Photo By Mindy Bloem | Tech. Sgt. Jacqueline Crow, 149th Operations Support Flight, secures her helmet for...... read more read more
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JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas – Each year, members of the 149th Fighter Wing, headquartered here, pack up their aircraft, personnel and equipment on a simulated deployment to accomplish their federal mission of training combat-ready pilots who will employ the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It is part of the wing’s training curriculum, and this year, the training was conducted at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, from April 12-23, 2015.
The mission is called Coronet Cactus, and has taken place over the past several years. Some years the unit may go to another location, but typically the training has been conducted in Arizona.
Cactus, as it’s more commonly referred to by wing members, involves different scenarios for different people. For the wing’s student pilots, assigned to the 182nd Fighter Squadron, it’s a chance to take what they’ve learned over the past several months and apply it to real-world combat situations. For aircraft maintainers, it involves long days of launching and recovering aircraft with live weapons and munitions, compared to the practice ones back home. For the Force Support Squadron, it takes smart planning and budget preparation to feed large groups of people with hearty appetites who line up to be fed each day. But to anyone connected to the flying mission, most can agree that it’s a time to bond and simply focus on what is at hand.
“I like working in a different environment,” said Senior Master Sgt. Jason Wyatt, a mechanic supervisor with 149th Maintenance Squadron. “It’s good to get away and just focus on the mission, not all the stuff that floats around the mission.”
Another plus involves the terrain, according to Senior Master Sgt. Cody Moore, a flight line supervisor with the 149th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron. It reminds him of Afghanistan – add to that the fact that students also get to drop live munitions, which he said gives the students real-world type experiences they can take with them to their operational units.
Getting out into unfamiliar territory and into a different time zone, loading and dropping live ordnance and being centralized in one location is a benefit of the Cactus operation. It acts as a simulated deployment to enhance training not only the future fighter pilots but also their support crew. And the difference between dropping live and practice bombs does not go unnoticed among the student pilots.
“It’s a blast to be flying out there and being able to look on either side of your wing and see this live ordnance right there and then to feel it come off the jet – you can actually feel the jet get lighter,” said 1st Lt. Kyle Phillips, a student pilot with the 18nd Fighter Squadron. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but that training that we’ve been through is just invaluable.”
The Combat Air Forces (CAF) seem to always be looming in the back of the minds of these pilots in training, so having the opportunity to practice with actual weapons on the D-M ranges builds confidence.
“It lets us go to those deployed locations and to be able to go in there confidently and say ‘I can do this.’” Phillips said.
First Lt. Bryan Smith, another student F-16 pilot, admits the training has been both a lot of work and a lot of fun, but that even when all is said and done, and that long-awaited graduation day takes place, the learning will have only just begun.
“I think the most humbling thing is that we've been training for almost nine months at this point, but the amount that we need to learn still has only increased,” Smith said. “We started with just learning how to fly the jet, then how to employ it as a weapon's system and how many weapons you can carry … that's the most challenging part … is even once were done here, there's still an almost lifelong education in front of us.”
| Date Taken: | 04.30.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 05.01.2015 16:19 |
| Story ID: | 161793 |
| Location: | JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, TX, US |
| Web Views: | 133 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, JBSA Guardsmen deploy to Davis-Monthan AFB for annual training, by Mindy Bloem, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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