Question for Army Flight Surgeons.

[ArmyDoc1999]

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OK, I am somewhat familiar with the training involved in Basic Flight Surgeon's Course at Fort Rucker, but any details anyone can provide on the course and duties of an Army FS on active duty would be greatly appreciated.

In exchange, I'll tell you everything I know about being an artillery forward observer. (Right, like that's something you all want to learn about!)

Thanks!

 

[pilotdoc]

Grant-

I am not a FS, but I am at Rucker, and fly with the flight surgeons and the Flight Surgeon course students regularly. The short FS course (not the residency) is 6 weeks long, it involves the study of aeromedical factors (altitude physiology, the eyes, ears, etc), flight and medical records, basic flying (you get to go in the simulator with some knucklehead like me for a couple of hours in the UH-1, UH-60, CH-47, and I believe AH-64), tours of the different aircraft, aviation life support equipment, and some flying as a passenger. Oh, and the altitude chamber.
The flight surgeons at Rucker spend their mornings at the Aviation Medicine clinic (they rotate, I believe) seeing sick-call, etc., then they have days when they do physicals. They have plenty of time during the week to head out and fly with any unit that they can. Most of them are PROFIS (professional filler system - we will all come to know A GREAT deal more about this - when you are working in a hospital or clinic you are "profis" to a go-to-war unit, that you will do some training with and deploy with come deployment time, Rucker was gutted of its flight surgeons last year, as all the flight surgeons were PROFIS to the 101st and off to Iraq).

 

[Homunculus]

OK, I am somewhat familiar with the training involved in Basic Flight Surgeon's Course at Fort Rucker, but any details anyone can provide on the course and duties of an Army FS on active duty would be greatly appreciated.

In exchange, I'll tell you everything I know about being an artillery forward observer. (Right, like that's something you all want to learn about!)

Thanks!

not addressing your main question, but OSU will give you credit for a rotation for the flight surgeon course. two of my army hpsp friends completed it during their 4th year and already had their wings before starting their FP residencies at bragg. (both are mega hu-ah wanting to do operational medicine type guys) good news is that you don't have to take a vacation month to do it and you can get it done before graduating-- the bad news is that i *think* it counts as a specialty elective and not a primary care elective.

also as a sidenote, when i went through advanced camp in 1999 (i'm a prior ROTC grad before medschool) we had a friendly competition put together by the cadre at the artillery familiarization day. they timed people to see how fast they could call in an accurate call for fire. so all the cadets pulled out their cheat cards and went to work . . . then this cadet strolls over, radios in a call for fire off the top of his head after glancing out at the targets, and completely blows away the fastest time. turns out the guy was a green to gold forward observer that did some time in the desert with desert storm, lol.

 

[ArmyDoc1999]

not addressing your main question, but OSU will give you credit for a rotation for the flight surgeon course. two of my army hpsp friends completed it during their 4th year and already had their wings before starting their FP residencies at bragg. (both are mega hu-ah wanting to do operational medicine type guys) good news is that you don't have to take a vacation month to do it and you can get it done before graduating-- the bad news is that i *think* it counts as a specialty elective and not a primary care elective.

also as a sidenote, when i went through advanced camp in 1999 (i'm a prior ROTC grad before medschool) we had a friendly competition put together by the cadre at the artillery familiarization day. they timed people to see how fast they could call in an accurate call for fire. so all the cadets pulled out their cheat cards and went to work . . . then this cadet strolls over, radios in a call for fire off the top of his head after glancing out at the targets, and completely blows away the fastest time. turns out the guy was a green to gold forward observer that did some time in the desert with desert storm, lol.

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try and take advantage of that. Knowing that I won't have to do it during a summer is great news. Frees up more time for other things. Just an FYI, the standard for getting in your initial CFF for AIT Forward Observers is 45 sec from the time the target is identified. How fast did you get it in?