Air Combat Officer

Good day. I'm Flight Lieutenant Chris Pendleton. I'm an air combat officer on board the AP3 Orions. And my job, essentially, is to make the tactical decisions of the mission, whether it be hunting a submarine, dropping life rafts for search and rescues, or up north in Darwin looking for the illegal immigrants coming into Australia. Originally, I had no idea what I was going to do. And Year 11, a recruiting team came through my school and gave their presentation, and it got me hooked. They told me about the Australian Defence Force Academy, and they were going to pay for me to go to Canberra, go to university. Excellent. Why not? At first, most people want to join up as a pilot, but when I read the job description about how you pretty much do the flying, but that's about it-- you don't actually have to think about anything-- I thought air combat officer, you have to make decisions, get to tell people how to run the show. And it just seemed a bit more appealing to myself. I spent a year on the basic air combat officer's course that runs down in Sale, just east of Melbourne. But I was lucky enough to do it in Canada. I went to Winnipeg-- spent the year there, all paid for by the Defence Force. There's pretty much three levels for my job. You can go maritime streaming like myself, you can go to the fast jet world, and then of course, you can go air defence or air battle space manager, and hopefully get onto the AWACS when they come in. Your typical day is not very typical. If we're at work, I'll be starting about 8:00, finishing 4:30, 5:00. But if we're flying, we usually take about two hours to preflight, and turn the computers on, get everything running. And then missions can go from 8 to 11 hours. You can take 20 people on board, but 6 of those will be passengers only. They have spots down in the back to sit, and we can take 12, usually, for all the operational positions. My role as the air combat officer on board is to tie all that in together, make the decision, and tell the crew what's going to happen next. So as a junior operator, I was in charge of all the radios, make sure information came and left the aircraft in a timely manner. Now as a senior maritime tactical coordinator, I'm in charge of the mission, making the decisions. The experiences you can enjoy are vast and varied. I've been over to the Middle East twice now. I've been to Japan a couple times for exercises, did the year in Canada for nav course. Now I go to Darwin a lot for searching for illegal immigrants on Operation Resolute. I did expect to do a lot of travelling and get around, but I never expected to make as many friends I have, and I can pretty much go, now, to any city in Australia and have someone to stay with, especially going through the Defence Force Academy. You make a lot of lifelong friends through there, and then throughout your career, every posting you have, you make new friends.