[Pilots] CAP Troubling Trends

[Greg Bestul]

Hello MN Wing Pilots,
I want to draw your attention to a couple of trends we are seeing that need to be corrected.
First, we have been seeing more than the normal number of sorties that are not being closed out promptly. By regulation sorties should be closed out within 72 hours of completion. That’s 3 days. What seems to be happening is if the sortie isn’t closed out the day it’s completed or the next day, it seems that it has a tendency to be forgotten and not closed out for many days or not at all. The word from NHQ is that they want to change the regulation to make all sorties closed out within 48 hours. This seems like a better idea. We will be using this new tighter restriction effective immediately to help alleviate non-closed out sorties.
In addition to sorties not being closed out, we are seeing large numbers of sorties that may be closed out, but do not have fuel receipts and form 10Vez forms uploaded for them (these are for funded missions). We must have LEGABLE copies of these uploaded to the sortie. They then have to be validated by wing and submitted to NHQ who must approve them before they will pay for the expenses. This all needs to be done by NHQ’s deadline or they will deny payment. We have had several cases recently that have come very close to having the charges sent back to the pilot to pay due to no receipts being uploaded to validate. Receipts should be uploaded onto the sortie within 48 hours as well to close out of the mission. If there are unusual circumstances where a receipt printer does not work, you need to be proactive in getting a copy from the FBO or controlling agency to upload ASAP. We have heard from FBO’s that it makes it difficult for them to track down fuel receipts the further back they have to go, many times they have a lot of transactions to look through to find the one you may need.
The last item I want to remind everyone about is a new process that was introduced in January, but since we haven’t used it much it probably has been forgotten.

  *   WMIRS now requires entry of Actual Time of Departure (ATD) and Actual Time of Arrival (ATA) on mission debriefs.
  *   The ATA–ATD time (automatically converted to tenths of an hour in WMIRS and displayed in the ATA-ATD box) must be within 0.5 hours of the aircraft tach time, or an error message will appear.
  *   ATA and ATD are defined as wheels up and wheels down, not engine start or engine shutdown.
  *   This change supports data integrity as Civil Air Patrol transitions to PlaneLogix, the new Maintenance Information System, and is intended to reduce maintenance risk and administrative burden on pilots.

Thank you for your help in making sure the toughest part of CAP flying, the paperwork, is being accomplished completely and in a timely manner.
Take Care, Fly Safe,
Capt. Greg Bestul
Minnesota Wing Director of Operations
Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Air Force Auxiliary
612-251-4786
GoCivilAirPatrol.com<https://www.gocivilairpatrol.com/>
[cid:afbd1fc4-745a-4eb7-9f54-7f84eaa96bff]

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