226-Valkyrie’s View: A Year Among the Stars

August 13th, 2552 – Formation flying
Pilot/Mechanic/Jump-Gate Navigator/Grunt Kat “S-Kat” James Reporting

While the non-pilot cross-training crew members worked on marching – the pilots worked on formation flying and team tactics. We learned about flying with a wingman and protecting your wingman. That’s harder than it sounds especially for non-military types – we’re used to watching out for ourselves and especially the criminal element is used to ‘everyone for themselves’ being a perfectly acceptable team tactic.

It was hard for us to learn new tricks, and let’s face it, people with my— area of expertise, tend to have trouble trusting people to watch their back, and it’s even harder to allow yourself to get used to having people you trust because you know at some point, they’re going to fail you.

It did make for some interesting calls when we decided to do a training mock battle and I got paired with the smuggler – teamwork in smuggling means you have one person draw the attention of the authorities while the other just waltzes into port and vanishes. They were expecting that tactic, they just didn’t expect the distraction to be the actual target.

Again, it comes down to training and teamwork vs chaos and very different teamwork. They’ve given us our own squadron to train and called it, “The Flying Circus.” I’m not sure but I think they meant it as an insult.

We’re very proud of our squadron, and her name.

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