Combat aircraft

The idea of

a mountain

fl ying course came

up because a lot of

C-130 squadrons were

coming to Reno to

inter-fl y with us in our

local terrain to prepare

for their forthcoming

deployments. After

that happened a few

times we talked about

starting a formal

mountain fl ying course

because a lot of those

units came here and

found themselves in

hazardous situations

they weren’t

prepared for

Maj Joseph ‘Spock’ Jaquish

The AMATS course is run in conjunction

with the US Marine Corps’ Mountain

Warfare Training Center in Pickel

Meadows, California. The ‘High Rollers’

deliver supplies to the Marines as part

of the course, and in return the Marines

invigilate the mountain drop zones (DZs).

The AMATS course syllabus o ers a

baseline building-block approach, but

it can be tailored to a crew’s experience

levels. Coming from air elds and

operating areas at near sea level, the

altitudes and temperatures around Reno

means the crews don’t have anything like

the performance they’re accustomed to.

According to Bravo, the training up in

the Sierra Nevada roughly equates to

 ying with one engine out in a C-130H

— there’s a huge power reduction.

‘We could be at maximum power but

receiving much less torque than at sea

level,’ he says. While the C-130J enjoys

more power than the older H-models to

better cope with the terrain, that doesn’t

tend to be the problem. Jaquish adds, ‘We

generally see the J-models [which have

a two-pilot cockpit but no navigator or

 ight engineer] su er in terms of mission

management and task-saturation. The

added stress of the challenging pro les is

a lot to ask of fewer crew members’. The

demands of the course mean that if a

young crew is coming to Reno, the AMATS

team suggests the visiting unit brings an

extra crew position up front to help cope

with the workload.

The course typically involves three

main missions. Each includes a variety of

elements, from tactical approaches into

elevated LZs to low-level routes. Bravo

says the crews are taught to plan the

mountain  ying starting with their escape

route. ‘They have to determine what it

takes to leave that area and then work out

how to ingress. We teach them to analyze

the terrain to  nd the most forgiving and

acceptable path and then determine

their performance and climb gradient.

The instructors actually do most of the

routine mission planning. We plan the

routes, the product development such as

charts and checklists and we even do the

mission brie ng for them. We ask them to

compute the performance data and then

 y their numbers.’

The missions

The  rst mission involves a high-altitude

decent into the pattern at an auxiliary

landing  eld. ‘They  y assault patterns

here and then they  y low-level in the

Sierra Nevada into steep canyons’, says

Bravo. ‘On that  rst  ight there is one

heavy equipment air-drop and one

container delivery system [CDS] air-drop.

They also  y out over the high desert of

the Great Basin, which means the 200ft

trees that they saw in the Sierras are now

20ft bushes, so that visual disorientation

teaches them how to not get too low.’

The second  ight sees the start of

work with the Marine Corps mountain

warfare teams. The Hercules crews, usually

Below top to

bottom:

Maj Joseph

Jaquish is a

graduate of the

USAF Weapons

School and a key

fi gure at AMATS.

The C-130H

crew typically

comprises

two pilots, a

fl ight engineer,

navigator and

loadmaster.

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