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Pilot Confessions
Low Fuel in Bosnia
by Joe Casey
In my ongoing saga of “Pilot Con- fessions,” I tell the tales of some of the stupidest mistakes I’ve made in an aircraft. For reference, I just
broke 16,000 hours of f light time and I have 10 really good stories of personally-owned aviation stupidity. So, on average, I do something stupid every 1,600 hours, probably more fre- quently. Hopefully, your average is less, and one day you’ll be able to tell your stories to someone else who can learn from them.
In 2004, I was assigned to the Texas Army National Guard as a UH- 60 Helicopter Instructor Pilot, and my unit was deployed to Bosnia. This was a “peacekeeping mission” to a part of the world with an incredibly
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ugly civil war. Civil wars are the worst because the death tolls are high and the fighting is among brethren. In the United States, our Civil War was easily the most brutal of our country’s wars (even considering WWI and WWII), with lasting effects that remain today. Bottom line: the Bosnian War was a terrible war for Bosnians.
I was in the odd position of being a Second Lieutenant (2LT) and also a Standardization Instructor Pilot. I was in my twelfth year of service and had recently moved to the “dark side” from being a warrant officer. I know – my intelligence is already being questioned because who would move from the perfect rank structure in the military (a warrant officer is
Author Joe Casey
easily the finest rank structure!) to a 2LT? There is no one more profoundly ignorant than a 2LT in any Army. But here I was, a 2LT with Master Aviator Wings on my chest in a foreign land. A truth like this just cannot be made up.
The men and women in my unit were looking for the butter bar to live down to butter bar expectations. Surely, the freshly minted 2LT would start acting like a 2LT. Unfortunately for me, I did exactly that.
When we first arrived in country, my job as an instructor pilot was to fly with all of the pilots to give the “local area orientation” and to give the local ground units we supported an orientation f light to ensure that everyone knew what to do in case the