Guest Blogging

By Lex, on Wed – April 27, 2005

 

From new reader Craig, and with his permission, a tale of the old days.

Not a particularly happy one, but instructive nonetheless. It ain’t all beer and skittles in the fleet – the good guys don’t always win, and not everyone makes it to the finish line. You’ll maybe understand a little better my reluctance to share flat-hatting stories. Not all of them end happily.

But the rest of us have to learn from their mistakes. They bet everything they had, or ever would have, that they were right about what they were about to do. And being wrong, they gave their lives up, because that’s the kind of business it is. There’s places where you don’t get to make mistakes. And sometimes, all too often in fact, people who do so take other folks with them, to the clearing at the end of the path. And in their memory, we owe it to them for the severity of the price they paid to learn their lessons.

To learn them very well.

 

The Cut Gun T-shirt.

Modeled on the movie Top Gun. Cut gun; in helos, to roll the throttles off quickly, to simulate a total power failure.

The shirts were the brain child of Steve.

Steve tried to kill me.

About two weeks later he did kill my best friend. And himself. And two other guys, Kevin and Eric.

Steve was a thin, intense, Chicago Irish catholic guy–Notre Dame, naturally–who came to the squadron from a naval air station search and rescue unit. Before that he’d been in the, now defunct squadron. A legendary ferry squadron. They did nothing but fly airplanes cross country to the various rework facilities. They flew all the time. With no supervision. Which is an important point. Steve was a very good pilot. But not as good as he thought he was.

I flew my aircraft commander checkride with Steve. It was a foggy morning at Pt. Mugu and the airfield was IFR (ed: Instrument Flight Rules – more formally, IMC: Instrument Meteorological Conditions – bad weather). Being from the ferry squadron–they didn’t fly in instrument conditions for various technical reasons– IFR to Steve meant: I follow roads. But I was a good instrument pilot, so I suggested to Steve that we file an IFR flight plan, shoot a SID and then see if we could break out above the clouds. We were going to our mountain training area and we knew it would be clear there, as this was just a sea fog. He was reluctant, but I talked him into it. I shot the departure, we broke out VFR on top at about a thousand feet and it was CAVU (ed: ceiling and visibility unrestricted).

We proceeded to our mountain training area to shoot confined area landings (CAL). This is a big part of being a helo pilot in mountainous terrain. A CAL is the deal. If you can’t shoot a CAL, you’re not worth much as a helo pilot. The crew chief directs you by intercom–he’s lying on his stomach on the cargo deck of the helo looking out in all directions– he can see, the pilot can’t. You position the machine where he tells you. And if he says, “Easy left six inches”, or “easy down six inches,” he means easy, and he means six inches. In our training area there was one spot called the garage that had big rocks within a foot of the tail rotor, both skids, and the nose of the aircraft. (skid equipped helos, like the Huey, are prone to something called dynamic rollover. If you have sufficient, and it doesn’t take much, momentum drifting sideways and hook your skid on something they will flip over very easily.) After landing in the garage a few times one understands what is meant by precision hover.

But before you can make a landing in the mountains you have to do a power available and hover out of ground effect (Hoge, pronounced like the sandwich) check. This is to make sure that you have sufficient engine power to actually land. ( The year before in Antarctica a couple of guys from our squadron got in a hurry on Beardmore Glacier, assumed they were okay, skipped the Hoge check, and crashed. They were lucky they weren’t killed)

During our Hoge check, Steve rolled BOTH engines to flight idle. A cut gun. I panicked and did nothing for a crucial couple of seconds. We were dropping like a set of car keys. Rotor speed, NR, fell to 79% before I finally recovered my wits and lowered the collective. Well I didn’t die, but I’ve often wondered how close I came. NR is never supposed to drop below 90%. At what point would the blades have folded up and broke off, I don’t know. Maybe no one knows. Steve was not impressed. Did I mention this was my aircraft commander checkride? In my defense, I was startled because it had never occurred to me that anyone would ever roll both engines to flight idle in a Hoge over mountainous terrain–that being a prohibited maneuver and all.

But Steve had a point. I should have immediately lowered the collective.

The rest of the flight went fine.

He still almost gave me a down. He didn’t for two reasons. One, he was impressed that I could flight plan and fly an instrument departure. Instrument flying was like Voodoo to Steve. Two, everything else, I did well. Actually there was a third reason, on the way back into the airport traffic area (ATA) the tower told us to follow traffic. Steve wanted me to go ahead and turn cross wind. I told him we were supposed to follow traffic. He told me there was no traffic. I told him oh yes there is. It is an H-46 Seaknight Helicopter and it’s right there. Where he wanted me to turn. I’m not saying there would have been a mid-air collision, but it would have been close.

But, he signed off. The next week he and I and Dan and Beez (Who knew Steve from the ferry squadron) went to Bishop, California for a week long search and rescue (SAR) mission. Dan was due to take his checkride as soon as we got back. Of course, I told Dan all about my trials and tribulations with Steve.

I didn’t tell Joe. Which haunts me to this day.

A few days after I got back from Bishop I was late for work–I’d been out bar hopping, and whore mongering, and all like that. I came in about 0900 hoping no one would notice I was an hour and a half late. I was the Maintenance Training Officer and we had a major Wing Maintenance Inspection coming up so I thought I could make a plausible argument that I wasn’t at my desk because I was out in the hangar looking at training records. Well, that was my story anyway.

When I got there, there was quite a lot of stress in the air. Me being me, I immediately thought that the whole world had gone to General Quarters because I was late for work. But I quickly figured out–hey, I’m not stupid– that it wasn’t about me. Steve and Joe and Beez and Eric had launched at 0800 that morning into the mountain training area. ATC Los Angles had just called and reported that they’d suddenly dropped off their radar and that they’d lost the transponder ID.

It was a bad few hours. It took until about noon to verify that they’d crashed. And another couple hours to verify that there were no survivors. I never learned who actually went out to the arroyo they were wedged into on the side of that mountain to see. I’m glad it wasn’t me.

Joe was my sea-daddy. I loved him like the big brother I never had.  He was short, tended to pudge, bald, from Oklahoma. He had a healthy mix of Indian and Mexican in him. He was the funniest man I ever met. And one of the smartest. And one of the wisest. His wife was also short and pudgy. And smart. She had a booming laugh. And you heard it often. They’d met at Oklahoma State. Their son was about 13 the last time I saw him. (Joe, his son and I went on a weekend ski trip to Big Bear which still makes me smile when I think about it) He’d be about 30 now.

Joe was taking his NATOPS Instructor checkride from Steve that morning. The accident investigation pretty quickly determined that Steve had rolled both engines to flight idle during a Hoge check and, having insufficient terrain clearance, they’d crashed.

A word about the others: Kevin was a hero. He was a rescue swimmer—a manly occupation. Rescue swimmers jump into the water to rescue pilots. Kevin won a Navy and Marine Corps Medal for jumping into the water in the South China Sea to rescue a pilot in the middle of a bunch of poisonous sea snakes. A couple years later he saw the Air Florida flight hit the 14th street bridge in D.C. He had his wet suit in the trunk of his car. He stopped, got into it, and started pulling people out of the water. Eric was this big sweet natured kid from Wisconsin. I didn’t know him very well. He’d just gotten to the squadron. He was 19.

They found Eric twisted up like a pretzel in the back of the Helo. He hadn’t been burned at all. Kevin was on a gunners’ belt and was thrown clear of the helicopter. His cause of death was blunt trauma from whatever rock he hit. Steve was also thrown clear. Seat and all. He was still strapped in. They found him hanging upside down in a Joshua tree. There wasn’t a mark on him, or so I’m told. His cause of death was listed as deceleration trauma. Joe was in the wreckage. He was burned to a crisp. But his cause of death was listed as competition for occupiable space– same as Eric’s.

During the accident investigation and the JAGMAN investigation that followed, when the board asked me about the Dual Engine Failure from a Hoge, I told them the truth. Then when they asked if Steve had ever preformed any other prohibited maneuvers, I said no. Which was a lie. And they all knew it was a lie. Because Steve was a flathatter. He thought he was great.

But he was only above average.

I thought then, and I still think now, what difference does it make. They’re dead. We all came to the problem a little too late.

The memorial service was good. Mike, a C-130 pilot friend of Joe’s, did the eulogy. He told a lot of funny stories about Joe, which lightened the mood and turned the service into a celebration– almost. I was okay during the memorial service, but the missing man formation got me. The fighter test squadron stationed at Pt. Mugu flew the flight. These are the best fighter pilots in the Navy–read the world. And they did the missing man formation for the memorial service. Five F-14s in formation, going slow, then the second from the left hit afterburner and shot straight up, leaving a gap in the formation. The missing man. That got me. I stood there in the parking lot of the base chapel, with my arm around Joe’s mama and bawled like a little kid.

Here is the T-shirt tie in: It was in the parking lot of the base chapel, just after her husband’s memorial service, that a LCDR went up to Steve’s widow and asked her who was handling the T-shirts now. Seeing as how her husband was dead and all. She told him she didn’t give a flying fuck about T-shirts.

Did I mention that I liked Steve? I considered him a friend. I don’t blame him. I miss him too.

I keep those shirts (I’ve still got three of them), for that reason. Cut. Gun. When I see them I think of Steve and Joe and Kevin and Eric.

———–

Here endeth the lesson.

Back To The Index