Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Briefing, and no, that's nothing to do with underwear

My job is to forecast the weather for a specific set of customers. My forecasts must be as accurate as I can get them, they must be delivered on time, and when I deliver them in person, they must be given in a manner that results in the customer believing me. If I put it like that it's quite scary sounding. Possibly more so when you consider that the customer is the RAF. If I get parts of the forecast wrong people could die. That might sound a bit melodramatic but in this case it's true. I won't go into the details of that right now as there's time later to expand.
For the last three months I've been observing the weather (this does not mean watching the weather, but recording changes in cloud height, visibility and other things) and practicing producing forecasts but not actually delivering them. Yesterday that changed. I had my first brief!
Okay, there were only three pilots in the room and they'd been asked to be nice, but damn it that doesn't matter. It was a real brief, I delivered it and I didn't look like a complete tit!
At the end of a brief, the last powerpoint slide is always "any questions?" One of the squadrons we brief is renowned for not responding to the slide, or indeed most of the presentation. This time they asked a couple of questions, one was really nice and one was something that wasn't too bad.
At today's brief, a different forecaster was keeping an eye on me. This time there were 6 of them (ohh). The brief went better and at the end the "any questions" slide came up to be greeted with marked indifference by the squadron and a cheerful "what's the wind going to be over the channel at 10000ft three days from now?" from the other forecaster.
Cue "rabbit in headlamps" look from muggins here, and no reaction at all from the pilots. We left with me muttering "excuse us, I need to kill this forecaster."
Later this week I should be briefing the other squadron on the station. There will probably be ten times as many of them there and they are a much more sarcastic bunch. Should be interesting.
BTW the station in Yorkshire that I'm serving at has two squadrons, as previously mentioned. (This will probably give you enough intel to figure it out). B, as I'll call them, are a training squadron. These are the less formal ones that I'll be briefing later. The other squadron, T, are a fighter squadron and much more serious. It seems to be the way that fighter squadrons take everything more seriously, which, all things considered, is probably a good thing, but it requires a different manner when dealing with them. With B you can relax and have "banter" with them (an essential skill, as I'm finding out), whereas T expect professionalism and an air of "this is serious, we may be about to go to war", which I can't even type without my eyebrow raising and an expression of "Biggles gets the runs". It's an RAF thing.

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