Aviation Mishap Story Time 2
Disintegrating Blades: The Law of Unintended Consequences is Merciless
It will help you if you read AMST: Intro and AMST: 1 before reading this one for important background and context.
Spring 1993 - All Endings…
We are blessed with a daughter in March and ~60 days later, I am “winged” as a Naval Aviator on May 21, 1993. I’m not number 1 in my class, but I do manage to get my first choice in selection: Cobras, East Coast. We’re heading to California for temporary duty at HMT-303, the training quadron for “skid” helicopters, Hueys (UH-1Ns) and Cobras (AH-1Ws), and then we’ll go back to New River, North Carolina, to join one of the two east coast Light Attack helo squadrons.
Although there have been a number of mishaps in the Fleet while I’m in flight school, I have no contact with any of them and they don’t even come close to penetrating my bubble. I don’t hear about them unless they’re newsworthy or someone close to me knows something about them. Mishaps are now something that happen to “other” (obviously) less worthy or less careful people; they’re akin to UFO abductions or deaths on Mt. Everest.
The two exceptions to this are the July 7, 1992, crash of a V-22 Osprey into the Potomac during a demo for congressional staffers. It gets a lot of talk because it is supposed to be the replacement aircraft for the Marine Corps’ aged CH-46 transport helicopter. I have paid enough attention to both AV-8B Harrier crashes and the V-22 to heed Jeff’s wisdom: Never select for a brand new airframe or you’ll be the one working out the bugs, whether you want to be or not.
The second is that a friend out on his FAM-6 during the approach turn stall demonstration - something the instructors don’t like either - has “a moment” where the aircraft simply does not recover and they plummet from 8000’ over the Gulf to below the hard deck at ~3000’ (IIRC) and it leaves our boy Mark shaken when we’re all out for beers on a Friday night at a local bar. They “scooped it out” but both he and his instructor spend the night in close confidence and we tease him about a budding romance. He does not laugh. They should have bailed at the hard deck and didn’t.
Summer 1993 - …Bring New Beginnings.
I check in, complete ground school and simulators in June, and am flying the AH-1W shortly thereafter. Just after the July 4th holiday, I go on a detachment to Yuma, Arizona, where there are plenty of ranges for live-fire of ordnance. Once again: there are “boat spaces” in the Fleet to be filled and our bodies are supposed to be filling them. A brief explanation is in order: prior to the Gulf War (I) in 1990, the U.S. military “bulked up” in anticipation of massive losses that never happened. Consequently, in the following years, DoD has to shed “excess manpower” - i.e. fire a shitton of people they previously convinced to stay on - and we are the next generation coming up in the aftermath of this personnel glut-then-reduction.
On August 16, 1993, a Huey and Cobra from HMLA-367, one of the west coast active-duty squadrons, are flying over the Pacific near Catalina Island for some kind of Public Affairs photo shoot. The photographer is in the Huey, along with pilot, co-pilot, and crew-chief, taking pictures of one of the squadron’s Cobras. It is yet another pristine, clear day for flying in southern California.
I hear there has been a midair collision while I’m in the Ready Room waiting for my next flight. Our instructors include guys who have served with HML/A-367, which is just a short walk down the flightline from -303, as are all four of the west coast active squadrons and 1 reserve squadron. We share adjoining hangar spaces. Both aircraft have gone into the Pacific Ocean and rescue helicopters are searching for survivors. The mood in our squadron is somber. We attend the Memorial service at the base chapel, but I’m an interloper. I don’t know these folks and I can’t commiserate in their loss.
Less than two weeks later, I’m playing in a roller hockey tournament in the parking lot at “the Murph” - what was San Diego stadium. During a break between games, I see a friend, Scotty, one of Jeff’s TBS classmates and a fellow aviator and Cobra pilot. We’ve played roller hockey together a few times over at the 22 Area tennis courts and I remember that he’s in -367, so I offer my condolences. He gets a little misty-eyed and then relates that he was in the front seat of the Cobra that was in the midair. He describes the whole mishap to me while I stare slack-jawed: how the blades hit each other, the autorotation into the water, the helo flipping upside down and sinking, the pilot in back getting his door open, Scotty holding his breath, trapped in the front seat because the Cobra’s Canopy Removal System (CRS) failed,1 the aircraft going down, down, in the darkness of the frigid Pacific, finally getting turned sideways in the seat and kicking open his door, and then thinking he can’t possibly hold his breath long enough to get to the top…
Suddenly, this isn’t a mishap that happened to just some guy out there; this isn’t the helo dunker at Pensacola. This guy’s been at my house, met my wife and kids, drank beer and barbecued with me, played on a line with me in roller hockey. This isn’t alien abduction stories on NPR - this is Scotty and I can see he’s different. I can’t say precisely how, but it’s similar to the difference you notice after someone loses a parent or close relative; or how you feel in the weeks after you put down a longtime, beloved pet. He isn’t the same happy-go-lucky guy I knew just 6 months ago back at flight school.
There’s another aspect of this, too, a poison embedded in his own gratefulness at being alive, and I can’t help but poke at it: he is a relative newcomer to the squadron, as I am at -303, and yet he lives… while one of the “old hands” there is now dead. A single Cobra rotor blade is 32” wide, it weighs 385 lb, and at the leading edge is traveling near the speed of sound.2 By contrast, the Huey blade has a chord of something more like 22” and nowhere near the mass of the Cobra blade. He and I both know the Huey blades were destroyed by the Cobra’s. Fortunately, 4 crewmembers were rescued; the pilot and the photographer were not. I ask him how he’s handling that part and he just stares and shakes his head.
“I don’t know, man…” He trails off and the hockey tournament intervenes. I’ve got to get back to playing, so we bro-hug and I thank him for coming down to watch our team play.
From Bad to Worse - The Curse of 29 Palms and Disintegrating Blades
I’m back to flying and making my way through the syllabus the first week of September when it all comes to an abrupt halt.
Sept. 7, 1993
Three Marines and one Army officer are killed when two Cobras from HML/A-269 smack into each other on a night flight at 29 Palms. That is my future squadron - I already have orders in the system for 269 when I finish and they are now down 3 experienced pilots. They’re at 29 Palms for a Combined Arms Exercise (CAX). Affectionately known as 29 Stumps because of the rather humble looking palms that line the road onto the base, it’s one of the few places in the Marine Corps where live fire exercises can be done with basically everything in the Marine Corps arsenal: tanks, artillery, bombs, rockets, Hellfire missiles - you can fire everything short of a nuke at the Stumps.
I hear about it the next day at 303 when I come in to fly. There are not a lot of details, but word travels fast in a community of perhaps 400 people. There are 6 active-duty and 2 Reserve HML/A squadrons with perhaps 30 aircraft each, a mix of predominantly Cobras and a smaller number of Hueys. It is a very small community of people who actually fill the seats of our aircraft.
Sept. 8, 1993
I’m hanging around the Ready Room later that afternoon when the phone starts ringing at the Squadron Duty Officer’s desk. The SDO sits by a radio in the Ready Room and tracks the flight schedule, checks aircraft “in and out” as they depart and return, answers the phone, and otherwise assists with making the flight schedule run. We all have to do that duty on a rotating basis.
A pilot from the West Coast Reserve squadron (HML/A-775) is shooting instrument approaches with a flight surgeon in the front seat at Montgomery Field, a civilian airport just south of NAS (now MCAS) Miramar, a 30 minute drive away from us in San Diego County. It doesn’t take us long to hear that, according to eyewitnesses, the aircraft has come apart in flight.
If there is a nightmare scenario for me, this is it. Literally. Like most people (I think), I’ve had nightmares about falling. In mine, a recurring one from childhood, I’m climbing a ladder against a castle wall and I am impossibly high, over a hundred feet in the air. The castle sits at the peak of a hill and so the ground slopes away from it. I am at the top of the ladder when it gets pushed away and the fall is even farther because of the slope. I can feel the ladder accelerating as I plummet, and I have nothing to do but hold on and ride it down. An instant before impact I wake up and sit bolt upright.
The Law of Unintended Consequences Remains Undefeated
On Sept. 16, 1993, NavAir Systems Command grounds all of the Cobras; we learn why in a briefing. At the very tip of each Whiskey Cobra main rotor blade is a tiny opening the size of your fingernail called a “weep-hole.” The purpose of the weep-hole is to allow any moisture that gets inside the blade to leak out. This bit of seemingly critical information has not been transmitted to mechanics and pilots in the Fleet. When the Cobras first start getting delivered, what the mechs and pilots notice is that the weep-hole makes a ghostly, whistling hum once the blades start spinning. In response, the mechanics caulk the weep-holes on the blades to shut the damn things up. Over time, moisture that gets in, stays in and eventually corrodes the blades from the inside out.
Every single blade in the Fleet has to be borescoped in order to ensure that the blades do not have any cracking or degradation as a result of moisture trapped inside. HMT-303 is second on the priority list - after deployed squadrons. A good friend who we lived next door to in base housing in flight school wanted Cobras, but instead got Hueys. He makes a crack to me in the Ready Room: “Looks like gettin’ Hueys might just be better’n I thought. Maybe God loves me more’n you,” he quips in his Texas twang.
He is a very close friend and can make that kind of joke; gallows humor is a part of flying. Less than a week later God proves that she hates all of us equally. On Sept. 21, 1993, a Huey crashes at 29 Palms during a close-in fire support exercise, killing 4.
Eventually, within a month, all of our Cobra blades are scoped and we return to flying. I finish the syllabus around Thanksgiving. By the first week of December, the wife and I pile into our crappy, but reliable, Chevy Corsica filled with all of our belongings, the kids, and pulling a small U-Haul to head back east. I am now, finally, finished being a “student.” I am a Cobra pilot - a 7565. At least, that’s what I think as we leave southern California for North Carolina.
The Cobra CRS is a piece of Det Cord - a thin explosive that looks like silver speaker wire - that runs around the seam of the canopy “glass.” You twist and pull a handle and it is supposed to “blow out” the canopy leaving an easy exit/egress from the rather confined cockpit area of the Cobra. It has a known 99% failure rate. So well-known that NavAir authorizes the installation of canopy breakout knives in the cockpit that we are supposed to use to “draw an X” on the glass and then punch out the canopy. It is an absurdity that we all live with as just “part of the deal.”
This is the limitation of rotary-wing flight: unlike fixed-wing aircraft, a helicopter blade-tip cannot have a sonic boom because of what that does to the air - and what that would mean for the next blade coming forward and trying to generate lift into the pressure wave from the prior blade breaking the sound barrier. This is a problem fixed-wing aircraft (planes) do not have; their wings are in front of the sonic boom. This might be fine for the first blade in a helo, but would not end well for the second.
Had forgotten about that shitty September in 1993. You’re bringing back a lot of memories Barney!