Juvat wrote:

Chad Irby posted:

"Getting tested on it" and "caring" are, as any high school kid can tell
you, two very different things.

Come on chad, we've gone from "severe lack of interest" to "caring?"

"Severe lack of interest" and "not caring" are pretty much the same
thing.

If I'm NOT getting tested, asked questions during
certification/verification briefings, mission qualification training,
and plain ol' ordinary day-to-day simulated "Fence" checks on a
flight...I guess you're right.

That's my point.

But I'd feel kinda silly as a pilot
saying I "cared." Alan Alda might say he "cared" but I wouldn't. I had
to know about certain aspects of EC...as a guy in the FRONT seat I
couldn't operate the ALR-46 or the ALQ-119/131.

Well, you *could* operate the ALR-46 and the ALE-40, at least partially.

As an IP, I could when
in the pit...at that point you would say I "cared."

But that's *you*. An *instructor pilot* who was expected to make sure
of that sort of thing. A lot of guys in the seat were on the verge of
hostile...

As an example, I was one of those guys who had to do end of runway
checks on the ALR-46, by talking to the back seater on the headset while
two other troops walked up the sides of the plane carrying test
transmitters. About half of the time, I'd hear the BIT tones running as
I plugged in the headset (oops - caught 'em), and it was often like
pulling teeth to get answers out of the back seat.

Exactly. If you don't use it, you don't care.

Clearly that is the only conclusion you are able to draw. Others would
disagree.

Yep. And one of them is an IP. Fancy that. I wonder if an aviator
might be a bit less forthcoming about his attitudes with an IP than with
an airman who can't do much about it?

And the way many officers dealt with it was... blow it off. If it's not
important, why care?

Again...negative training, that runs counter to "train like you
fight." C'est vrai?

Exactly. Again.

Try being the guy who has to load it on the plane and then figure out
what was "wrong" with it when it comes back with a writeup that
describes, basically, normal operation.

Life isn't fair. But it would be fair to say that the guys making
those write-ups were not PILOTs...correct?

Oddly enough, we got a lot of front-seater writeups for ECM. Those
usually came down to switchology.

--
cirby at cfl.rr.com

Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.