Crew Responds To Help C-17 Medevac Reach Maryland
A late night call, a cancelled sortie and some needed
flexibility led an aircrew from the 351st Air Refueling Squadron at
England's RAF Mildenhall to expedite medical care for more than a
dozen severely injured troops being transported from Iraq to
Andrews Air Force Base, MD on February 7.
According to Captain Brent Toth, 100th Operations Support
Squadron scheduler, the refueling mission was far from the
norm.
"We got a call around 2:30 a.m. asking if we could refuel a
high-priority air-evacuation mission (en route) to the hospital at
Andrews," Toth said. "Luckily we had a cancelled flight, and we had
a crew available."
That crew was Captain Colin Henderson, co-pilot 1st Lt. John
Cramer and boom operator Tech. Sgt. Raile Cantrell. Captain
Henderson had been scheduled to fly his first mission as aircraft
commander on a routine refueling mission over the Mediterranean
Sea... but that plan had changed.
"We normally know 24 to 48 hours out when we're going to do a
flight," Henderson said. "When we showed up, our (mission) binder
(still) had all the information from the previous (cancelled)
flight."
Henderson said what information they did have was the refueling
track, the time of the rendezvous and the call sign of the
receiver, a C-17 Globemaster III from the Mississippi Air National
Guard's 172nd Airlift Wing C-17 that had left Iraq at about 1 am
GMT.
The Air Guard's mission was unique, as the majority of its C-17
flights are to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Facility in
Germany.
"Our crews are able to make changes to meet the needs of the Air
Force as the mission dictates," said Lt. Col. David Buck, a
Mississippi Air National Guardsman spokesperson. "There was a lot
of scrambling they had to do to make this mission happen."
The same can be said of the crews at Mildenhall. "The
maintainers and my crew worked unbelievably fast because we
realized how critical the mission was," Henderson said. "We
basically planned it from scratch."
The KC-135 launched from RAF Mildenhall at 6:30 am, and passed
more than 16,000 gallons of fuel to the C-17 over the
England-Scotland border. Colonel Buck stated the C-17 arrived in
Maryland just before 3 pm GMT.
Alas, that wasn't the end of the mission for Henderson and his
crew. On the trip back to RAF Mildenhall, they ran into a snowstorm
that required them to circle the base before landing on a runway
that had just been cleared by a snow plow.
Henderson said the refueling mission saved the C-17 crew roughly
three hours it would have taken for them to land and refuel.
"We weren't the ones carrying (the injured troops), but who
knows? We might have saved them a few hours that made the
difference between life and death," Captain Henderson said. "But
then I thought to myself after we landed that I get to go home
today while the guys in the back of that plane are fighting for
their lives. It was sobering."
(ANN thanks Geoff Janes, 100th Air Refueling Wing Public
Affairs)