An early morning

It's ten til 5 in the morning. I've been up for about 4 hours already. It's official. I now have absolutely no circadian rhythm. I eat. I sleep (sort of). I fly (or stand alert). I sign papers. Such is life at sea for 60-some straight days. I'm currently sitting in the ready room, with flight gear donned in Alert 15 status. In the background, I'm listening to Blazing Saddles, being shown on the big screen up in front of the ready room. The campfire scene just played. Back here in the operations corner of the ready room, I can't see the screen, I can only hear the "sound effects".

I finally wrapped up the E-5 evals on Sunday night. The Division Officers and chiefs debriefed the guys yesterday. It's good to have that done. The flow of paperwork never ebbs, though. Now change of command Fitness Reports (performance evaluations for officers) are due in the next few days. I have to write the FITREPS for all of my DivO's in Maintenance (I have 8 who work for me). Plus I have to provide inputs for my own FITREP to the XO. Whenever a squadron has a change of command, the outgoing CO writes a final FITREP for all the Officers in the squadron. Plus, each year a "periodic" report is due (during a different month for each pay grade). O-4 periodic FITREPS are normally due in October. So, I get to write some bullets on all the things I've done since October. Our change of command is scheduled for some time in May, out here on the ship.

On a completely different note, here are some photos of that helicopter you could see sitting on the flight deck in my last entry... This is "Loosefoot 610", our CAG bird. Each squadron in the airwing is permitted to paint one aircraft with some squadron "flare" as a source of pride and espri de corps. I'm sure you've seen pictures of jets with the pilot's names painted below the canopy. We do the same thing, painting names below each door. Each squadron put's CAG's name and Deputy CAG's names on one of their aircraft (the "CAG" bird), and these are the aircraft that are painted with the non-tactical squadron colors. The paint job is typically constrained to the tail area, showing a portion of the squadron emblem. Perhaps I've written about this already, but I'm pretty sure I haven't posted any pictures yet. Here are a couple of good shots of 610...

This picture was taken from my aircraft during a training flight late last year. This was 610's first flight after getting it's new paint job.

I found this picture online at an Aviation Photography website. You can find a picture of "Black Knight 610" there as well, to compare our CAG bird with a "typical" CAG bird. Photos of the S-3 and EA-6B CAG birds are also there.

This is a photo of the first Hellfire missile being shot from the right side of a Navy H-60 (the orange parts are test-related instrumentation). When we return from this deployment we will immediately begin a transition to this new model of H-60, the MH-60S Armed Helo. We'll trade in our torpedoes for anti-ship and anti-armor weapons. I had the opportunity to fly the "Sierra" when I was in Patuxent River. I'm looking forward to the transition.