Proper procedure for timing racetracks

Maybe you're right. In our culture we are safety oriented. When procedures are not followed, people die. "Oral lore" is not safe way of passing informations. That's what our ancestors used to do in history. :)

Inviato dal mio S2 utilizzando Tapatalk

This will probably fall on obstinately deaf ears but you'd probably have an aneurysm if you knew how the manuals were actually written so here we go.

Each manual actually has two effective "sponsors." One at CNAF that deals with administrative issues (such as notifying the fleet of policy changes and physically producing the manuals) and a service sponsor (both a squadron and a person in that squadron) who is the final authority on matters pertaining to operational safety and standardization. This is not this person's primary job, it is a "collateral duty" outside of their primary flying job. This person changes to a new guy every 18-36 months who generally has no experience doing it and needs to be taught or learn independently.

Each manual is typically on a two or three year revision cycle, offset from other mostly adjacent (not necessarily higher or lower) manuals from other communities. At a revision working group (a "NATOPS conference") representatives from all over the fleet are in attendance. These individuals are supposed to be the experts but most of the time it's whoever is available due to operational constraints. Changes to manuals have to pass a popular vote. The "experts" don't vote, their Wing representatives do. Sometimes the Wing representatives vote against the "experts."

You get one week (usually only three working days factoring in opening and closing administrivia) to implement all the proposed changes for the past two years. In many cases there isn't even enough time to field all the issues and so they are prioritized. Lower priority changes may not get voted on at all. Some manuals are updated in accordance with constantly changing command guidance out of sequence with manuals that haven't hit their revision cycle timeline yet. To implement new procedures that don't align with existing older manuals, you definitionally have to make changes that don't match what other manuals say. Sometimes the guidance that influenced that change gets reversed and now you have to change your manual back in two years.

When they say "the NATOPS is written in blood," it means both that it is incredibly difficult to make changes merely for precision's sake and that the procedures exist until an accident or fatality necessitates a change. Off-cycle updates are rare and are typically initiated by fleet "hazreps" (hazard reports) for matters of safety only.

When a procedure is written or changed that has any necessary tolerance, it's often presented to the conference in the form of "eh, plus or minus ten seconds sounds good" if it's not something driven by avionics or some external influence. If that tolerance was "good enough" or fleet procedures were more strict so as never to generate a hazrep, a change to the original tolerance (no matter how arbitrary its genesis) may never be reviewed or made. In many cases it doesn't matter because the tolerances are often for training purposes and needing to have some objective metric for passing or failing a student in training. The actual targets and techniques used seek far more precision than the bare minimum standard.

So it's nice to think that there exists a world where the manuals are perfect and scientific, but the military operates in reality and "an 80% solution executed now is better than a perfect solution executed too late/never." There are diagrams and entire paragraphs in some of these manuals that are years out of date and there just isn't the time or urgency for literally whoever is available to fix them. Maybe if we had people whose primary duties were to write manuals then they would execute those duties with the precision expected of the aviators flying their airplanes, but we don't.

And that's why the opening paragraph says "Take this all with a grain of salt. Know this information. Know your airplane/community. Use sound judgment and know when and where to deviate."

Hell, it's not just the Navy either.

I've seen how Army Technical Manuals ("-10"s) are written too and it's not much further off. The Air Force and Army may tend to tell you everything you can do rather than the Navy style of only specifying the stuff you shouldn't do, but writing a TM from scratch is often an exercise in the blind leading the blind.

Dozens of engineers with compartmented knowledge of the system advising pilot representatives (not necessarily even trained in the airframe yet) who are dictating to subcontracted writers just looking for something to pay the bills and with no vested interest in the long-term accuracy of the document after their contract expires. Systems around for 20 years whose manuals were still internally inconsistent in places because no one at the operator/pilot level bothers to submit a change request or it would cost more money to change the sentence and redistribute the document than the cost of just doing the procedure incorrectly and occasionally breaking something.

It's the nature of having an organization so large and decentralized that it's cost-prohibitive to expect instantaneous changes for change's sake.

To clarify, that's not to say that the manuals would be blindly followed to the letter with the inevitable result of breaking equipment. That's where the oral tradition, written supplementary documents and checklists, and computer-based and classroom training fills in with things like techniques and supplemental procedures. Those offset the risks of that happening or expound upon very generalized procedures in the NATOPS.

Those kinds of things don't get captured for posterity on the sites that host snapshots of operating manuals that only see significant updates every few years.

So, after all this... we shall still strive for 1 sec. off EAT :D and if we show up at the fix 10 or more seconds late the boss (directly!) will put us in Delta hold for 10 min. or will tell us to go and find another carrier (read: MP server ;/) to play on!

I hope that this sort of script will be included in the upcoming "carrier module" along with boss's harsh language (in every language, lol).

Hey Guys,

dose anyone know how to set the Hack time, for EAT?

I thought you could set it in ET,

TIMEUFC (HSI) , then ET UFC.

just start, stop, and resume

So....back on topic. Easy peasy CASE II/III holding that I've been able to time to 6 minutes within +/- 4 seconds at 7,000 feet is:

-- Flown on 180° relative BRC (CASE II); relative FB (CASE III)

-- 250kts, 30° AoB

-- Start turn approx. 2nm before hitting your marshal distance

-- Downwind approx. 1min15sec; Upwind until marshal distance

Doing the same at 6,000 feet gave me a +/-6 second time, so I'm guessing the downwind leg needs to be adjusted about 2 seconds or so for every 1,000 feet to stay within the same +/- 4 second tolerance.

Anyway, maybe that helps someone.