-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
Heavy Metal (of the rotary kind)
- Thread starter HeyJoe
- Start date
Come on man! Keep up! I got a whole thread-jack turned thread about the 53 steering knowledges.
If I was a rotor head, the 53 would have been where I'd hope to go. Are they sought after, or does everyone want to drop seals and swagger and vertrep with HSC? Any Helo that can pick someone's house up when you piss them off is pretty impressive.
A look inside, from the Corpus Christi Air Show.
AE 606 Photos
AE 606 Photos
Yeah i have that Tshirt. I was out at HC4 in sigonella. As much work as that helo was, it was still a beast. It was an eye opener when we were on standby for the olympics casualty evac with something like 27 litters ready to go.
Yep. They thought of everything except taking along some troubleshooters and some Go boxes. One bird downed for a hydraulic pump and the other down for a bad BIM indicator and nobody brought a tire gauge. Black eye for the Navy no matter how you put it.
I was busy graduating IERW....
I can tell you all about steering in the 47 thanks to one of my former crew chief classmates.
Blast from the past (5 years ago at least)
040722-N-5821W-004 Naval Air Station Sigonella, Sicily (July 22, 2004) - A MH-53E "Sea Dragon" helicopter assigned to Helicopter Combat Support Squadron Four (HC-4) undergoes pre-flight checks at the Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella flight line before a mission. HC-4 is based in Sigonella and transports cargo, passengers and performs a wide range of heavy helicopter combat support missions, including mine-countermeasures operations. Sigonella provides logistics support for Commander, Sixth Fleet and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in the Mediterranean area of operation. U.S. Navy photo by Journalist 2nd Class Stephen P. Weaver (RELEASED)
040722-N-5821W-004 Naval Air Station Sigonella, Sicily (July 22, 2004) - A MH-53E "Sea Dragon" helicopter assigned to Helicopter Combat Support Squadron Four (HC-4) undergoes pre-flight checks at the Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella flight line before a mission. HC-4 is based in Sigonella and transports cargo, passengers and performs a wide range of heavy helicopter combat support missions, including mine-countermeasures operations. Sigonella provides logistics support for Commander, Sixth Fleet and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in the Mediterranean area of operation. U.S. Navy photo by Journalist 2nd Class Stephen P. Weaver (RELEASED)
Good to see that the PAOs are just as bad now as they were 4 years ago. HC-4 didn't do AMCM. If they had, they would have been a HELMINERON and not a HELSUPRON.
There were only a few slots every now and then so the seats were usually competitive. There weren't many guys that wanted 53's overall though.
If guys don't want to choose a platform that is mostly land based and perdiem getting, then I don't know what to say.
Yeah, but they didn't get all uppity about "near mid airs" whenever 60s came within 1.0 of them.
I don't remember the exact numbers but we once calculated that a three year tour with HM-15 that included two Bahrain deployments would be ~50K better then your typical USS Ship squadron.
The common consensus I heard when I went through was no one wanted to have to tow all the time, because that was the rumor that's all 53 guys did. I personally wanted them but there weren't any seats for about two months when I winged.
Bingo!