Aviation Mishap Story Time 8
The Definition of an Optimist
[Ed. note - for better context, these are the previous “episodes” in this series: AMST Intro, AMST 1, AMST 2, AMST 3, AMST 4, AMST 5, AMST 6, Helicopter Parenting, and AMST 7.]
A Collection of Tales
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).
I. The Luck o’ the Irish.
Wally, callsign “Angry”, tried out for - and won - the audition to be the mascot for Notre Dame when he was a student there in the ‘80s. If you saw him, you would appreciate that it was destiny: guy looks like the walking embodiment of the Fighting Irish tattoo you see on Southie boys. A red-headed, fiery-faced madman, with an impish smile was he.
Just days before I was leaving on deployment, Bill and I ran into Angry and another pilot at the ATM outside the PX on base. Wally had heard about our crash and now the gap between us didn’t seem as far as the differences in rank and time in service; he was just about to go on terminal leave and exit the Corps - and flying Snakes - forever. I had heard the rough outline from other people over the time I was in the squadron, but never from Angry himself. After I told him my view of our mishap, his came tumbling out.
Angry was in the front seat, just like I had been, with a very capable pilot in back known for being a good stick. Box and Angry were on a night shoot on low light level conditions (less than .0023 lumens, for those who care about such things, or - as we frequently said in honor of an older pilot who coined the phrase - “it was darker than the inside of a coal miner’s ass.”) They were part of a section doing some training in the lead-up to the Gulf War - the first one, back in 1991. Angry had his head down “in the bucket” - looking through the telescopic sight unit (TSU) - while shooting at some sand dunes in the desert. NVGs are a technological wonder, but despite videogame depictions, they do not turn night into day. It’s shades of green and one of the biggest limitations is the loss of genuine depth perception. The other is the narrow field of view (about 40º), so it’s like looking through an empty christmas paper tube.
The desert, much like the ocean, is also a seductive mistress. The human eye relies upon contrast and movement. The ocean, when calm, or the desert, can be deceptive because of the lack of contrast.
Wally said that as they were getting closer, they hadn’t noticed that the ground sloped up underneath them, and at the last second he got some inkling that they were in trouble, somehow Box pulled power at the last instant as they impacted the ground, and they managed to fly away from the ground after striking it, the aircraft seemingly intact as they climbed away from near-death. It was a few moments before their wingan caught up to them and, after a visual inspection, informed them that they were missing their skids. On a flyover of the impact site, Wally and Box’s skids were stuck in the desert sand, perfectly straight, ripped from the aircraft, which was otherwise perfectly intact.
Thankfully, Box managed to fly them back to some airport in the rear where mechanics built some kind of lash-up where Box maneuvered the helicopter into place until it could be stabilized and wouldn’t fall over upon shutdown. Voilà! They got to keep their wings, but no air medal for Box for some amazing stickwork… because you don’t get an air medal when you fly a perfectly functional aircraft into the ground in the first place, no matter how good the subsequent save is.1 But Wally told of Box’s airwork best: “Barney, if he doesn’t hit skids perfectly straight - if there’s even a hint, one degree, of lateral drift, we fucking cartwheel across the desert floor.”
Maybe it’s the luck of the Irish, or maybe it’s just great basic airmanship; I’ll raise my glass to either and both.
And best postscript to any mishap, ever: after saving the aircraft, it was put on a truck to return to its base and get new skids. Unfortunately, the truck drivers didn’t get the memo about bridge height and the top of the Cobra - the rotor head - smacked the bridge, ruining the aircraft. No good deed goes unpunished.
II. Smells Like Engine Failure.
One of the highlights of my aviation career is that as the junior Cobra pilot in the Detachment, I get paired with the senior Cobra pilot as my combat crew - Major Nick “Festus” Hall. Festus had come from to 269 from the west coast, we’re he’d racked up at least WestPac deployments. He was also a graduate of the helicopter test pilot school at NAS Patuxent “Pax” River, Maryland. Not only had he completed a tour at test pilot school, his project aircraft while there was ours - the Whiskey model Cobra. As I understand it, that was not the normal way of things for Pax River test pilots; usually you work on a number of different projects and might learn to fly several different aircraft types and models and work on various individual projects, like flight envelope or engine testing on one aircraft, or a weapons system test on a different one, etc. But Festus was “right place, right time” and had worked on much of the flight testing that made up significant chunks of our aircraft’s NATOPS Manual. It is no exaggeration to just cu to the chase and say he was the f***ing Man on the Whiskey.2 What it meant for me was flying day-in, day-out, while on deployment, and living just around the corner from, the most complete, most knowledgeable, best pilot I ever saw - period.
But he wasn’t exactly expansive on the subject - or any subject, for that matter. Festus was a taciturn guy by nature, with an engineering degree from Penn State. He had a capacious mind with an encyclopedic knowledge of flying helicopters and velvet hands to match. One time, we were both testing aircraft off the back of the ship3 and I had just landed ahead of him. I waited for him to finish - shut down, handlers to pull his aircraft off the spot and into the “bone yard” - so we could talk on the walk in. One of our mechs came up to ask about his test and he replied by explaining that there was a hydraulic line under a panel just aft of his seat that was vibrating. I had no idea what he was talking about…
I thought I knew my aircraft - all of the numbers, parameters, procedures, etc. - but I realized he knew all of that, PLUS he had seen that bird pulled apart, skinned, and put back together. He knew how it was wired the way you might expect a vascular surgeon to know your veins and arteries. (Of course I later checked with the open-mouthed mech and he was correct about the hydraulic line).
And then this happened…
…We’re doing an exercise on the island of Sardinia, Italy. I don’t even think we had live ordnance, it’s just make believe bombs dropping, but as part of the exercise, we’re going to “call in” - direct Harriers from out ship - onto a target on a very narrow plateau at the top of a mountain. Because of the terrain, there wasn’t any good place for us to be, so we find ourselves in - yes, you guessed - yet another high hover hold off the side of a plateau, with a cliff dropping off beneath us. Once again, on the absolute wrong side of the Deadman’s Curve. And it’s the kind of cliff that if our engines fail, we are going to be going on a very, very shitty roll 200' feet to the base of this mountain. The “hill” that Bill and I stuck our helo to in 29 Palms ? It doesn’t even deserve to be proximate to a sentence about the terrain we were hovering over in Sardinia.
Festus is sitting in the back, and flying, while I’m in the front seat just finishing my call with the Harriers as they pull off the target.
Harriers: Lightning Five-One and Five-Two are clear; returning to Mother. (“Mother” is our term for the ship’s navigational beacon. Frequently it gets used to refer to the ship itself.) Me (on radio): Copy, Five-One. Harriers: Switching. Me: Double-click of the mic to acknowledge. Me (over ICS): Welp, I guess those guys really are one pass, haul ass. Festus: Yup. [Pause] Barney, you smell something… burning? I might as well not have a nose for all I can smell. I boxed and played hockey as a kid and, given my mouth, the proboscis has been busted and reset a few times. Me: Burning? Festus: Engine.
My eyes snapped to the engine six-pack, which includes the temperature gauges for each engine, as well as engine oil temperatures. A lot can be diagnosed about the health - or sickness - of an engine from just the six-pack. I saw the temperature spiking on our #2, the right engine, climbing through the upper end of the normal temperature range of 867º C into the yellow. Normal (unrestricted) operating temps are 400º-801º, with short, transient spikes allowed into the upper 900ºs.
Now having been trained in the Old Fashioned Way to be truly paranoid, I looked at the other engine, momentarily ignoring the one rapidly over-temping, and I’ll be damned, but that sucker had rolled back to flight idle.
In the moment it took me to key the mic, and say something like, “One’s rolled back,” Festus’ hands were already in action: I could “feel” that he had seen it, too, as he dropped the collective at the same time he pedal turned putting us nose down the cliff so we could essentially “fall”/glide down the ridge, requiring no power, letting the temperature come down on the right engine because there was no load, and his voice came on at the same time he executed the pedla turn, calm and collected:
“One’s at idle; locking out one,” he was using a procedure that would “lock out” our Engine Electronic Control Unit (EECU), shiny silver box that sat at the bottom of each engine and enabled the engines to talk to each other - “cross-talk” - and thereby share the power demands on all of the various systems of the helicopter. Festus bypassed the unit and - like they did in the old days - controlled fuel flow to the engine by twisting his wrist on the collective. Number One came back on line as the mountain fell away under and behind us and it was immediately clear that the EECU had been the problem. With it removed, we had two engines at full power, and Number Two’s temperature came back down into normal range.
Now here’s the insidious thing: we had an emergency that in our NATOPS manual could very well have been diagnosed as an “Engine Overheating/Overtemperature”. The schoolbook immediate action EP (emergency procedure) would be to cut power to the “affected engine” - that is, roll the throttle of the over-temping engine to flight idle. Had we done that without checking the Number 1 engine first, we would have had exactly zero fully operating engines, two at flight idle, and we would have been toast - right into that mountain. But Festus had smelled the #2 over-temping before it got high enough to be “shitty” - giving us an extra handful of seconds that were critical in diagnosing that the underlying reason that #2 was overheating - because #1 was at idle. I was proud that I had caught in an instant after he did; but never did it feel truly dangerous. He handled it so matter-of-fact that I can’t recall feeling a moment of fear.
After radio calls to our wing and then landing down at the beach, we called back to the ship, explained to our maintenance department what was up and that lockout appeared to have solved the problem, and then we flew the bird back to the ship. No fuss, no muss.
An E-I found later that the ceramic-insulated electronic cables that connected our engine EECUs, under high heat conditions, (!!) could cause volt spikes that “look” to the EECU as erroneous data, which might explain the rollbacks. Messages at that time were coming in fairly regularly of single-engine rollbacks on the Cobra’s T-700 engines from all over the Fleet. When they were able to replicate the rollback on a bench test with our cable, I felt no small degree of professional vindication, though I don’t have conclusive “proof” that happened in Bill and I’s specific mishap because no one had thought to look for such a fault previously. After all, the cables were designed to operate in temperatures that ran to almost 1000º Celsius.
III. “You don’t wanna know.”
Shortly after the engine rollback with Festus, later on during this same NATO exercise over Sardinia, a small detachment of us were sent ashore, forward deployed with the British Royal Marines Four-Two (42) Commando Squadron. It was early May, 1995.
Jim “Jinx” Jenkins played linebacker at Cornell before becoming a Cobra pilot. This was his second deployment; he would later go on to command our squadron from 2007-2009. We came within a second of dying together one night in Sardinia.
Sardinia is a large island north of the top of the boot of Italy, more like off of Italy’s left knee, just south of the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea.
Jinx and I were flying together, with Mike “Woodman” Wood and Clark “Swab” Cox as our wingman. It was a late night launch and would be a low light level NVG flight. We were supporting 4-2 and an infantry assault of NATO forces near a place called Stagno de San Giovanni - St. John’s Pond. It’s an inlet on the western edge of the island and the NATO forces were moving north, from the south, headed towards a canal outside of a small town. Within the exercise, that canal was acting as a limiting feature for the NATO troops and fire support control measure for us, allowing us to pretend to shoot (no live rounds on this one) north of the canal. At the time, I was going through a phase where I was recording flights using a voice-activated walkman with earphones under my helmet.4 This particular flight seemed interesting, and, at the least, would allow me to record all of our NATO allies and their funny accents so we could poke fun at them later back on the ship.
Everything was going along fairly uneventfully, although the water was particularly calm that late night/early morning hours. As a result, if you looked at land, you could see and sense altitude, but if we happened to be turning or facing the water, there was a distinct illusion that we were flying in space. The stars above and reflected below on the water made the sea disappear and it was impossible to see where the sky ended and the water began.
As we came in from the west over the San Giovanni’s stagno at 300 feet AGL looking at the land, we were south of the canal trying to locate the NATO troops while talking to our British ground controller, a forward observer who was going to practice calling us in using a 9-line format. This produced a funny exchange where he was trying to talk our eyes onto the advancing troops who were carrying infrared chem-lights on the back of their packs.
Me: Did he say look for the violins? Jinx: (laughing) Cyalumes. Me: Cyalumes? Jinx: Chem-lights. Me: Ohhhh... Limey bastards! Speak ‘Merican. Jinx: You see ‘em? Wai- there they are. Me: Tally! Looks like we’re about a click-and-a-half south of the canal. Jinx: Coming left.
We were behind our own troops running perpendicular to their line of advance, so we needed to get back out west and make another run in just in front of the canal. Jinx did a 180º turn back towards the water and we headed back out toward the water, stars everywhere above and below us. I looked over my shoulder to check on Clark and Mike and ensure they were with us, then I looked back down at my map to re-orient.
As Jinx did a 180º to the right to get us lined up with the canal, I had a sinking sensation and looked at my barometric altimiter, where the needle was moving down through 100 feet. The front seat in the Cobra did not have a radar altimiter, but given our proximity to the water, the “bar alt” was pretty close to the rad-alt, but with a little lag.
Me: Altitude.
I felt the aircraft buck as Jinx pulled the nose back and grabbed an armful of collective.
Me: Whoa.
Jinx: Sorry.
We continued on our run-in across the forward edge of the troops, just north of the canal simulating a gun and rocket run with our wing right along side covering our pull-off.
After that we hurried back to refuel and sit to await our next call for air support. On the way back to our refueling point, I was curious about Jinx’s power pull.
Me: How close were we to the water?
Jinx keyed the mic for a second and there was just static, then after a long pause, his voice came back: You don’t wanna know.
After the mission ended, we returned to the ship. Our other 2 Cobras and Hueys would replace us and we would get some sleep, then rejoin the exercise in the morning. Back on the boat, after we shut down, Clark and Mike came by our room for a quick debrief.
Clark: What did you guys see in the water?
Me: What’s that?
Mike: Did you guys see some dolphins or seals or something in that inlet, that pond?
Me: Dolphins? What are you talking about?!
Clark: When you guys were air-taxiing over the water, as we turned back in for that simulated gun-run…
Mike: …Yeah, we could see the salt-spray from your rotor-wash on the water.
My eyes met Jinx’s and he stared at me.
Me: We weren’t air-taxiing...
Mike and Clark got somber in an instant, as they realized what had happened. We had gotten to within 10 feet of the water, maybe less, so close that our rotorwash had thrown up mist and spray.
Coda: The definition of an optimist.
A few days after Bill and I had crashed in the desert, a bunch of us were out for our daily run in the desert. Someone was training for the Marine Corps marathon in the fall and most of us took up running with our mate out of solidarity. Wouldn’t hurt to keep us in shape, either.
Right after we finished running, A. R. “Rick” Lyman, a Huey pilot and Naval Academy graduate who looked like Steve McQueen, pulled out a cigarette and lit up.
We were all still catching our breath from the 8-mile run and someone in the group couldn’t contain their surprise.
“Jesus, Rick!”
“What?” Rock said as he took a long drag on his Marlboro.
“You’re not worried about lung cancer?”
Rick Lyman took another, extra-long haul, held it, and looked at me, his cigarette between his fingers. Then he turned to his questioner:
“Well aren’t you the fucking optimist - a helicopter pilot who’s worried he’s gonna die of lung cancer,” and he turned to me as he said it to catch my eye. All of us, including the CO, started guffawing.
From that moment on our squadron had a new definition of “optimism” - a helicopter pilot who smokes and thinks he’s going to die of lung cancer.
Ed. note - Wally and Box were both great guys and pilots. Box was my instructor for my first Fleet boat landings and he did have “silky mitts,” to borrow a hockey term.
As further proof of this, I note that he would go on in his career to make Colonel and become the “Class Desk” for the AH-1W, the duty matter expert in the Marine Corps for our aircraft.
One of the more risky things we probably do is testing off the back of the ship. Aircraft require maintenance and after you’ve done as much as you can do while chained to the deck, at some point, you have to have confidence that the aircraft can be flown - you go to the back of the ship, in its wake, and then conduct all of the your “hover checks” off the back, in case you go swimming, you’re at least in the ship’s wake and they have a better chance of finding you. I’m not kidding about this.
I would tell anyone I flew with so this wasn’t surreptitious to capture anything in particular. It was mostly boredom - something funny or interesting would happen and I would have a recording of it on cassette. The group of us would then have something to laugh about until I recorded over one of the three 90-minute cassettes that I had.