Five Hundred Hours of „Combat Time”
Szöveg: honvedelem.hu | 2013. január 4. 9:04All airmen know that the experience gained by them is measured in hours rather than years. Earlier the air crewmembers received their recognition by the number of flight hours. This recognition was a measure of the experience they gained, the work they put in and their vocation for flying.
The mission started working in August 2011. The tasks are to train Afghan aircrews – including pilots, onboard technicians and door gunners – and to mentor the ground crews of the helicopters. During the more than one year that has passed, close to 30 onboard technicians and door gunners have received the certificate of completing the school. The bulk of this work was taken upon by a team composed of five air crewmembers and three aircraft maintenance technician mentors drawn from the personnel of the HDF 86th Szolnok Helicopter Base, who have participated in the NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan over the last one year.
To match the seriousness of the mission, the work conducted in the area of operations was preceded by several years of preparation. Exercises conducted in Hungary and abroad, training flights, simulator training and classroom instruction were needed to familiarize the personnel with the circumstances and tasks waiting for them in the area of operations. At the beginning, the mountain flying, the take-offs and landings executed in brownout conditions and the combat techniques required by asymmetric warfare posed new challenges. Today, the personnel of the mission share this knowledge with the future and present aircrews of the Afghan Air Force.
The Hungarian Defence Forces Mi-17 Air Advisory Team has a very complex mission. They are supposed to conduct training flights with candidate air crewmembers having little experience, while they also have to take into account the rules of hostile environment. Each flying is a combat task at once. They need to be aware of the threats and the ways of avoiding or meeting them in a given case.
The aircrews of the Transport Helicopter Battalion of Szolnok and the AVUM experts deploying with them have acquired a kind of knowledge that can be used in territorial defence tasks as well, a knowledge which forms part of the culture of military aviation.
Photos: Miklós Szabó and Károly Gulyás
