Scariest Day/Night Flying

[Nose]

Just to clear the air, I promise I will take pot shots at Hacker, Huggy, and all their sisters whenever possible, but that wasn't directed at him.

It was a comment about what a Clstrfk that whole shootdown was.

Non-Mode IV Helo

Clueless AWACS (redundant)

Eagle Pilot who can't VID a no-threat Helo, then acts like he killed Godzilla after shooting it down.

CAOC (or whatever it was called back then) that was clueless on the air picture below Angels 5

I don't know Hacker, but I'm pretty sure he would have taken a close look (or 4 or 5) before he pulled the trigger on a Helo that was zero threat. Huggy would have gotten some nice pics of it.

 

[phrogpilot73]

I don't know Hacker, but I'm pretty sure he would have taken a close look (or 4 or 5) before he pulled the trigger on a Helo that was zero threat. Huggy would have gotten some nice pics of it.

As a helo guy, I sure as shit hope he would!!!

 

[HeyJoe]

Just to clear the air, I promise I will take pot shots at Hacker, Huggy, and all their sisters whenever possible, but that wasn't directed at him.

It was a comment about what a Clstrfk that whole shootdown was.

Non-Mode IV Helo

Clueless AWACS (redundant)

Eagle Pilot who can't VID a no-threat Helo, then acts like he killed Godzilla after shooting it down.

CAOC (or whatever it was called back then) that was clueless on the air picture below Angels 5

I don't know Hacker, but I'm pretty sure he would have taken a close look (or 4 or 5) before he pulled the trigger on a Helo that was zero threat. Huggy would have gotten some nice pics of it.

Someone (or several someones in collaboration) took the time to put together a Wiki ariticle on the unfortunate incident. I'm still appalled at lack of definitive comms between fighters and the AWACS and the dysfunction inside the AWACS.

 

[busdriver]

I'm active duty. The ops tempo is always an up and down thing, my crew saw less both flying hours wise and hot LZ wise than some of the other crews I was with. I haven't been to the Stan since 06 though, so I don't know what it's like now. Have fun over there though, there were scary moments for sure, but playing Star Wars canyon runner on every sortie was awesome. If you're a desert person, it is a beautiful country with very challenging flying, which for me was very rewarding.

 

[Firehawk]

Several I can think of....

Night HVBSS training about 20 miles south of Point Mugu in open water. Low light with 4% illum. Inserting troops to a small Coast Guard cutter. I'm crewchief and left side crewman in an HH-60. Conditions are set similar to reality....ship will steam ahead at 10 knots. Since there's so many vertical obstructions on the deck, we have to hold a hover over the deck, 90 degrees out with the door facing the ship's stern (flying sideways, keeping up with the ship), and the left side facing the bright running lights on the bridge. HAC (sitting right) does two inserts without incident. Third evolution, he passes controls to to the CP for the third and last insert. CP has had his eyes down on the FLIR for a portion of the flight, but says he's good to go. CP approaches the deck, and calls for ropes. He does a great job of holding a steady hover, about 30 foot above the deck. Last man out, he departs. I pull my head back in, and begin to help the right crewman clean up the cabin. About 10 seconds after departing, I start to feel a sinking sensation. The same instant I turn my head to the left and see rotor wash coming in the left window, I hear the HAC yell "POWER, POWER!" and grab the controls.

CP had been holding a hover, staring right into the lights of the bridge with goggles on. He was looking under the goggles, but had to move back to them once he departed. With almost zero illum, he struggled to find something to look at. Before he thought to move to instruments, he almost flew her into the water. HAC said he saw 5 feet on the altimeter when he called power. CP was only 40 feet over the water when he started his descent, so things went from bad to worse very quickly. The bright lights of the bridge made low light just that much worse.

Got another good one from the desert I'll have to post up in a bit.

 

[Squid]

1st night trap in the fleet. 2 weeks out of the RAG. Overcast @ 700, pitching deck, dutch roll, MOVLAS. "Deck's up don't chase it" "Power back on". No Count 1. Ouch.

Some hinges went around a couple of times that night.

I got aboard. And after getting a few more pitching deck traps while I was out there, it wasn't THAT varsity... but it sucked a lot.

 

[ferrari360gt]

well my dad was a crew chief on the UH-1 bell 212 in the United States Marines Crops HML-267 and he always tells me stories about what he did. He told me that he was flying to south Korea against strong wind and they had to do an emergency landing at an unscheduled air field because one of the helicopters was out of fuel from flying agaisnt the wind. So they landed and the South Koreans thought that they were North Korean spys because they fly the same aircraft and they pointed AK's at them and orderd them out of thieir aircraft and told them to lie face down at gun point untill they had confromation that they were not North Korean spys.

 

[Obi Offiah]

I don't know if these have been posted before, but I found the following videos quite interesting:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4gGMI8d3vLs&fmt=18
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=S0yj70QbBzg&fmt=18
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UVgBayUfPJU&fmt=18

Maybe its just the camera, but the scary part of the last video is that about 38 seconds into play, it looks like that Hornet could have smashed the stabs and or nozzles on the end of the landing area.

Obi

 

[phrogdriver]

well my dad was a crew chief on the UH-1 bell 212 in the United States Marines Crops HML-267 and he always tells me stories about what he did. He told me that he was flying to south Korea against strong wind and they had to do an emergency landing at an unscheduled air field because one of the helicopters was out of fuel from flying agaisnt the wind. So they landed and the South Koreans thought that they were North Korean spys because they fly the same aircraft and they pointed AK's at them and orderd them out of thieir aircraft and told them to lie face down at gun point untill they had confromation that they were not North Korean spys.

Though I'm sure your dad did get a good scare from South Korean security, I would say two things. One, the North Koreans probably are not the biggest customer of Bell Helicopter. Two, South Koreans typically don't rock AK rifles. Are you sure your dad wasn't telling you a story about the time he defected to the communists?

 

[sardaddy]

Ok, the following is not an in theater story. I spent 10 years in the Army and seemed to PCS from a unit right before it went to a war zone. If you saw me leave, you had better get your bags packed. This one was in the Coast Guard so it may not measure up.

I was on ready duty in the NW Washington area (Just West of Whidbey) and we got a call that a mother had a breech baby two months premature. She lost a lot of blood and the baby wasn't breathing. They were in BFE and needed to be MEDEVAC'd. The big problem was there is no weather reporting on the West Coast in this particular area so it was a guess.

After about 75 miles the weather comes down to 100 ft cig and 1/4 vis. If we go into the clouds we ice up so we pull the RADAR up and stay just off shore for about 50 miles below the clouds. Then the ceilings come up a few hundred feet but we have to go into the mountains to effect the rescue so any gap we had between clouds and the ground went away quick, the RADAR is useless for terrain mapping since it is all terrain, since instead of flat water, we have nothing but pointy ground to deal with. We skim through valleys and over small hills, sometimes busting through gaps with less that 100 feet between ground and clouds for another 50 miles to get to where they are. Once we had them on board, we had to fly another 100+ miles in the same conditions with a quick hot gas (we landed with 250 lbs of gas at that location) then back enroute to get to a hospital that could help them. The kicker? We had to fly the same route in reverse under NVGs to return critical blood supplies to the original pickup point because the mother had used the entire towns blood supply to be kept alive and the town was surrounded by flood waters.

One of the few flights in my military career where I felt I had bitten off more than I could chew and had accepted the fact that I was not going to make it.

 

[docpup]

My scariest was when I was an FRS instructor. We were taking some students (front and back) to the boat for a day into night DLQ / Vert Rep flight. Day events were fine, then we rolled into night.

Our student pilot was abeam turning towards the first PICK of the night. We had a SOP of the enlisted instructor in back made the calls for the first one then the A/C students took over. It was low light and a deck height around 40 feet. SP was in the right seat. The profile was smooth, then as we passed below 40 KIAS here is the exchange:

Me: 40 Knots, tails clear...
SP: Deck in site, tail right...WHOA!!!

After the WHOA...the tail passed the 90 degree mark (pointed towards the ship), the bird started an AGGRESSIVE lateral acceleration (towards the ship), and it appeared the SP dropped the collective. I screamed for power and the IP took the controls. By the time we recovered, salt spray covered my visor. IP called he had vertigo.
I jumped from the door to place myself between the seats and hawk the gauges (breaking my ankle in the process*).

The IP's vertigo was BAD. We were in a insane climb (strip gauges all red), NR dropping, and flying backwards at 30 KIAS. Good CRM helped most of the vertigo issues, but we still had to make 3 passes (one was waved off well below deck edge) to land on the ship.

After the students were aboard, the IP made the take off and vertigo reared its ugly head again. Same climb out scenario. This time the SP (mind you...in the middle of me giving the pilot single axis inputs to get us away safe), asked if we should call control at NASNI. In unison, the IP and I yelled "Shut the F... up and sit on your hands!!"

Safe on deck as NASNI, I made the "in the throat for shut down" call, promptly laid on the deck disconnected my ICS and gunners belt. *That's when my ankle started to hurt. I was down for 4 weeks for the ankle.

 

[busdriver]

Well OK. I wasn't really scared when this happened, but I'll attribute that to training and experience, I know my Co-pilot was. But it may be helpful to young guys to hear that real no-shit get shot at combat is still happening in our risk averse military.

Watching my flight lead get "shot down," he really didn't, but had to make an emergency landing due to low fuel after being shot up. They limped away and made an emergency landing in the desert and I and some OH-58 guys ended up having to land under fire and pickup my comrades and our patients. By landing under fire, I mean watching bullet impacts right at the edge of my rotor disc while I sat on the ground waiting to patients to be loaded.

For those of you who have access to the high side and want to know a bit more, PM me and I'll see what I can do. The official after action report isn't out yet, but if you're a Navy helo guy doing Medevac this may be useful.

I'm only really mentioning it since it's already out in the media thanks to Michael Yon and his site. Which by the way, if you don't know about him, he's probably one of the few really good journalists. Basically, they already know they shot up one of our helos, you guys may not.

 

[highside7r]

Summer 07 OIF launch for a priority medevac with 1-1.5mile vis and standard low dusty ceiling over the greater city. We hold on the now routine patient(walking) as we are receiving a urgent call come in. Launch with our chase, a slick UH-60L with M240s, with no command directed Attack support (AH-64) due to Wx. Arrive on station, establish comms with ground unit, low recon, and then land in the selected LZ. Approx. 3 minutes later, copilot and I feel the familiar "thud" of incoming indirect fire rounds. Takes a few seconds to register, then look over to my flight medic outside tending to patients, who is waving us off. Chase slick at my 8 o'clock in the LZ is taking small arms fire and starts to return fire with left M240. I make sure crewchief is onboard and tell very calm copilot (we had been crewed up most of the rotation) to depart the LZ. On departure, copilot starts jinking as I watch tracers pass through the rotor arc. Due to vis, quickly set up new LZ with flight medic, whom I have left on the ground with squad. Land and upload 2 routine patients+happy flight medic for quick flight to Combat Support Hospital (CSH) downtown. At the same time we had forgotten about original walking routine patient in the back! Flight medic becomes member of selective "trigger time" club for crewmembers that have returned fire.

The leaving the flight medic on the ground was always pre-briefed and the medics accepted that fact we would return!

 

[ryan1234]

The about VFR brought another "set" of instances to mind- VFR Departures out of NAS JAX, because we would routinely chop VFR as soon as we cleared the coast to go operational... We took off from JAX, got the old climb and maintain 1200' proceed 090 to XXX... I'm looking North and see a Piper Cherokee has us boresighted 1100 constant bearing decreasing range, I call up flight and tell him to break right, the Nav SCREAMS- Break Left Traffic 0100 level, so flight sucks back on the stick and up we go... one of the aft observers was able to keep an eye on the 1 o'clock traffic, and he reported the two airplanes almost hit directly underneath us... ATC claimed they never saw the two birds and bitched at us for breaking the assigned altitude. I got ticked and told them we would file a NMAC report when we returned and I wanted the radar tapes held...

Later in became a standing joke at Jax about transiting Indian Country between NAS and the beaches... More than one crew got the S**T scared out of them in that 20 mile space because of all the VFR traffic-

Does NAS Jax publish any caution posters at the FBOs at CRG, JAX, SGJ or other airports about typical transition/departure areas? I've personally heard a lot of people talk about almost hitting a P-3 or -60s up in Jax.... generally because they're traversing the coast line looking down rather than looking out side. If you guys have any posters/publications like that, I'll put it up at the XFL FBO.

 

[Gatordev]

Does NAS Jax publish any caution posters at the FBOs at CRG, JAX, SGJ or other airports about typical transition/departure areas? I've personally heard a lot of people talk about almost hitting a P-3 or -60s up in Jax.... generally because they're traversing the coast line looking down rather than looking out side. If you guys have any posters/publications like that, I'll put it up at the XFL FBO.

It's not just the civilians that have issues. Over the past few weeks, I've noticed a rash of HS guys on the river south of NIP not up CSAR common, which is odd because they used to be up all the time. The CG guys have said they'd be up it as well, but have apparently stopped. It's becoming an obstacle course going north up the river approaching Julington Creek at night, and even worse when doing a NFAM sans goggles.

As for almost hitting P-3s...well, if P-3s would just not be the slowest thing in the world that's flying and get out of everyone else's way, the world would just be a better place.