Expert: James Bell - 2/10/2011

Question
To James,

Hello, my name is Brandon Cruz.
To give some background about myself, I am currently training for my PPL License and I am curious about military life/career. I am currently thinking about applying for a ROTC scholarship, but that is not set in stone until I become a senior in high school. Anyway I have a project in school called "Career Search Option" in my BMMT Class (Business Management Marketing and Technology) and if you could answer the questions below that would be great for my class who I have to do a presentation for next month, and me especially. Thanks.


1.  How did you become interested in this kind of work?
2.  What personal qualities does a person need to be successful in this occupation?
3.  What are some of the more satisfying features of this work?
4.  What disadvantages are there in this type of position?
5.  What are some things I can do now to prepare for this kind of work?
6.  In what special skills or procedures should I be proficient?
7.  What opportunities are there for advancement?
8.  How old where you until you decided that you wanted to do your career?
9.  What made you want to become one?
10. What college/Military Academy did you go to if you have?
11. Have you completed any flight training prior training for the military? (For you, as a flight engineer for questions 11 and 12 ;)
12. How does the selection process work for being chosen for a specific aircraft?

Answer
Brandon -

You ask a lot of questions, but I will attempt to answer them to the best of my ability.

1. I learned of the flight engineer field once I became a loadmaster on the C-5 galaxy.  I liked that the engineer was fully involved in the entire flight process, from pre-flight to post-flight.  He was aware of and responsible for all the aircraft systems.

2. Being on a flight crew requires good teamwork and the ability to think quickly in stressful situations.  If an emergency occurs he needs to be able to quickly asses the nature of the problem and how to resolve it or shut down the affected system.

3. Unlike many jobs, at the end of the day you can see the results of your work.  Whether it's moving tons of cargo from one country to another, refueling fighters as they protect the airspace for ground forces, or getting humanitarian supplies to disaster areas, each flight has success at its conclusion.

4. In any career working with aircraft, there is a certain danger involved in flight.  Several of my friends never finished the career they started.  There is also the time away from family and deployments to inhospitable desert locations.

5. The flight engineer is not a job you can go right into from being civilian.  You must retrain from a career field that is considered a "feeder" field.  You need to be good in mathematics and have a good sense of engineering and schematics.  I retrained from the loadmaster field.

6. Like I said above, you need to be good in math and have an aptitude for engineering.  Reading electrical, fuel and hydraulic schematics will also be a part of your needed skills, as well as chart reading.  The engineer is responsible for calculating all performance data for the aircraft, which is done through a multitude of charts.

7. All military jobs are based on a rank structure.  Everyone competes for promotion and enlisted personnel test annually for advancement to the next higher rank.

8. I joined the Air Force at 20 and had already planned to make a career out of it: To serve at least 20 years.  I ended up serving 24 before retirement.  I retrained into the flight engineer field at the age of 27.

9. I admired the job engineers did on the aircraft and felt it was a better challenge to my abilities than that of loadmaster.  Several of my flight engineer friends said I would be much better as an engineer, so I took up the challenge.

10. Being enlisted, all training is done through a series of technical training schools.  I attended loadmaster school at Sheppard AFB, Texas and Altus AFB, Oklahoma, then went back to Altus for both the technical schools as an engineer.

11. I had no formal flight or military training prior to enlisting with the exception of a few years of ROTC in high school.

12. As with all things military, the choice of assignments is made by the military.  You provide your preferences -- base and aircraft type -- and that will be taken into consideration, but the ultimate decision is based on your training and qualification coupled with job openings at various bases.

I hope this answers your question.

Sincerely,
James Bell