That just prompted a memory that really highlights what seem like small differences that with enough exposure you just feel:
During my time as a Platoon leader in the early 90s my Guard unit transitioned from the M60A3 to the M1. Most of that joyous 3 1/2 years was M60A3. When it came time to drive the old tanks to the railhead I was going to do what I rarely got to do, drive. The 2LT who was going to TC for the move grabbed the log book while I was doing something else and just waved me over. I didn’t bother to look at the tube or bumper number. When I climbed in I got a sense of deja vu. I was pretty sure it was MY tank just from the tiny non-functional variations inside the turret. On the trail I recognized how she handled. It WAS my tank, Charon.
I may have talked to her and patted her on the fender before we left.
But everything you’re saying here about vehicles and people being complex machines would also apply to military aircraft, which according to LSLGuydo get swapped between flight crews on a daily basis.
Is one difference that planes have to land back at their base after every mission, and maintenance is always done by base personnel, whereas tanks may spend days or more in the field, so their own crews are often doing the daily routine maintenance? So it becomes a bigger deal to swap tanks than to swap planes?
That might be it. Another factor is that relatively speaking airplanes, especially tactical airplanes, need a lot more maintenance. So having a crew tied to an aircraft means the crew sits while the aircraft is being fixed. Better to swap them into another aircraft.
We always planned to have about 2x the pilots as aircraft. Roughly speaking they’d be divided into two shifts, morning and afternoon. Each aircraft would fly twice a day, each pilot/crew just once. For some close-in scenarios we’d plan to fly, fight, come back and refuel/rearm quickly with engine(s) running, fly & fight again, then come back and shut down to turn the aircraft over to the second shift who’d also fly/fight twice.
under that kind of use plan it makes no sense to hard-assign crews to aircraft and vice versa.
What LSLGuy said, plus, the type of any specific mission (beyond defeating the other guy) and the means of achieving the goals of that mission is so different between ground and air forces its really sort of hard to make a meaningful comparison.
LSLGuy and you both touched on part of it muldoonthief. The pilots have a higher chance of “sleeping in their own bed” at the end of their shift while on mission. The Tankers and mechanized infantry and Cavalry guys while on mission, not so much. That tank, or Bradley or APC or 577(or M88/Hercules for us mechanics) is the crew’s home in the field.
Different tools and different goals within the over-all mission of defeating the other guy help lead in part to different vehicle crew philosophies between armor and air.
To what extent do military planes / vehicles have their own “personalities”? I think we expect for example that even in mega-mass produced cars, each individual vehicle may have its own quirks of operation.
With military vehicles, on the one hand, each is produced to specifications which far exceed civilian vehicles in their exactness. On the other hand, each tank or plane is maintained and refurbished so extensively that you’d expect some individuality to creep in.
Pilots and tankers, is this an issue? Do you ever hop into an M1/F16 and think “whoa, this baby pulls to the left” or something like that? Vehicle crewmembers, are there such tendencies that you work to counteract?
Short version: Real big picture, they’re all darn near the same. Differences are nuances and are often swamped by the random factors of the day. e.g. turbulence, loading, mission, etc. Which is distinct of course from the fact that any given fleet will usually have some variation in installed equipment or level of updates within the fleet. They’re not all exact clones. The older and larger the fleet the more idiosyncratic differences in equipment creep in.
Long version:
In airliners some are more bent or the controls are more out of perfect adjustment than others. So yes, some “pull left”. Which we adjust out via the trim system so the airplane flies straight. When this gets too far out that contributes to excess drag and fuel burn, which motivates us to report it and the company to fix it. Not much different than getting a front end alignment in a car.
As some gizmo or other is getting ready to fail it can start behaving flaky or to occasionally flash a warning light / message that promptly goes away. These get written up and often maintenance can’t identify the problem. So part of the preflight ritual is reading the recent maintenance history to look for stuff that’s popped up recently and might pop up again on your flight. After an intermittent self-resolving problem gets chronic enough the company will start replacing gizmos trying to track down the exact problem. Or sometimes the gizmo just cleanly gives up the ghost on your flight and it’s easy for them to ID and replace the troublemaker.
All these kinds of issues are transient, so old #47 might be suffering from left hydraulic weirdness this week but by the time you fly it again two months later that’s long since been fixed and no longer an issue.
In fighters you had the same kinds of issues although the airplane itself had lots fewer parts and stuff tended to work or not.
A big issue with bomb dropping and gunnery (both aerial and strafe) is how well the computers and the sighting system were aligned with the airframe. This is conceptually no different than sighting in a pistol or rifle so it hits where the sights are pointed at. The alignment process is painstaking and takes a day or more, so it wasn’t done too often.
So we kept a book on each aircraft and wrote down each bomb impact vs. aim point. As well as qualitative info on gunnery accuracy. When you drew #123 for today’s bombing mission you’d consult the book to know to aim slightly long and left of the target to get a direct hit.
My era was pre-GPS, so we also tracked the inertial nav system performance. They inherently lose accuracy over time, and as they wore they tended to lose it at an ever-increasing rate. Usually they developed a bias to get worse in one particular direction. So knowing how quickly and in what direction it was probably drifting on your flight helped improve nav and bombing accuracy as well.
Much the same with ground vehicles. Component wear, maintenance cycle, and for armored vehicles, how good of a job the crew is at doing operator level maintenance tasks (I’ve seen some Bradley commanders who were pretty good geewhiz mechanics). For armored vehicles, a lot of crews (most maybe? depends on the unit policies) make small modifications to their home-in-the-field. It used to be pretty common for Bradley crews (pre ODS) to do things like attach straps to the outside bolt-on armor to hang personal gear from (this was especially true in the infantry battalion I was in). The ADA unit I spent some time in, one guy actually figured out how to wire his cd player into the comm system for his Bradley without disrupting any actual communications and played music for his crew.
For Army Combat Vehicles don’t assume exactness at that level. IIRC it was in Michael Orr’s “King of The Killing Zone” that I saw the stoyr about the turbine engine folks visiting the tank plant for the first time. They were used to an aviation environment where their turbines were used in helicopters. Then they went to a tank plant and saw workers on the line making small adjustments with sledgehammers. They were aghast.
Still the differences tend to be small. My M60A3 when I was a Platoon leader was the slowest tank in the platoon by a couple mph. It worked. I never had to train my driver to intentionally slow down during action drills until the tanks on the outside had completed their longer moves on the outside of the formation.
My HMMWV during my first company command had radial tires instead of the normal bias ply. That was thanks to my Motor Sergeant ordering them because I spent more time on road than off road. The difference in handling and feel on road was noticeable if I swapped vehicles to one with the standard bias ply. For whatever reason, even if you tightened the cable clamp way down, the hose that ran hot air to the vent in front of my seat never quite locked in place either. It would mostly stay in place even with lot’s of shaking and being bumped by my legs. It was still pretty easy to pull it off with a good tug though. Which made it really convenient for tucking up under my jacket.
In other “pimp my ride” using the Army supply system our battalion Maintenance warrant had bucket seats in his HMMWV. They were from some other vehicle in the system and could, with a little field rigging be made to work. He also had a non-standard, for us, truck topper with built in storage compartments for his tools. The 5 ton truck in our battalion S3 section had a custom built cargo area to store all their stuff and allow it to operate as a backup/alternate command post. In my second command the maintenance section tool truck had a custom built tool storage and organization system. I’m aware that an Engineer Battalion from the Upper Peninsula in the MI Guard had a sauna built into the back of one of their trucks. They claimed it was mission related since they frequently got called up to help with snow removal. That was their story at least.
At an extreme, when we transitioned to M1s they came without benefit of a depot level rebuild. They had more personality thanks to years of hard use and wear. I can think of one that had more than usual the issues when turret problems fell from the sky (aka rain). There was another one that saw more than it’s any reasonable share of trips to maintenance for a host of unrelated problems. Then there was “Christine.” She was a long term, free time project for Battalion maintenance. She’d just randomly start up on her own. They eventually found a worn spot on one of the cable networks buried in the hull that if it touched the hull would ground and begin the startup procedure. It just took something like another tank driving by it to shake the cable right.
Something like that is much different. Most of the differences are small if not actually non-functional. When you live, sleep, eat and sometimes relieve yourself without dismounting you tend to notice all those little differences. The replenisher pump sounding a touch different isn’t a big deal as long as it still works. Maybe the driver’s hatch is or isn’t susceptible to he hammer/helmet key trick to get it to pop open from the outside (that was actually a thing on the M60 series).
Your post makes it sound like there are tangible differences between vehicles, and that crews mostly do stay with their vehicles–otherwise they wouldn’t bother with the custom mods. And a crew that jumped into “your” tank might find itself in a bind if they couldn’t get top speed when they wanted it.
Nah, the custom mods are mere cosmetics. Anything maintenance related that would cause the vehicle or crew to have problems in the pinch is either so new it’s not documented in the maintenance paperwork yet or IS documented and the vehicle is considered non-mission capable (administrative inoperability as opposed to actual non-functioning) Those things are fixed in relatively short order. You could swap out any tank or Bradley crew at any time without notice and they would do just fine for mission purposes if need be. That’s where the operational tolerances come in, the philosophy is vehicle/crew remain the same, but that philosophy also recognizes reality. The problem would be “dammit that’s not my duffel hanging off the side.” in the case of a too rapid crew swap. (I’ve actually been part of that, and damn if I didn’t forget my rucksack)
Also, track vehicles tend to pull right not left. Well, Bradleys and the M113 family do. Has to do with suspension design.
Well we do mostly stay with our tank as I described above. Although like chaz I’ve been part of jumping track and having all my stuff quite a bit away for a long period. The speed difference wasn’t something that would have affected any of my crews functionally. When you’re riding a 60-70 ton death winnebago small differences in slope could make a bigger difference. Gravity sucks.
I did just think of one very real difference that was functional. On the M60A3, our stabilization system wasn’t as good as on the M1. You got some bounce in the sight as a result. The gunnery manual talked about platform speeds, and rough estimates of what they were on a typical tank. Those were the speeds where the amount of slap and vibration from the track were minimized giving you a much more stable sight picture to engage. The small differences between vehicles (along with track wear) could affect exactly what those speeds were though. Since the driver couldn’t see the sight picture he couldn’t tell exactly where those spots were by himself. To take advantage of having a good platform you really had to check it out before you were in the middle of an engagement. That way the driver could just automatically tweak things towards the nearest platform speed for a moving engagement. It was a real difference that absolutely could have affected real world engagements. That went out with the Abrams though.
Wow Dino, I didn’t know that about the M60s. Our local Guard unit swapped over to M1s a few years before I joined the Army so I never really got to experience that tank even after I left active duty. Slap and vibration…reminds me of the time I rode in a track with a bad pad, SLAP and rattle…man I miss that life sometimes
Things got a lot simpler when we transitioned from Dino Riders to Jedi Tankers. The A3 was a good tank. In some ways it was better than the comparable aspect on the M1. The TTS was a much better thermal sight than the TIS on the early Abrams variants. It took a good crew to really maximize the tank though. The Abrams didn’t have as much drop off between great crews and average ones. being able to fly around at 45 mph was nice too.
I missed the hell out of being a true tanker, instead of being merely an Armor officer, in my late career. It’s not 2 years since I finally hung the spurs up the spurs for good. That’s been harder. Sometimes I find myself going out my way to sniff diesel exhaust or walk closer to construction sites to hear a track squeak.
yeah, someone mentioned somewhere how fine tolerance adjustments on tanks are done with a sledgehammer. Do you miss walking the track after being out in the field Dino? (say gunnery or such?), I never thought I would miss doing that on my 88 (that was the task I hated most) but…time and distance…
LSL, I’m fortunate in that I get to smell the diesel every morning at my job, not the same as jp8 but close, now if I could just get my boss to by a truck powered by a turbine engine:D
That actually wasn’t something I did all that often after training. I did NOT work for a living. I tended to lean towards the Commander’s Weapon Station and other prep to fire checks by the time I escaped from PL to the TC portion of my duties. I did like the absolute ass pain of cleaning the sub turret floor when we turned in the tanks at the end of the training year. It’s how I got back most of my lost alcohol markers.
Then I made XO and my hands on time went way down. My maintenance focus became adjusting PL and PSG headspace and timing. My Motor Sergeant could have done it by himself. I considered it bad form to let him throat punch other leaders in the Company area, though.
I was an enlisted aerial photographer. My squadron was a test squadron that flew F-111, F-4, F-15, F-15E, F-16, A-10, and T-38 aircraft. Most of the pilots and WSOs (weapons system officers) maintained currency (meaning were considered qualified to fly) in two different aircraft types. I flew in the backseat of T-38, F-4, F-15, F-16, and UH-1 choppers. I don’t recall whether I was allowed to maintain currency in 2 or 3 fighters plus the chopper, but if I needed to ride in something I wasn’t currently qualified to fly, I had to have a special briefing called a “Form 45”, which in theory was a quick refresher in emergency procedures for that aircraft type. In practice, it mostly involved me getting the life support guys to find me a harness for the airplane type
Maintaining currency meant flying the aircraft type a certain minimum amount of time, having formal egress training every so often, and passing the written emergency procedures test given every so often.
OY, yeah, you can have your hull cleaning all to yourself.
You armor/mechanized guys and us heavy mechanics, good grief the crap we drop down under the floor plates.
<evil grin> Yes Sir, I did the trouble shooting by the manual, the wiring harness is bad not the fuel pump and needs to be replaced. I’m sorry sir, I can’t help it if it happens to run under the turret, I’m not the designer that decided that was a good place to put the other fuel tank.
IIRC it was in Michael Orr’s “King of The Killing Zone” that I saw the stoyr about the turbine engine folks visiting the tank plant for the first time. They were used to an aviation environment where their turbines were used in helicopters. Then they went to a tank plant and saw workers on the line making small adjustments with sledgehammers. They were aghast.
