1-130th higher headquarters, North Carolina’s 449th Theater Aviation Brigade. Adjacent to Raleigh-Durham International Airport, the complex features a towering hangar for aircraft maintenance, a motor pool lined with Army-issue Humvees, and a tarmac landing area bigger than three football fields.
Overlooking the tarmac from the flight facility’s second floor, Sgt. Thomas Mullaney stands in the center of the battalion’s hub for checking in pilots and monitoring their flights. He’s rushing between phone calls while his staff helps pilots turn in flight plans and risk assessments – preparing for more than 20 pilots to conduct training flights after the sun goes down. A dozen big-screen TVs line the walls displaying information about the day’s operations, including schedules, pilots’ training status and weather forecasts.
Mullaney is a flight operations specialist, known as a 15P (“15 Papa”) by his military specialty code, and he’s got his finger on the proverbial pulse of the 1-130th’s aviators.
“The flight operations specialist entails everything from flight tracking and talking to aircraft over radios, all the way down to maintaining flight records, flight scheduling and flight physicals,” Mullaney said. “As the pilots come in, they’ll request when they’re ready to get their flight bag and keys ... we’ll update their information with their route of flight, and record the flight’s briefer and final approval.”
While the facility’s second floor is focused on flight plans, accountability and individual crew member records, the open hangar underneath is manned by a team of Soldiers turning wrenches, evaluating equipment, and making sure North Carolina’s helicopters stay in top condition.
One of these Soldiers is Staff Sgt. Chang Vang, a 15G (“15 Golf”) airframe mechanic and 12-year Army veteran, who has spent the past six years with the 1-130th. Vang and his team are trained to work on a variety of military aircraft, including Apaches, UH-60 Black Hawks and UH-72 Lakotas.
“An airframe is an airframe – we work on pretty much any airframe,” Vang said, walking between Apaches while knocking their metal fuselages. “We repair and fabricate anything down to the littlest screws, we deal with pretty much the whole structural aspect of an aircraft.”
Airframe mechanics are focused on the panels that make up an aircraft’s body – their shop on the edge of the hangar includes large tools used to cut and shape the racks of stock metal lined up against the wall.
“We’re not the aircraft maintainers,” Vang said, referring the 15R attack helicopter repairers, “but we’re the backbone of the maintainers. When they find an issue, the get us. If a panel doesn’t lock closed properly, we come out and assess and see what we can do, take something off, replace it or just modify it.”
“Even if we don’t have the actual parts, we have to find ways to repair an airframe anyway,” Vang said, pointing out that their supply section can only stock so many items at a time. “If they don’t have it, then we have to be johnny-on-the-spot; we break out all our tools and figure out how to repair it as fast as we can.”
During his 2009 deployment to Basra, Iraq, Vang said his team didn’t have the fully-stocked tool shop he works out of in Morrisville. “We had our toolbox, but it was very limited – I once had to fix a Black Hawk stabilator (on the aircraft’s tail) that’s ribbed, but didn’t have any ribbed metal. I had to take a broom handle and beat the metal into shape. That’s about one of the most creative things I’ve seen so far.”
Vang is always on the move, even as he talks about his job for this interview. Between questions and answers, he’ll drop under an Apache to bang on its bottom panels, or open access panels and point out with a flashlight the small compartments he’s had to fit into in order to make a repair.
“When I feel limber enough, I’ll crawl up in [the rear of the aircraft] and work upside down ... You really can’t be a big person in this job,” he laughs.
The 1-130th airframe mechanics have a good relationship with the
battalion’s Apache pilots, who show they appreciate the airframe mechanics’ fast work in getting aircraft back up, Vang said.
“A lot of the pilots we have here in the 1-130th are real people people,” he said. “They talk to you and they appreciate what you do.”
Vang said that being part of a close and mission-focused unit like North Carolina’s 1-130th ARB makes it easy to work in the background as part of the team.
“I like the hands on, I like getting out and sweating to death out here working with these aircraft,” he said. “The biggest, most important thing is that when you need us, we’re here for you.”
While Vang and his teammates are capable of repairing the bodies of an aircraft, the 1-130th also has a team of Soldiers with technical training to maintain the electronic systems that make the Apache lethal in combat.
Fuquay-Varina native Sgt. Bruce Werthan joined the North Carolina National Guard in 2006 before graduating high school, and chose to train to become a 15Y (“15 Yankee”) Apache Armament/Electrical/Avionic Systems Repairer because it “had the coolest sounding title.”
“Working on armament systems just sounded fun to me,” he said. “It was a bit more difficult than I realized, but everything’s in the electronic manuals and wiring diagrams. And there are plenty of Soldiers around here who know a lot more than I do, and we help each other out.”
Now a graduate of North Carolina State University with a major in history, he spends his drill weekends assigned to Detachment 1, B Company, 638th Aviation Support Battalion – a part of the 1-130th structure.
During live-fire training exercises, the 1-130th’s repairers and refuelers operate as a pit crew by managing landing pads in the field.
“We load rockets, we load ammo, and if they’re shooting Hellfire [missiles], we’ll load Hellfires,” Werthan said. “And if there’s any problem on the pad that we can fix quickly, like a pilot having trouble with their helmet or monocle, we’ll deal with that there. We do spot checks like that on the pad.”
“[Pilots] depend on us, but you don’t really hear about us too much. We’re not the headline or anything like that, but we get the job done,” he said.
On drill weekends like this, where the pilots are flying but not using their weapon systems, Werthan will help launch and recover flights, and address routine maintenance issues like cleaning weapons and attaching equipment.
“Our time to shine is really during gunnery annual training,” Werthan said, referring to the two-week training events each National Guard unit holds every year. “That’s when the aircraft are actually going up and shooting.”
Werthan’s attended two of these exercises – last year at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and in 2012 while supporting the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command outside Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. He’ll work a third gunnery training event this April, with the 1-130th’s annual training at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia.
“What do I like about this job? It’s something completely different from what I do in the civilian world or what I studied in school,” Werthan said. “I’m not super mechanically inclined – I’m not like an engineer or anything – so it’s a good challenge whenever I come in and get to work on the aircraft. Plus it’s really cool.”
Werthan said it’s a rewarding feeling to do an important job in uniform, and then go back to his civilian life on the weekdays.
“[After drill weekends,] I usually tell my friends that I’m tired, but then I tell them that we do something different every weekend, and there’s always a different story to tell – always something fun,” Werthan said. “I’ll tell them that I’ve worked on a really cool helicopter. They probably think the stories all sound the same, but to me there’s always something new.”
The 1st Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, 130th Aviation Regiment, is part of the North Carolina National Guard’s 449th Theater Aviation Brigade, which is manned, training and equipped to support a variety of state and federal aviation missions. The 1-130th – which includes 109 full-time employees and more than 460 traditional National Guard Soldiers – will spend the coming months preparing for the unit’s annual gunnery training exercise this April in Virginia.
| Date Taken: | 01.10.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 02.21.2015 12:46 |
| Story ID: | 155076 |
| Location: | MORRISVILLE, NC, US |
| Hometown: | FUQUAY-VARINA, NC, US |
| Hometown: | MORRISVILLE, NC, US |
| Web Views: | 697 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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