bobdina
08-16-2009, 11:06 AM
Coalition troops help Afghan pilots get in air
By Erik Holmes - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Aug 16, 2009 8:24:45 EDT
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan pilot flew his Russian-made helicopter low and fast over the arid steppes north of here.
Fifty feet below him were nomad camps and their herds of goats, abandoned farms razed during Afghanistan’s 30 years of war and half-destroyed, mud-walled compounds inhabited by peasants.
He banked the Mi-35 into a hard left turn, took aim at a hillside in the Bagram aerial gunnery range and ripped a short burst from the 12.7mm machine gun on the helo’s nose.
It would be a routine live-fire training mission for an American pilot. For Maj. Ghulam Mohidin and the Afghan National Army Air Corps, it was a milestone.
The sortie was just one of a handful flown by Afghan airmen since May 27, when they fired live ordnance from the air for the first time in a decade, and the first for Mohidin in about 20 years.
The Afghan air force was all but destroyed during the civil war of the 1990s, and U.S. bombers finished the job in 2001. Now, Americans — more than 150 airmen plus a handful of soldiers, Marines and coalition partners — are helping get Afghans back in the sky.
For Mohidin, a pilot in the 1980s for the Soviet-sponsored Afghan regime, it is one step closer to fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida.
“It is my turn to help my people,” Mohidin said through an interpreter.
“Al-Qaida is in Afghanistan, and those people want to interfere,” he said. “At first we want to have a reconciliation with them … but if they can’t accept it, we must fight against them.”
Mentoring, American-style
The Combined Air Power Transition Force, or CAPTF, is two years into its work. The Americans and a small group of Czechs mentor the Afghans in all aspects — from flight operations to personnel systems — of how to set up and operate a modern air force.
“The best way to fight this insurgency is to enable the Afghans to fight it themselves,” said Brig. Gen. Walter “Waldo” Givhan, commander of CAPTF and the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing. “We’re not trying to re-create the U.S. Air Force. … We’re trying to build something that’s tailored to meet the needs and demands of Afghanistan.”
The Afghan National Army Air Corps, or ANAAC, has only about 30 aircraft — older Russian-made helicopters and transport planes — and 2,600 airmen. For now, operations are limited to daytime airlifts and presidential transport, and Afghan pilots have yet to fire on the enemy.
“We want to be in the fight. The simple fact is we don’t have enough aircraft to be in the fight yet,” said Col. Brad Grambo, commander of the 438th Air Expeditionary Advisory Group, based near the ANAAC headquarters at Kabul International Airport. “We’re about two years behind all the ground corps in getting our act together over here.”
The next year, though, is expected to bring enormous progress. ANAAC will get the first of 18 modern C-27 cargo planes in November, and kinetic operations with the Mi-35 helicopter gunship will likely begin later this year.
Lt. Faiz Ramaki recently became the first Afghan in nearly 50 years to graduate from U.S. pilot training, and more than 60 young Afghans will soon follow in his footsteps. These officers will form the nucleus of what the Americans hope will someday be a self-sufficient Afghan force.
By 2016, ANAAC plans to have at least 8,000 airmen and nearly 150 aircraft.
“The main [war] effort is Afghanistan, and the main effort within the main effort is building up the Afghan national security forces,” Givhan said.
“The airpower that the Air Corps represents is incredibly important for that.”
Battling language, illiteracy
Capt. Tyler Rennell, an Air Force Huey II pilot, sat in the cockpit of an ANAAC Mi-17 transport helicopter at a small base in the mountains north of Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban.
As Rennell’s Afghan co-pilot took off, the helo nosed down and came dangerously close to plowing into farmland outside the base. Rennell grabbed the controls and pulled up sharply, averting a crash.
Rennell is supposed to let his co-pilot do most of the flying, but sometimes — as on this day — there isn’t time for talk. The Afghan airman speaks little English so an interpreter — also in the helo — must translate everything.
More than 60 local translators work for CAPTF, but Rennell and the other American mentors still struggle with the language barrier.
“There’s that time delay, and a lot of things in flying happen instantaneously,” he said. “You have to realize it’s probably going to take a full minute … to get this command across.”
Few Afghan airmen speak English, even though their country — like much of the world — is English-language airspace. They are more likely to speak Russian because most were originally trained by the Soviets.
Recruits are chosen in large part for their language abilities. The younger officers speak better English than their older counterparts, so CAPTF is trying to get the recruits into the cockpit as quickly as possible.
Part of that effort is CAPTF’s push to teach English to officers and enlisted airmen to make sure they can communicate with control towers and coalition aircraft. Classes at ANAAC are taught by instructors from the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio.
English aside, many Afghan airmen cannot read or write their native languages of Dari and Pashto. No more than 20 percent of most recent class of enlisted recruits at ANAAC’s Air University training school is literate, said Temor Shah Rigiwal, the training school’s director. The illiteracy rate for the country is about 70 percent, according to The World Factbook, which is compiled by the CIA.
The school teaches basic Dari and Pashto literacy courses, and the American mentors and Afghan translators are trying to come up with course materials and technical manuals that are understandable for nearly everyone.
Givhan, the CAPTF commander, encourages his airmen to break down maintenance procedures into steps so illiterate airmen can grasp and remember them.
“A lot of times here you have to say ‘Let’s simplify this’ … so it can be understood without having it necessarily written,” he said. “Even if you can’t read it, it’s a simple enough procedure you can understand it.”
That’s a difficult concept for American airmen, who rely on detailed tech orders and endless checklists.
Doing it the Afghan way
One of the main focuses of CAPTF’s efforts has been to create processes and organizations that the Afghans can sustain because ANAAC must stand on its own someday.
Grambo frequently asks his airmen: “What’s the Afghan way?”
Teaching American methods is pointless if they don’t work for the Afghans.
Yet, Afghan ways seem sloppy by Western standards, and the American airmen are often appalled at the cavalier attitude displayed by the Afghans. It can best be summed up by the popular saying “inshallah,” Arabic for “if God wills it.”
“When you live in such a dangerous society, driving down the street or just getting food, I think they have a tendency to accept a very high level of risk,” said Lt. Col. Steve Orie, CAPTF’s maintenance team leader.
CAPTF is trying to instill rigor and discipline in the Afghans to mitigate the risks of operating aircraft.
On the maintenance side, that means teaching the Afghans how to use tech orders, checklists and routine maintenance checks rather than just how to change a particular engine component.
“We like to focus on the procedures due to the fact that we think it can have a bigger impact” in the long run, Orie said.
For fliers, it means teaching the Afghan pilots to use flight checklists and procedures to avoid potentially deadly oversights.
And for all Afghan airmen, CAPTF is trying to adapt the American military culture in which training never stops.
“What has been missing is a culture of training that we have in our armed forces,” said Givhan, the task force commander. “Even in times of war, we never quit training. That has been missing here because they have been … torn apart by civil war and there’s been nothing but operations.”
Signs of independence
Though progress can be frustratingly slow, all the Americans interviewed said it is happening.
“They’re starting to take the lead on stuff,” said Master Sgt. Robert Vandehey, the CAPTF mentor for armaments. “We can step back more and more.”
One of the most encouraging signs so far was ANAAC’s response to widespread flooding this spring in the country’s north. Four Mi-17 helicopters rescued more than 1,500 civilians from the floodwaters — with no American involvement.
“They did it without a mentor within hundreds of miles of them,” Grambo said. “When it comes down to it, they can do it.”
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/08/airforce_captf_081609/
By Erik Holmes - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Aug 16, 2009 8:24:45 EDT
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan pilot flew his Russian-made helicopter low and fast over the arid steppes north of here.
Fifty feet below him were nomad camps and their herds of goats, abandoned farms razed during Afghanistan’s 30 years of war and half-destroyed, mud-walled compounds inhabited by peasants.
He banked the Mi-35 into a hard left turn, took aim at a hillside in the Bagram aerial gunnery range and ripped a short burst from the 12.7mm machine gun on the helo’s nose.
It would be a routine live-fire training mission for an American pilot. For Maj. Ghulam Mohidin and the Afghan National Army Air Corps, it was a milestone.
The sortie was just one of a handful flown by Afghan airmen since May 27, when they fired live ordnance from the air for the first time in a decade, and the first for Mohidin in about 20 years.
The Afghan air force was all but destroyed during the civil war of the 1990s, and U.S. bombers finished the job in 2001. Now, Americans — more than 150 airmen plus a handful of soldiers, Marines and coalition partners — are helping get Afghans back in the sky.
For Mohidin, a pilot in the 1980s for the Soviet-sponsored Afghan regime, it is one step closer to fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida.
“It is my turn to help my people,” Mohidin said through an interpreter.
“Al-Qaida is in Afghanistan, and those people want to interfere,” he said. “At first we want to have a reconciliation with them … but if they can’t accept it, we must fight against them.”
Mentoring, American-style
The Combined Air Power Transition Force, or CAPTF, is two years into its work. The Americans and a small group of Czechs mentor the Afghans in all aspects — from flight operations to personnel systems — of how to set up and operate a modern air force.
“The best way to fight this insurgency is to enable the Afghans to fight it themselves,” said Brig. Gen. Walter “Waldo” Givhan, commander of CAPTF and the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing. “We’re not trying to re-create the U.S. Air Force. … We’re trying to build something that’s tailored to meet the needs and demands of Afghanistan.”
The Afghan National Army Air Corps, or ANAAC, has only about 30 aircraft — older Russian-made helicopters and transport planes — and 2,600 airmen. For now, operations are limited to daytime airlifts and presidential transport, and Afghan pilots have yet to fire on the enemy.
“We want to be in the fight. The simple fact is we don’t have enough aircraft to be in the fight yet,” said Col. Brad Grambo, commander of the 438th Air Expeditionary Advisory Group, based near the ANAAC headquarters at Kabul International Airport. “We’re about two years behind all the ground corps in getting our act together over here.”
The next year, though, is expected to bring enormous progress. ANAAC will get the first of 18 modern C-27 cargo planes in November, and kinetic operations with the Mi-35 helicopter gunship will likely begin later this year.
Lt. Faiz Ramaki recently became the first Afghan in nearly 50 years to graduate from U.S. pilot training, and more than 60 young Afghans will soon follow in his footsteps. These officers will form the nucleus of what the Americans hope will someday be a self-sufficient Afghan force.
By 2016, ANAAC plans to have at least 8,000 airmen and nearly 150 aircraft.
“The main [war] effort is Afghanistan, and the main effort within the main effort is building up the Afghan national security forces,” Givhan said.
“The airpower that the Air Corps represents is incredibly important for that.”
Battling language, illiteracy
Capt. Tyler Rennell, an Air Force Huey II pilot, sat in the cockpit of an ANAAC Mi-17 transport helicopter at a small base in the mountains north of Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban.
As Rennell’s Afghan co-pilot took off, the helo nosed down and came dangerously close to plowing into farmland outside the base. Rennell grabbed the controls and pulled up sharply, averting a crash.
Rennell is supposed to let his co-pilot do most of the flying, but sometimes — as on this day — there isn’t time for talk. The Afghan airman speaks little English so an interpreter — also in the helo — must translate everything.
More than 60 local translators work for CAPTF, but Rennell and the other American mentors still struggle with the language barrier.
“There’s that time delay, and a lot of things in flying happen instantaneously,” he said. “You have to realize it’s probably going to take a full minute … to get this command across.”
Few Afghan airmen speak English, even though their country — like much of the world — is English-language airspace. They are more likely to speak Russian because most were originally trained by the Soviets.
Recruits are chosen in large part for their language abilities. The younger officers speak better English than their older counterparts, so CAPTF is trying to get the recruits into the cockpit as quickly as possible.
Part of that effort is CAPTF’s push to teach English to officers and enlisted airmen to make sure they can communicate with control towers and coalition aircraft. Classes at ANAAC are taught by instructors from the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio.
English aside, many Afghan airmen cannot read or write their native languages of Dari and Pashto. No more than 20 percent of most recent class of enlisted recruits at ANAAC’s Air University training school is literate, said Temor Shah Rigiwal, the training school’s director. The illiteracy rate for the country is about 70 percent, according to The World Factbook, which is compiled by the CIA.
The school teaches basic Dari and Pashto literacy courses, and the American mentors and Afghan translators are trying to come up with course materials and technical manuals that are understandable for nearly everyone.
Givhan, the CAPTF commander, encourages his airmen to break down maintenance procedures into steps so illiterate airmen can grasp and remember them.
“A lot of times here you have to say ‘Let’s simplify this’ … so it can be understood without having it necessarily written,” he said. “Even if you can’t read it, it’s a simple enough procedure you can understand it.”
That’s a difficult concept for American airmen, who rely on detailed tech orders and endless checklists.
Doing it the Afghan way
One of the main focuses of CAPTF’s efforts has been to create processes and organizations that the Afghans can sustain because ANAAC must stand on its own someday.
Grambo frequently asks his airmen: “What’s the Afghan way?”
Teaching American methods is pointless if they don’t work for the Afghans.
Yet, Afghan ways seem sloppy by Western standards, and the American airmen are often appalled at the cavalier attitude displayed by the Afghans. It can best be summed up by the popular saying “inshallah,” Arabic for “if God wills it.”
“When you live in such a dangerous society, driving down the street or just getting food, I think they have a tendency to accept a very high level of risk,” said Lt. Col. Steve Orie, CAPTF’s maintenance team leader.
CAPTF is trying to instill rigor and discipline in the Afghans to mitigate the risks of operating aircraft.
On the maintenance side, that means teaching the Afghans how to use tech orders, checklists and routine maintenance checks rather than just how to change a particular engine component.
“We like to focus on the procedures due to the fact that we think it can have a bigger impact” in the long run, Orie said.
For fliers, it means teaching the Afghan pilots to use flight checklists and procedures to avoid potentially deadly oversights.
And for all Afghan airmen, CAPTF is trying to adapt the American military culture in which training never stops.
“What has been missing is a culture of training that we have in our armed forces,” said Givhan, the task force commander. “Even in times of war, we never quit training. That has been missing here because they have been … torn apart by civil war and there’s been nothing but operations.”
Signs of independence
Though progress can be frustratingly slow, all the Americans interviewed said it is happening.
“They’re starting to take the lead on stuff,” said Master Sgt. Robert Vandehey, the CAPTF mentor for armaments. “We can step back more and more.”
One of the most encouraging signs so far was ANAAC’s response to widespread flooding this spring in the country’s north. Four Mi-17 helicopters rescued more than 1,500 civilians from the floodwaters — with no American involvement.
“They did it without a mentor within hundreds of miles of them,” Grambo said. “When it comes down to it, they can do it.”
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/08/airforce_captf_081609/