Mooney Humor Continuous Thread

[A64Pilot]

Yeah the system got a lot of guys, especially the older more experienced ones. 

When you got out of the aircraft at night you were pretty much blind, your right eye wasn’t night adapted and because you had been ignoring your left for the last couple of hours often the brain just wouldn’t use it, you had to learn to close your right eye to force the brain to look out of the night adapted left eye.

For me what was hard was that if you looked to the right your right eye was 10 ft forward and three ft lower than your left and lights especially would show in the combiner lens in a completely different spot than the thermal image.

As you gained experience your brain would automatically switch from one eye to the other, left for inside the cockpit, right for outside, but until you got more experience with it it would make mistakes. I was riding in the front seat which used the TADS for night flying, TADS could look straight down. Anyway I dropped my pencil and looked down to get it, but saw trees very close rushing by at high speed, scared the stew out of me, thought we were crashing or something, brain had switched back to right eye.

It screwed up some people so bad that if you turned the light out in a room they would fall down, that was temporary though it seemed.

Edited February 19 by A64Pilot

[Hank]

2 hours ago, A64Pilot said:

Yeah the system got a lot of guys, especially the older more experienced ones. 

When you got out of the aircraft at night you were pretty much blind, your right eye wasn’t night adapted and because you had been ignoring your left for the last couple of hours often the brain just wouldn’t use it, you had to learn to close your right eye to force the brain to look out of the night adapted left eye.

For me what was hard was that if you looked to the right your right eye was 10 ft forward and three ft lower than your left and lights especially would show in the combiner lens in a completely different spot than the thermal image.

As you gained experience your brain would automatically switch from one eye to the other, left for inside the cockpit, right for outside, but until you got more experience with it it would make mistakes. I was riding in the front seat which used the TADS for night flying, TADS could look straight down. Anyway I dropped my pencil and looked down to get it, but saw trees very close rushing by at high speed, scared the stew out of me, thought we were crashing or something, brain had switched back to right eye.

It screwed up some people so bad that if you turned the light out in a room they would fall down, that was temporary though it seemed.

Now I'm wondering if this was involved in the DC midair . . . .

[A64Pilot]

On 2/19/2025 at 4:25 PM, Hank said:

Now I'm wondering if this was involved in the DC midair . . . .

Unlikely

The system I’m speaking of is completely different than Googles, Goggles are of course on your head and use both eyes, the PNVS and TADS are those things on the nose of the Apache and are your eyes at night, but only your right eye. They don’t move as fast as your head, 60 degrees a sec if memory serves for TADS, faster for PNVS, but I’m sure that’s what the poster earlier was saying about clearing your tail, you spin your head around but the picture is still slewing when you stop because the system is slower, that can be disorienting and even make you sick to your stomach, you learn to not move your head faster than the system can skew.

I’m better than 90% sure they weren’t on Googles, probably had them on their helmet but not using them, I’m pretty sure there is a currency requirement here so they had them to fulfill that currency requirement for the Staff Aviator, but Googles in an environment filled with bright lights just aren’t the best thing to have, bright lights, especially red ones bloom them out and shut them down both. I think they were there to check a currency block.

I used to fly Staff Aviators from savannah Ga to Daytona at night so they could get their minimums and check the NVS currency block. Understand that in time of War the Staff is not part of a combat crew, will never fly a mission, truth is they will be working long hard hours doing their Staff job, planning  getting you beans and bullets etc. Their jobs are important and critical, just it’s not being a Pilot.

Need to understand that for the Female getting the Checkride, that flying wasn’t her Job, her Job was, well whatever she did in Politics etc. but as a Military Aviator she had minimums she had to fly in order to stay on flight status and receive flight pay as I assume a FAC 2 Aviator, line Pilots are FAC1, FAC 2 has lower minimums, and frankly much lower expectations for a Checkride etc.

Then and this is going to tick someone off I’m sure but the truth is that the best pilots don’t get these kind of assignments. I’m speaking to the Warrant Officer here, the ones that do are the ones a unit Commander can afford to send and frankly the “Real” pilots don’t want to go, there is no real tactical flying, it’s just Ferrying VIP’s around, no yanking and banking down in the trees etc. 

Edited February 21 by A64Pilot