Breaking the silence

Sure enough, it was a long night. Finally got the call around 0130 to head up to the roof to turn a couple birds. I shook off the 2 hours of sleep, pulled on a flight suit and stumbled down to maintenance control to get the latest scoop. By time I got to the desk 2 minultes later, my mind was clearing and I was ready to go. It's always odd heading up to the flight deck in the middle of the night when it's so quiet and still. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty going on up there. Almost half of every squadron's maintenance department works the night shift, taking care of all the problems that were found during the day, preparing aircraft for the next day's flight operations. But the jets are quiet, tied to the deck, with green shirts crawling over and under them. Occasionally the peace is broken by a low power turn, as a jet engine fires to life to ensure that a maintenance action was successful, prior to putting that jet back on the flight schedule. In the case of our fixed wing brethren, the cockpit is occupied by a specially trained and qualified maintenance technician, who starts the engines and controls the throttles while the jet remains well chained to the deck.
The requirements for helicopters are a little different. When we turn up our engines that almost always also involves engaging the rotors. Navy regs require that a qualfied helicopter pilot must be at the controls to engage rotors in a helicopter. So, while the jet bubbas are dreaming or playing in the late night poker game in WR I, one of the Eightballers may be up on the flight deck, working with our maintenance team to ensure that a helo is ready to go for the next day. Fortunately, this isn't required too often (maybe once or twice a week). That's where I found myself last night, sitting in the right seat, with one of our maintainers sitting in the left seat to help me read through checklists and monitor the controls while I started the engines. We finally wrapped up the turns around 0530, working through 2 different aircraft. One up, one still down. Still recovering from a tough day yesterday.
I had a meeting at 0900 this morning, so I got another 2 1/2 hours of sleep before it was time to get up. I rolled from that meeting to church, then brunch, then training, another meeting, then another meeting. Once again, the stack of blue folders has gotten away from me, stacked up almost as high as the top of my laptop monitor. We must be running low on blue, though. There's some yellow, green, and black in this stack. Variety is the spice of life, right?
If you're starting to see a pattern in my days, let me know what it is. I'm still looking.