Well this trip is turning out to be loads of fun. After checking out of the hotel at 3 and getting to the airport by about 3:45, we started planning for the flight back to San Antonio with the medical team still over 3 hours away.
The pilot had the great idea of shortening the day by flying closer to the medical team instead of waiting for them to drive back to us. He looked around and found that they were 10 minutes away from Moffett Field near San Francisco and directed us to start planning for that.
This is where things got interesting. The pilot, while well known and somewhat important in AFRC, doesn't have a lot of experience with active duty missions--at least it seems that way. So far throughout the trip he's refused to deal with the active duty command who actually controls us; instead he only deals with AFRC command and tells them to report what he says to the Air Force. The reality is that we're on an Air Force mission and should deal with them exclusively.
Anyhow, this led to the pilot asking the wrong set of people to recut the mission down to Moffett. Some of these wrong people disapproved of the change despite the pilot's repeated assertions that as a reservist he didn't need to listen to the active duty controller. The pilot then started using his AFRC connections to get a reserve general involved. In the end AFRC cut us a training mission to Moffett so that we could continue on the Air Force mission to San Antonio. I'm not positive, but I think a lot of the friction wouldn't have been necessary if we'd been talking to the right folks from the beginning.
Just to kind of poke us in the eye for causing so much trouble, the airplane decided not to work for us. On startup the ignition relay on the #4 engine failed, causing us to shut down and replace it (luckily we had one). Then after re-starting normally we taxiied out for takeoff and on the runway noticed very low power on #4. We wound up taking it back to parking to troubleshoot for an hour, but nothing the crew chiefs could see fixed it. We had to give up for the night because no light carts were available and it was hard to see the engine. The plan is to go back to the hotel and look at it tomorrow in the daylight.
So, 9 hours after checking out I'm back in the same room tonight. The friendly front desk staff gave me a coupon for free internet, but naturally it says it already expired. I guess they base their expirations on Eastern time where it actually is tomorrow, but I got the $9.95 internet anyway. It's not like I wouldn't get it.
