Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola Air Field Support Officer Lt. Cmdr. Kenyatto Mayes discusses training conducted by Sailors on arresting gear engines while in the NAS Pensacola Arresting Gear Shop in order to prepare for an upcoming annual gear certification.
Transcript
Here at Air Operations Department, we just completed a 12 to 18 month runway project of construction. Now the next thing we have to do is get prepared for our ongoing annual Gear Cert. What that requires is to have our training where our 30 sailors are learning all the operations and all the major components of our 12 arresting gear engines. The annual gear cert is very important to us, where we support all our tenant commands in recurring their emergency aircraft that come in to ensure that the gear have the specified numbers, and they can meet the metrics to handle emergencies as they come in to support our tenant commands. I hope our sailors gained importance exactly on what they do everyday when they come from doing their pre-ops, and when it comes to their monthly or their quarterly, or any type of maintenance that we have, because it’s very important they can see during the gear cert that hey, they’re doing this to support not only the tenant commands, but hey, the Navy as a whole, to ensure that we’re putting out pilots to, and to train the fleet. These are sailors that are used to working 16 to 18 hours when they’re at sea. That mindset doesn’t change when we’re here in port, and when we’re here with our families. It’s not as long of hours, but that mindset absolutely stays the same, because we’re always in the business of launching freedom, and recovering victories.