JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, TX –
A team from U.S. Army
North’s Task Force 51 at Fort Sam Houston packed their bags and headed across
town to Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland March 2 to train on loading their
equipment on military aircraft.
The training was part
of the task force’s quarterly emergency deployment readiness exercise, or EDRE.
There is no “down cycle” for the task force, so they must be prepared year
round to deploy anywhere in the continental U.S. at a moment’s notice. The need
to be constantly ready makes routine training like this critical for a number
of reasons.
“We have quite a lot
of new people in Task Force 51, so it’s important we get people trained up,”
said Lt. Col. Sandra Chavez, TF-51’s logistics chief. “It’s also important
because the nature of our mission is deploying with no advance notice, whether
by military aircraft or ground convoy, so we have to stay familiar and trained
on the processes for both.”
For the training,
TF-51 used the 433rd Airlift Wing’s mockup of a C-5 Galaxy aircraft to load two
Emergency Response Vehicles, or ERVs, plus a large shipping container and a
pallet of duffel bags.
Air Force air
transportation specialists Master Sgt. Alejandro Molina and Tech Sgt. Crystal
Schiller assisted the team with the training.
Both are experienced at airlifting vehicles like the ERVs during
numerous deployments and operations with federal agencies such as the FBI and
Border Patrol.
“My job is to inspect
the cargo and make sure it is good for shipment,” Molina said. “The customer
typically loads their own equipment but they need to know what is okay and what
needs to be fixed before they get here, so they don’t have frustrated cargo
that we can’t ship.”
For example, Schiller
explained, a vehicle can be dripping water from its air conditioner or up to
one drop per minute of oil, but any leaking gasoline or brake fluid will mean
the vehicle is not transportable.
For some on the TF-51
team, the training was old hat, but for others, it was a first.
“We have 50 percent
people who are new and 50 percent who are veterans to this, so it’s good
training,” Chavez said. “It gives the new people a better understanding of what
we need to do to complete our mission and get us out the door.”
Sgt. 1st Class
Fernando Davis, a TF-51 veteran since 2013, said even though the training was
in a mockup and they didn’t actually fly anywhere, the conditions were
identical to a real deployment.
“The way this is
happening is exactly the way it should happen in real life,” Davis said.
After loading and
unloading the mock aircraft, the team then drove to Camp Bullis to join another
TF-51 team that was training on setting up an operations center, in preparation
for a week of disaster response exercises.