"You couldn't choose a harder place" to move cargo, McNabb recently told a House Armed Services Committee panel.
Moving cargo by air is more expensive but reduces convoy casualties, he said.
On a recent practice mission in Maryland, Mentges and his crew thundered off a runway at Warfield air base, east of Baltimore, and swung out over a latticework of suburban homes and highways, heading northeast toward Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Glancing occasionally out of the oversized cockpit windows at the landscape tilting 1,000 feet below, Mentges, the colonel who was in Afghanistan last year, and his co-pilot, Capt. Geoff Haan, a 31-year-old from Oneonta, N.Y., kept up a steady exchange with a controller at the Aberdeen drop zone code-named Aegis.
"Aegis, what do you give us for surface winds?"
"Sir, I am at five knots at 010 [degrees], how copy?"
"Copy, five knots at zero one zero," Haan replied crisply.
The highly automated C-130J cockpit includes a computer that calculates precisely the time and point in space to drop the pallet, corrected for the aircraft's speed and altitude and for surface wind speed and direction. It displays the path to that point on one of several cockpit screens.
The cockpit also features an automatic warning system that kept being triggered as Mentges gently coasted down toward Aberdeen and his release point at 700 feet above the ground - outside the speed and altitude parameters set for normal flight operations.
"Terrain ahead, terrain ahead," warned a woman's soft voice, designed to penetrate a busy pilot's distractions.
"Two minutes," Mentges said to his crew on the cargo deck, ordering the ramp to be lowered.
"Too low! Too low! Pull up!" the female recording warned. When no one responded, she added helpfully, "Landing gear! Landing gear!"
"Flaps at 50," Mentges interrupted, dismissing the automatic warnings. "Crew, one minute ... Green light ... pallet clear!"
It looks easy because of the practiced coordination among the flight deck crew, the loadmasters in the cargo bay and air controllers on the ground.
For Maryland's crews, the routines have been honed on three extensive combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, where a typical day might involve three sorties involving airdrops or ground stops to offload cargo or take on casualties.
