hour trip between our accommodations and the base. We wrapped up what we could on Friday and Saturday and then proceeded to pick up our ADVON team of aircraft maintainers on Saturday afternoon. Sunday was coming way too fast. We managed to sneak in a pretty decent meal at the hotel before hitting the sack early in preparation for the big day that lay ahead of us.
Sunday the 11th went really well. We recovered (parked and performed postflight inspections) all 15 A-10s from Aviano and three more from Spangdahlem as scheduled. We were now waiting on the transportation system to catch up. Our relocation had not been without problems. Because our initial request for airlift had been denied, we had contracted for commercial trucks to supplement the assets the US Army Transportation Command had in Italy to move our equipment from Aviano to Gioia del Colle. We had nearly one-half of our equipment on the road by the time we convinced the decision makers that this approach would not get our sortie-generation equipment to us in time to meet the schedule for six CSAR alert lines that night, and our tasked sorties for the next day. We were finally allocated some C-130 airlift and were able to get a limited amount of key equipment to Gioia, but it remained far from an ideal situation. One of the redeployment’s most frustrating moments was the excitement of seeing our first C-130 on final, anticipating the delivery of our much-needed sortie-generation equipment, only to find that some of our materiel had been delayed to make room for a combat camera crew. The crew was there to cover our activity at Gioia del Colle as we began to regenerate our jets. Cameramen were absolutely our last priority since they weren’t among the things we needed to have on station to get our A-10s ready to fight—but I figured they would at least be able to take some nice pictures of our 18 static-display aircraft the next morning if the stuff they had displaced didn’t make it.
The flow of equipment and tools from Aviano could not have been worse. We had gone into great detail in planning the order we needed to receive the equipment at Gioia del Colle, but since the operational methods varied among the numerous transportation contractors we used, some shipments unexpectedly took longer than others to make the trip. Some trucks had two drivers and did not stop en route. Others had only one driver who took two or more days to make the trip due to overnight stops for rest. It appeared that almost everything showed up in reverse order. The one movement we had control over was the equipment we used to get the jets out of Aviano. After the Panther launch, we loaded that equipment onto the C-130s, and it made it to Gioia shortly after the Hogs arrived. That limited C-130 airlift support probably saved our efforts and allowed us to meet Sixteenth Air Force’s aggressive timeline.
Keeping track of everyone was another redeployment challenge. We did not have a personnel accountability (PERSCO) team on hand to track the people who were showing up from Aviano and Spangdahlem. An Air Force PERSCO team would normally complete all personnel actions required to support deployed commanders, such as reception processing, casualty reporting, sustainment actions, redeployment and accountability of Air Force personnel, and management of myriad other personnel-related programs. Without their help, we did everything we could to catch everyone on their way in, get a copy of their orders, and record some basic information that included their room assignments.
The first three days at Gioia del Colle were absolutely the most difficult. Many of us had already put in a few very long days to get the jets from Aviano to Gioia. Those who had worked a lengthy shift to generate and launch the jets at Aviano jumped on the C-130 for a two-hour flight to Gioia and then went right to work to get our Hogs ready to meet the Monday frag. We did our best to ensure that our technicians stuck to a 12-hour schedule, but that didn’t always work out. It was easy to have people working over 24 hours with little more than a nap. We cut our maintenance crews back to the minimum necessary to prepare the aircraft to meet our CSAR alert for Sunday and get the first eight aircraft ready for Monday. We prepped six front lines and two spares to cover Monday and put everyone else on shift, letting them get some much-needed and well-deserved rest.
Five A-10s and about 70 personnel from the 74th FS at Pope were headed our way. They had been holding at Spangdahlem until our redeployment fate was decided, and then held a few additional days to let us settle in. With all that was going on with our own redeployment, inheriting additional aircraft and personnel added to my list of things to do and worry about. Some unique maintenance issues had to be resolved as we molded aircraft and personnel from Pope and Spangdahlem into a deployed unit under the air and space expeditionary force (AEF) concept. We did what we had to do by the book and applied common sense as much as possible. We encouraged team integrity by letting the dedicated crew chiefs work their own jets, and we took the team approach to the rest of the maintenance workload. Once we got through the initial growing pains, things seemed to work well. Everyone shared the goals of generating safe and reliable aircraft to support NATO’s missions and of bringing all of our pilots home safely.
We faced several other challenges in addition to a hectic redeployment with an almost impossible timeline. We were in a small town in southern Italy with none of the “conveniences” of home. We arrived on a weekend and were pretty much unable to work any support issues that involved the locals, such as portable toilets, bottled water, or any type of eating facility for our troops. The RAF and the Italian air force were gracious enough to allow us to use their facilities to cover our needs for the weekend, and that enabled most of our day shifters to get a good meal. We were able to scrounge up some “meals ready to eat” (MRE) for our night shifters, and a few of the other troops were able to go off base before their shift and find grocery stores or restaurants to meet their needs. Positive attitudes and a strong sense of mission were the keys to making the redeployment work.
We were not able to provide such basic needs as bathrooms, bottled water, and meals for the first three days—even so, I heard absolutely no complaints. For the most part, everyone was too busy and tired to worry about it, and I think just knowing the problem was being worked was enough for the majority. Everyone’s dedication was incredible. We had to order some people to leave work because we knew they had been there way over their 12- hour limit. Attitude was everything. I cannot say enough about the effort put forth by the maintainers—those on the flight line and those in support roles. Our liquid oxygen for the first day’s flying was courtesy of an innovative liquid- fuels specialist. Our equipment to fill the bottles was still en route. The specialist knew that Brindisi AB was just an hour or so down the road and he took all of our aircraft bottles and brought them back full. Had he not done so, our first flights on Monday would have not made it off the ground. It was this sort of dedication and creativity that kept us in the fight until our cargo caught up with us a few days later.
Once our equipment was in place, we began to settle into a routine. Our hotel was a 75-minute drive away. Adding two-and-a-half hours of driving to a 12-hour shift wasn’t the route we wanted to take. Once we resolved some initial scheduling issues and adjusted the shuttle schedule, the bus system worked great. It was definitely the way to go.
A typical day at Gioia was pretty fast paced. At the height of the air campaign, we were launching 16 aircraft on the first go and usually 14 on the afternoon go. We used a UHF/VHF-equipped Humvee as the production superintendent’s vehicle. This enabled us to talk to the pilots and “ops desk” to get aircraft status on the inbound so we could begin to line up the afternoon sorties and have technicians standing by to begin to work the inflight write-ups. We definitely had a full plate turning the aircraft from the first go to the second go.
Our configuration was typically four Mk-82 low-drag bombs, two AGM-65 Maverick air-to-ground missiles, 30 mm combat mix ammunition, 14 2.75-inch rockets, two AIM-9 air-to-air missiles, chaff/flare, Pave Penny pod, and an ALQ-131 electronic countermeasures (ECM) pod. Obviously, our crew chiefs, weapons loaders, and system specialists were all busy. They worked in-flight write-ups, conducted aircraft postflight inspections, loaded munitions, and refueled—all of this had to come together in about two hours and 30 minutes. Our production superintendents orchestrated the activity on the line, and the troops hustled each and every day of the campaign to make it happen. Both the day and night crews did a remarkable job of keeping track of the frag, necessary configurations, and CSAR alert. We scrambled our CSAR-alert aircraft on the nights the F-117 and F-16 were shot down, and again on several other occasions. We took our CSAR-alert commitment very seriously, knowing that lives
