"Aviation Photo Thread" (Planes, Helos, Balloons, etc)...

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Sorry for the large posts (2) today. It's a series of scanned images that don't mean much posted individually, and require a little back-story to make sense.

The initial days of the Kurdish Relief were done mostly by formations flying into areas where groups of refugees had been reported, locating a camp, and then dropping supplies. Hazardous terrain combined with poor visibility made the flying tough, and with no-one on the ground to control the masses we quickly ran out of drop spots as they kept moving the camps to where the supplies previously landed. Near the end of the airdrops we were literally dropping relief supplies on steep slopes to try and not injure anyone on the ground.

Ground forces made their way to camps to coordinate with refugees, and others scouted places where we could safely land to offload and then transport supplies by truck. Camps were consolidated and moved to locations that could be serviced by truck. And the airdrops were replaced by airland operations. Eventually, as the logistics improved, the initial need for large numbers of Hercs dropped and we maintained a smaller presence at Incirlik.

One of our initial airland spots was a small road that was widened for use as the local airfield, just outside Yuksekova in SE Turkey, not too far from the Iranian border.

That wide spot on the road in the Pilot's windscreen? Yep. We're going to land there.
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Lined up and on approach.
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View to the front left of our bird. (Other than my post-landing walkaround I spent my time monitoring our aux power unit and generator while the cargo was offloaded. I only popped my head out of the flight deck emergency escape hatch a couple times to snap a few photos.)
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Crowd of locals gathered to watch the goings-on.
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Over-the-shoulder view of the road/ runway. Two-lane road widened to four-lane, with another 10-foot or so of gravel on either side. As you can see, quite a slope to the surface, and at points if you had a malfunction and veered too far to one side or the other you'd go off the surface and impact a wing in the fields.
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Lined up for departure.
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When the content is as dramatic as this I doubt anyone will moan about large posts!

Thanks.

I guess it speaks as to how jaded/ conditioned to our activities we were.

We never really thought of anything we did as dramatic, it was "just another day at the office" for us.

edit - for us, our "dramatic" stuff were things like flight control failures, multiple engine failures, engine or electrical fires, near-misses with other aircraft or the ground... E-ticket stuff.
 
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