Attitude Flying

Among its operators and the wider aviation community the P-3 is known as a rugged, reliable workhorse. But Squadron Leader Marija Jovanovich, the executive officer (XO) of the RAAF’s 10 Squadron, refers to the P-3 somewhat more passionately and descriptively.

“It’s 135,000 pounds of romping, stomping, anti-submarine warfare machine!”

‘It’s 135,000 pounds of romping, stomping, anti- submarine warfare machine!’ Maz Jovanovich

‘Maz’ has flown and had a love affair with the RAAF’s AP-3C Orion since 2007. “It’s a magnificent aircraft,” she said. “Just look at its history, it’s been around for so long and done so well.

“This is something you learn as a test pilot, how to look at aircraft critically. When you look at a P-3, its lines are so clean. Its speed range is from 115kt in the landing configuration to 405kt near sea level – it flies throughout that range beautifully. It’s just an intricate system of ropes and pulleys, but there’s something really magnificent about the engineering feat that is the P-3.”

If being a squadron XO and a B Category Maritime Captain and an AP-3C Check Captain weren’t achievements enough, Maz holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in mathematics and physics with a university medal in physics, she has a Master of Systems Engineering and a Masters of Science (Flight Test Engineering), and is an experimental test pilot.

Maz is also a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society and Australian Women Pilots Association, is an associate member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, and regularly speaks at professional and academic events around the country.

She is, like so many of her peers, and as the current Air Force recruiting ads promise, accomplished.

SCIENCE & ADVENTURE

Maz was born in the former Yugoslavia, and in 1995 at age 13 migrated to New Zealand with her parents to escape growing tensions and conflict in the Balkans.

As proof of the old adage that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – both of her parents are surgeons – Maz excelled at sciences at school in New Zealand. So when she started thinking about life after high school, she was naturally drawn to opportunities that would combine practical science applications with adventure.

“I consider myself an engineer and scientist by training and education, but I’m also a historian and philosopher by choice,” she said. “While science wasn’t the only thing I was interested in, it was definitely where my gifts and major interests lie.

“It was probably when I was about 16 that flying started to crystallise as something I’d like to pursue in order to combine those two dual loves of adventure and science.”

In 2000 Maz won a scholarship to go to Scouts New Zealand’s Walsh Memorial Scout Flying School at Matamata where she logged 10.2 hours in a Cessna 152 and went solo after six hours. “One reason I wanted to do that was because I wanted to make sure that I would actually like it,” she recalls. “I understand there are some people who strap into a small airplane for the first time, they get airborne and they hate it.

“I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of going through air force selection if I wasn’t sure this was something I actually wanted to do. Intellectually, I wanted to do it, but I wanted to know that the physical sensation was also something I wanted to do.”

She needn’t have worried. “I loved it, absolutely loved it!” she said. “I still remember that feeling, we took off and I think what I said was ‘WEEE!’

“I’m forever grateful to my high school for getting me that scholarship because it really changed the course of my life. For the three weeks we all camped in tents at the airfield, and during the day we flew. It was just a really buzzy experience, and really gave me an insight into the fact that this was something I wanted to do.”

Maz joined the RAAF straight after finishing Year 12 in New Zealand and attended the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra. “I’ve never actually lived in Australia outside of the military,” she said.

“At ADFA I started doing a Bachelor of Technology Aeronautical (BTech Aero). That’s three out of the four years of an aeronautical engineering degree, but after the first year I quit that because I wasn’t enjoying it. I switched to a double degree of pure science, maths and physics. The reason I didn’t like BTech Aero was because I was craving the first principles stuff, the deep understanding as opposed to the application at that stage.”

The subsequent masters degrees she has completed and her flying career to date have scratched that application itch. “While I wanted to end up flying, I also definitely wanted to go to university,” she said.

After completing her honours year at ADFA in 2004, Maz went straight to the Basic Flying Training School (BFTS) at Tamworth in January 2005.

“If I had retained anything from the Scout Camp, it was so minuscule that I can’t really pinpoint anything,” she said. “But, I was actually pretty glad that I started from next to nothing. I just knew I liked it and I didn’t have any bad habits to take on to the CT-4, which was nice.

‘I was actually pretty glad that I started from next to nothing.’

“There are different ways of flying an aeroplane, and the military wants you to fly aeroplanes in a particular way – it’s called attitude flying,” she added.

“Sometimes the way you learn to fly in the GA environment is different. If you fly enough in the GA environment to pick up muscle memory, it can be very difficult to change that.”

After BFTS it was off to No 2 Flying Training School (2FTS) and the PC-9 at RAAF Pearce near Perth. Unlike many new military pilots who aspire to go on to fats jets, Maz hadn’t yet identified a preference for what aircraft she’d like to fly. “I was not really willing to put all my eggs into one basket,” she said.

“I got to 2FTS and I just wanted to graduate and get my wings, so I didn’t really start thinking about types until later through 2FTS. I made a very deliberate decision early on to just take it one step at a time rather than shoving off headlong in a direction that may or may not eventuate.”

Towards the end of her training at 2FTS, Maz expressed a preference to go to the AP-3C due in part to that aircraft’s high operational tempo.
“I was very, very excited to go to the P-3,” she said. “I desperately wanted to go on operations and fly ops all over the world, and the P-3s have been doing that forever.

“The other thing was, and I don’t know when this awareness came in, but I knew that I would be well suited to the multi-crew environment,” she added. “I knew that would be something that I would both enjoy and be good at. That’s not to say that I didn’t think I’d be good in the single-seat environment, it’s just that I knew this was more me.

Like a kid in a toy shop, Maz’s face genuinely lights up when she talks about the Orion.

“Firstly, there’s the pure aircraft nerd side of it,” she said. “Then what it does is really excellent – 90 per cent of what we do is operational.

“In my first five-year tour as a line pilot, I was flying search and rescue missions out of the Solomon Islands. I flew anti-piracy missions off the coast of Somalia, I’ve chased subs on exercise off the coast of Southern California. I’ve flown in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, South East Asia – the world becomes your playground because of the many roles that the P-3 carries out.

“And then there’s high-end anti-submarine warfare which is very challenging – I once had it described to me as a chess game at 200 knots, against an opponent you can’t see. Then of course there was the Middle East. I’ve done one tour flying over Iraq, and two tours flying over Afghanistan, in addition to the maritime tasking we did there. Again, a completely different set of roles, but very, very rewarding.”

The overland mission the AP-3C has been employed on speaks to how useful the platform is.

“The aircraft was not designed to fly orbits at flight levels. But, it did the job and it did it well.”

TEST PILOT

Through her speaking engagements and published papers, Maz is building a reputation for thought leadership within the Air force and the wider defence and academic communities, and says she had never come up against any professional or cultural restrictions to do so.

“I guess I’m lucky that I’m part of a very progressive Air Force,” she said.

“It’s not something that Air Force pushes on anyone, but it’s something that fits with me, and the Air Force has never been anything but supportive of those predilections.”

In 2011, the RAAF called for expressions of interest for maritime pilots to apply to become a test pilot. Maz immediately applied and was shortlisted after an initial selection process. The process also requires the applicant to build a network of advocates.

“There are always a lot of phone calls in the background, because one of the most important things as a test pilot is to have credibility in your community,” she explained. “At a relatively junior rank you might have to make some big calls and, more than anything else you need your community to believe in you.

“Obviously the phone calls that were made about me were positive, because I got invited down to ARDU for a week of selection activities,” she added. “During that process they run a combination of academics and some exams, a couple of flying briefs, and then a couple of sorties where you are really demonstrating your rate of uptake.

“They teach you a couple of basic flight test techniques on the ground, then they have you replicate them in the air. And they just want to see whether your learning gradient is still what it was on pilot’s course, because test pilot school is all about gradient.”

Maz’s love of science obviously attracted her to the idea of being a test pilot.

“I love the experimental side of the TP work,” she said. “I read The Right Stuff when I was quite young, and I always found that side of it, the pushing the envelope side of it, really fascinating.

“And of course, when you’re a line driver you look at your options,” she added. “You weigh up what you think you might want to do and when I found out this was an option, I was sold. There were also a couple of people early on who had mentioned it…the squadron QFI (qualified flight instructor) at 10 Squadron when I was a ‘bograt’ co-pilot talked to me and said, ‘You know what? I reckon in the future, you might want to look at the test world’.”

Maz is unable to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes someone a good TP candidate. “I never spoke to that QFI about what it was that made him say that,” she said. “But he’d been around for a long time and he saw something, that’s the important bit. I guess it’s an aptitude, but it’s also a set of characteristics that would make you suitable for that kind of work.

“Obviously there has to be a degree of flying aptitude there. But there also has to be a methodical approach, and an interest in that deeper understanding of why airplanes work the way they do, as opposed to just thinking, ’well, it does this when I do this, so I’m just going to do this.’ I’ve always been more of a, ‘Why does it do that?’ kind of person.”

At the end of the ARDU week candidates sit a selection board, after which they are advised of their suitability. Maz was advised in mid-2012 that her application was successful and that she would be attending the USAF Test Pilots School at Edwards AFB in California.

“The current Commander SRG (Surveillance & Response Group), Air Commander Craig Heap was actually the OC (92WG) at the time,” she recalls. “He called me into his office to give me the good news. He said, ‘You’re going to the USAF school.’ I didn’t immediately process that, because I had defaulted to the US Navy school at Pax (Patuxent River, Maryland) because that’s where we’d been going.”

Most RAAF test pilot candidates attend the USN Test Pilots School at Pax River, the Empire Test Pilots School (ETPS) in the UK, or the privately operated National Test Pilots School (NTPS) at Mojave in California. The RAAF had not sent a test pilot candidate to Edwards since 1991.

“When he said it again, I clicked, ‘Edwards?’,” she said. “Because that’s a massive dream come true just in itself. For an airplane geek, to drive to work past an SR-71 every day…just magnificent. So that was a real surprise.”

Edwards AFB is perhaps the holy land of aerospace development.

“It’s magic,” says Maz. “Edwards is either in the middle of nowhere, or it’s in the middle of everywhere.

“The environment…there is all sorts of awesome stuff flying over your head every day…B-1s, B-2s, F-22s, F-35s…But also things like Dreamchaser— we watched its first free-flight. And there was one memorable weekend when, driving on to base we saw a 787 doing touch and goes as part of its own testing.

“And then there’s the aircraft museum, and the school itself which has an F-104 out the front on a stick. And photos on the wall, and the people who had walked those halls, just being there was surreal. You can’t help but feel a little bit of, ‘How did I get here?’ I still feel like that even now.”

The first step for new candidates at the USAFTPS is to qualify on the Northrop T-38, the USAF’s fast jet trainer.

“I started out hating that airplane, and I ended up loving it,” Maz recalls. “It’s a hard little airplane to fly, but that makes sense when you think that it was designed as a trainer when the people who flew it would graduate on to the ‘century series’ (F-100 to F-106) fighters, which were notoriously difficult to fly.

“The T-38 is a very interesting aircraft,” she added. “You walk out to the airplane the first time and your first thought is, ‘Where are the wings?’ It’s also got some very peculiar aerodynamic characteristics. It’s got a very steep back of the drag curve, so you can find yourself in trouble quite easily. But they don’t because the USAF doesn’t fly that aircraft in the pattern using alpha (angle of attack) the way you fly a Hawk or a Hornet.

“One peculiarity of flying a T-38 is that you’re flying around base in the closed pattern at 180kt,” she added. “Your minimum speed on final is 160kt but your landing speed is 135 knots, so there’s an instant there where you’re supposed to instantly lose 25kt. But of course, that doesn’t happen.

“One of the things that was very uncomfortable for somebody of my background was the fact that at about 100ft you just chop the power in the T-38. That takes so much self-control for somebody who grew up flying a a P-3 which gets a lot of its lift from the blown nature of the wing. If you chop the power in a P-3, you go straight down.”

Maz flew 23 different aircraft types at Edwards, including the F-16 VISTA (Variable stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) which is a F-16D modified with a bespoke advanced flight control system, allowing the handling characteristics of the aircraft to be modified while airborne.

Other types Maz flew included the Beech C-12 (King Air), standard F-16s, the F-15E, the KC-135, the F/A-18F, a MiG-15, an Antonov An-2 biplane, a Grumman Albatross amphibian, and an Extra 300.

“You fly an aircraft, you do a selection of flight test techniques, and you get a feel for the aircraft,“ she explained. “And then you write a short report on it in which you compare and contrast it to other aircraft, that’s called a ‘Quick Look Evaluation’.

”The idea is that, once you know what you’re doing in the test pilot sense, you should be able to look at the airplane, look at its documentation, form a rough idea of how it’s going to behave, jump in, spot check the points that you know are going to be interesting from looking at it and from looking at its control systems, etc. Then you have at least some information about how that airplane flies. The idea is that if you only have one shot at having a look at a particular airplane, this is the methodology you use to look at it.”

One of the things the students do towards the end of the course is to visit the Edwards museum. “You just walk around,” she said. “And from all the things you’ve learned about shapes of surfaces and stability derivatives etc, you can now look at an aircraft and you can quite accurately predict exactly how it’s going to behave just from what it looks like. That’s really cool.”

When Maz graduated and returned to Australia, she regained her qualifications as an AP-3C maritime captain, but her main job was as a test pilot at ARDU, working on various test programs then underway.

“I worked on some KC-30 programs, not as the test pilot but as part of the flight test team,” she said. “I also did the initial concept demonstration of the non-intrusive flight test instrumentation (NIFTI) on PC-9, the initial handling and testing with the pods and the sensors.”

“My favourite program was on a P-3 that was ‘misbehaving’, in that it had an ‘interesting’ aerodynamic characteristic about it and we were trying to explore that. In the end, we ended up tufting the aircraft – we stuck thousands of bits of string to it and turned it into a flying wind tunnel model. So, this is 2015, within a few years of the P-3’s end of life of type, and I’m doing the purest of pure structures and aerodynamics flight test. If you had told me that that was going to be a thing, I would not have believed you. But that was a really awesome experience.”

Maz isn’t sure what is next in her flying career, but she hopes to stay in the operational world and to have a long Air Force career.

“I really enjoyed my work at ARDU, but I knew that my future lay in the operational world,” she said. “I feel like I went away and got the test pilot skillset so that I could round out my flying expertise, but my heart and soul are deeply in the operational world.”

‘My heart and soul are deeply in the operational world.’

Whether that next step is transitioning to the new P-8 Poseidon or a tour in Canberra, remains to be seen. But her first love will always be the P-3.

“When it works, it is just like rolling around the world with a family, doing important work and having fun.

“That’s what I love more than anything else, and it’s hard to make this statement, but I would give up the test pilot stuff to do another tour as a maritime captain, on a maritime crew. Because that is the best job in the world.”