Aviation Mishap Story Time 12
Large-Scale Tragedy Strikes
In (at least) Episode 8 of this series, I stated the following:
Always remember, Kids! Even under the best of circumstances, it can all go to shit in an instant.
- One of my flight instructors, or my law partner shortly before oral argument in court (possibly both).
For readers of the other episodes in this series,1 it will be evident that this is a recurring theme in the life of a helicopter pilot. I had been back home from Yuma and my testing for the WTI course for perhaps a couple of weeks, when May 10, 1996, arrived. If ever there was a day that typified everything going bad in an instant, Friday, May 10, 1996 was just such a day.
One day shy of five years of commissioned service in the Marine Corps for me. Five years since I went aboard the oldest ship-of-the-line in the U.S. Navy, the USS Constitution, at the Charlestown Navy Yard as a midshipman (1/c), pinned on my gold (butter) bars, and then came ashore as a Second Lieutenant - an Officer of Marines.
A lot can happen in five years.
I was 26 (and a half!) years “old” when the phone rang around 3:00 AM on May 10, 1996. The phone next to our bed was a landline that also doubled as our dial-up modem for internet. When it rang, I knew immediately it was not good news; no good news is ever delivered to a base-housing landline at 3:00 AM. I sloppily reached for the handset in its cradle, but I was coming awake fast.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Barn, it’s Hubie.” I recognized the voice of one of my roommates from the Boat - Duane “Hubcap” Hubing. “There’s been a mishap…” I felt my stomach drop. In the military, death notifications usually fall to those closest to the deceased. I instantly assumed that Hubcap was calling to inform me of the death of our mutual best friend, Duane “Opie” Opperman - one of our other two roommates from our 6-month LF6F2 deployment, and recent WTI graduate.
That was the way the puzzle pieces were coming together in my head, so there was a long pause, but the rational part of my brain was telling me that we weren’t flying that night. I mean, I’m the squadron’s QA officer; I know when we’re flying because I’m the primary guy testing the aircraft all day-long to make sure we’ve got birds for the next day or evening’s sorties. Additionally, it only took a moment for me to listen and hear complete silence from the airfield, which was a few hundred yards from my front door. There were no airfield ops tonight at all.
Hubcap jumped into the silence: “It’s not us -”
And now I’m relieved, immediately tinged with guilt, because I know someone else has suffered a tragedy… but it’s not someone close to us. I park those emotions to be dealt with later.
“- I was gonna say…”
“It’s MAG-26… and it’s bad.” Now the puzzle pieces clicked together. Yes, it was MAG-26’s time in the barrell; they had the current detachment training for their LF6F - which meant it was HML/A-167, our sister light-attack squadron… The same Squadron and Group that had just lost Squire Edwards and a LtCol just 6 weeks prior.
“…bad enough that MAG-29 is going to be doing the investigation and the CO picked you as the Cobra rep,” Hucap continued on.
“Oh, shit.”
“The CO says that you should take time to pack some things because it’s- you should expect to be out there at the crash site all day. You got something to write with?”
“What happened?”
“A Cobra and a -46 had a midair, with pax in back.”
“Oh. Shit. Okay, hold on.”
By now my wife was stirring and she knew what was happening from my end of the conversation. She rolled over and clicked on the light as I hopped out of bed and made for the kitchen to get a pen and paper.
The CO and Hubcap were right; it was going to be a long day.
I got a set of grid coordinates, plotted the location on my Camp Lejeune Special - our name for the unique map that we all used, a homogenization of several other 1:50,000 scale maps that all of the local squadrons used to cover our routine training and flying area. The crash site was inland from Snead’s Ferry Bridge, in the middle of some pretty swampy ground. Flying there would be a snap - even a boat from my house would have been easy - almost direct. But I was driving and would have to make my way on paved roads to get as close as possible and then hike in to the site. I threw a go-bag together of “stuff” that I thought I might need, got dressed while the missus made me a cup of coffee and I filled her in, and then I headed out into the dark. False dawn hadn’t started when I got on the road.
I knew it was bad before I even saw it; I could smell it. Burning fuel, metal, fiberglass, and alloys, and whatever other toxic chemical compounds make up a helicopter. I saw a couple of cars parked along the side of Snead’s Ferry Road (Highway 172) not too far east of the bridge. I parked as far off the road as I could, got out of my car, and started walking toward the treeline. I had seen a couple of people, shadowy figures in the night, going into the woods, and then flashlights bobbing around in the darkness like fireflies. As I got close, I saw 4’ x 8’ sheets plywood on the ground, forming a makeshift bridge through the woods, which quickly turned into swamp as you moved north toward the crash - and got closer to the New River. Someone got out of a car across the road behind me - I heard the door close - and there was some yelling, and then voices, saying, “This way. Come this way!”
I started following the plywood path through the woods, missed a few turns and steps - and found myself hip deep in swamp. I pulled my leg out, turned left, and kept moving toward the sound and the smell. Eventually I found the Forward Air Controller/MEU Air Officer who had been on the ground in a nearby LZ3 when the crash happened.
Fourteen people died Friday when two Marine Corps helicopters collided in darkness and crashed into swampy pine woods during the largest U.S.-British training exercise in history.
There were two survivors. Rescue workers had to wade into chest-deep mud and water to search for bodies, said Maj. Steve Little, Camp Lejeune's public affairs officer.
“It is waist-high and chest-high mud,” Little said, explaining the difficulty in removing bodies and in taking a small army of reporters to the crash site, which is 600 yards from the nearest road.
Col. J.C. Yannessa, returning from the scene to brief reporters, wore a uniform water-stained to the top of his shirt pocket. He said the terrain was so thick that rescuers had to cut through with chain saws [sic].
…
By mid-afternoon, crews had retrieved 11 bodies, all extensively burned by a fire that broke out upon impact, said a Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity. Dental records will be needed for positive identification of the remains, he said.
“Our hearts go out to the families, the friends, the loved ones of those who lost their lives,” President Clinton said at the White House.
Fisherman David Milbourne heard the crash while pulling shrimp nets.
“It sounded a lot like a 18-wheeler crashing into a wall,” he said.
…
The crash involved a CH-46 Sea Knight and an AH-1 Cobra from the Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 266 based at New River Marine Corps Air Station. Troops aboard the aircraft were assigned or attached to a battalion landing team of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment of the 2nd Marine Division, whose headquarters are here.
The aircraft were participating in Operation Purple Star, war games involving 38,200 U.S. troops and 15,600 British troops massed off the North Carolina coast this week.
How Does This Happen?
[…] President Clinton admitted, “One of the things I confess I did not fully appreciate until I became president was how dangerous the day-in and day-out, the year-in and year-out work of our military, just training, just doing the defense of our country, is.”
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Pentagon said at least 14 American servicemen were killed and two remained hospitalized in critical condition following a collision between two U.S. Marine Corps helicopters taking part in massive military exercises in North Carolina early Friday morning.
The accident occurred in the middle of a mock invasion of North Carolina. It was the largest United States exercise in decades, involving more than 50,000 troops from the United States and Britain.
When dozens of helicopters are in the air at once, a commander’s biggest worry is a mid-air collision. This sort of training is supposed to help soldiers learn to avoid such an accident. Civilians often underestimate both the value of such exercises and the danger involved. Even President Clinton admitted, “One of the things I confess I did not fully appreciate until I became president was how dangerous the day-in and day-out, the year-in and year-out work of our military, just training, just doing the defense of our country, is.”
Night vision a factor?
Under a typical training scenario, the AH-1 Cobra gunship, with a crew of two, would have flown in first to practice suppressing enemy ground fire. Its maneuver would have cleared the way for the CH-46 Sea Knight, a twin rotor transport helicopter, which in this case was carrying at least 12 Marines, a Navy sailor, and an Army soldier.
It is not yet known why the choppers collided. As Maj. Steve Little of the U.S. Marines said, "The weather was clear. We had a half moon. I do not believe that weather was a factor, although I would not want to speculate or rule out any cause."
Helicopters Fly by Miracle and Fall Like Safes.
There were essentially three separate crash “sites”, plus a debris field over a few hundred yards because of the speeds involved, directions each aircraft were traveling, and how the crash unfolded. This was a night-vision goggle mission with the two AH-1W SuperCobras “sprinting ahead” of the transport helicopter to simulate having “cleared” a Landing Zone. Then the Cobras would circle the LZ at 500’ AGL, with the CH-46 carrying 12 passengers, coming in “behind” the Snakes on a slight delay, perhaps a minute, from the south at 300’ AGL.
Somehow, despite the altitude and time separation baked into the plan, one of the Cobras and the CH-46 wound up occupying the same exact piece of airspace at the exact same moment. The picture just below shows - from the Cobra’s view - the relative position of the aircraft upon impact. The Phrog was traveling north.
The Cobra’s front seat pilot, 1st Lt Joe Fandrey, lived right at the entrance to officer base housing, on LongStaff Street; we lived at 25 Longstaff. He and his young wife had a new baby, as I recall. I can’t say we knew them well, but New River Officer Base Housing circa 1996 was not a big neighborhood. Captain Scott Rice was in the backseat; Scott and Susan Rice also lived in base housing, not far from us. In the instant before impact, at roughly 375 feet above the ground, in the early morning hours, traveling west at roughly 130 mph, the Cobra likely caught a glimpse of the 46 through their night vision goggles (NVG’s), a miracle of modern technology, but with two deadly limitations.
Of Cylons and Toilet Paper Rolls
The ANVS-6s snap onto the front of a pilot’s helmet and then can be rotated down in front of your eyes and it is not an exaggeration to say that it, or “they,” turn night into day. It's miraculous.
Photons of light enter the optics and those electrons are “excited” by being bounced off of a wafer that magnifies the existing light, producing an instantaneous and accurate image - in shades of green - of events and objects that are otherwise, to the naked eye, encased in complete darkness. For our purposes, it’s what we called “FM.”4 The well-known limitation of them is that they only have a 40º field of view; it’s like looking through a toilet paper roll. Everything outside of that roll, however, is inky black darkness.
In training you learn to keep your head moving constantly, all around, while flying on goggles, like the Cylons in the original “Battlestar Galactica.”
We set our interior cockpit lights very low on blue or green light, so we can look under the goggles to see the engine gauges, the navigation instruments, and the weapons systems. I didn’t even have 1000 flight hours when I left flying, but I had my “century patch” - 100 hours of NVG flight time. This should not be read as a boast - guys in the Nightstalkers have thousands of NVG hours. I say it instead as a statement of base-level competence and experience with the technology, only to add this: it is very common to have people like me executing extraordinarily complicated missions at nighttime in close proximity to other aircraft with all of operating “blacked out” - no lights on at all - because we have NVGs and normal aircraft lights would “white out” the goggles.
We used to fire 5” rockets, the Zunis, like the ones you see in old Vietnam era war movies or film footage, coming off of F-4 phantoms in diving fire. We could fire them off of the Cobra - and they are very accurate. They fly very straight because they have a big motor, but when firing them at night, right before pressing the button to launch the rockets, I would notify the other pilot and we would both look away - that is, we would turn our heads to the opposite side of the rocket being fired and close our eyes momentarily - so as not to have our night vision ruined from the flames coming off of the motor as it ignited and burned, AND because it would temporarily “white out” the NVGs, making them useless for a bit.
Goggles are designed to work (optimally) in low-light conditions. They’re useless in daytime because when there is a large source of light, it floods the optics and they stop working. The same is true even at night if there is too much light entering the excitation chamber. Parking lots, RV parks, any built-up area constitutes a massive amount of “light noise” for goggles.
The field of view limitation of NVGs has been cited in dozens of mishap investigation reports, probably hundreds. It’s very frequently a causal factor because we do missions on NVGs that are dangerous if done in the full light of day in VFR conditions - with the full capacity of the human eye. Operating tactically around LZs is not like “regular” flying on the airways at a specified heading, direction, and altitude. As you move your head around, you are essentially abandoning what you just saw, but keeping it in your memory, trying to build and update a complete “picture” what’s happening within your own small FOV and around you - the locations of objects on the ground, other aircraft, towers, and, in lighted areas, ‘light obstructions’ that can white out the goggles at inopportune moments.
Why did I tell you all of this about NVGs? [Foot stomp.]
A Little Too High, A Little Too Low, and Blinded by the Light (at least).
The pilot of the 46, the senior man, was sitting in the right seat, and the Cobra blade struck just aft of his seat, knocking him unconscious - and into a coma - for several weeks after the crash, IIRC. The kevlar armor he had around his seat probably saved his life.5 There were 6 people on the “right” side of the aircraft, the side closest to us in the picture above - and 6 across the other side, in the drop down mesh seats.
The Cobra went down to the left (from its perspective) almost immediately after the midair and crashed, catching fire. The 46 continued northward, the junior man, a first lieutenant, went for the ground, trying simultaneously to starve the aircraft fire of fuel and hold a burning aircraft together, as it twisted and bucked. As he flared above the trees, the helicopter snapped in half, the aft, passenger compartment, falling to the ground upside down; while the pilot’s compartment crashed through the North Carolina pines to the ground.
We worked all day long, and many nights, interviewed everyone we could, listened to the radio calls, plotted the aircraft tracks, had testing done on everything we could - we even did a “reconstruction” flight (Day, VFR) as a group to test our hypotheses as to what happened. There was no gross negligence, no “Bud Holland” like aspects to any of the crew’s actions, top to bottom.
There were three significant factors - that the Cobra was “a little low” from their 500’ altitude, and the 46 was “a little high” from its 300’ foot altitude, was an obvious combined error turned into a fatal combination, HOWEVER, two other factors were also critical. First, the timing was off despite both aircraft flying their routes “as briefed”. Sometimes, things just don’t work like they do in practice and the Cobra was supposed to at the Zone a full minute ahead of the 46. Had that been true, the Cobra undoubtedly would have had time to get “set up” on altitude, visually acquire the incoming 46, and there is no midair. Instead, the 46 seemed to be a little quicker than usual on its route, and the Cobra a little slower than usual, and immediately after the Cobras made their first pass over the Zone and turned around - boom. The 46 was there.
Second, the 46 was coming in at a slightly different angle than the last time and, if you look up at the aerial photo, you can see that the LZ sits just north of Courthouse Bay, which has an Exchange, convenience store, some parking lots, and a bunch of big light poles with night-time parking/security lights. If you look across the River, you can also see an RV park. That whole coastline had a bunch of big light poles and bright lights, as well.
After doing some flying over there ourselves, and doing a reenactment flight, it seemed to all of us that - combined with the timing issue and being off altitude, the NVG limitation in FOV and the back-lighting, made the 46 “invisible” as the Cobra came out of its turn. It was just a fatal combination of small factors that resulted in 14 people dead.
I’m getting the length warning on this note, so I’ll save the “rest of the story” and my final thoughts on the whole tragedy for Part 2. My condolences to the families and loved ones of all of those who perished. I have more to say about one of them in particular in my next piece.
Maj Michael Kuszewksi* Capt Scott Rice 1st Lt Joe Fandrey 1st Lt Arthur Schneider Cpl Brandon Tucker Cpl Brian Collins Cpl Britt Stacey Cpl Erik Kirkland LCpl John Condello LCpl Jackie Chidester LCpl Jose Elizarraras LCpl Jorge Malagon HN Brent Garmon (USN) SSgt Sean Carroll (US Army) *posthumously promoted to LtCol
An LF6F is the abbreviation for “Landing Forces, 6th Fleet.” When a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) goes on a “Med Float” for 6 months to keep an eye on things in that part of the world, we are part of the “Landing Force” for the 6th Fleet of the U.S. Navy.
Landing Zone - essentially a large, open field in the pine forests of North Carolina that aircraft could land in and pick up troops.
Anything of sufficient technical complexity beyond lay understanding is, for all intents and purposes, “F***ing Magic.”
All helicopter seats either had, or were retrofitted, with these kevlar armor panels, which we all used to mock because they seemed very unlikely to stop any but the smallest of calibers. It did its job here.