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In flight school, you had a laminated checklist, but you used it so many times that for the most part you had it memorized. I had it memorized but assumed we would still use it. Nope, I’d just learned that “assume” stood for “make an ass of u and me.”
“Cory, here we have to do it fast, and there’s no time to be reading. Have it memorized and just get at it. You take the rotor head, and I’ll get down here.”
In about five minutes, that bird was preflighted. Before we climbed into the aircraft, the door gunner handed me a chicken plate. I noticed I was the only one wearing a flak jacket over my jungle fatigues. We didn’t have flight suits at this time as Air Force and Navy pilots had; everyone wore jungle fatigues when flying. The chicken plate was a metal plate covered with ceramic tile and fiberglass. It would stop a small-arms bullet. It was normally worn over the shoulders with a belly band to hold the front and back pieces together. Here, the front of the chicken plate sat on your lap, covering your chest and stomach. It was held in place by the shoulder harness and seat belt. Where was the back plate? I wondered. The crew chief and door gunner were sitting on them, as their seats had no armor plating and the pilot seats did, at least against small-arms fire. A .50-cal or 12.7 mm antiaircraft round would punch through the seats.
As we sat in the aircraft, Mr. Baker, Tony, went over the finer points of getting the aircraft started and out of the revetment. No sloppy hovering at this point or you were going to be banging into the revetment, which would make the crew chief unhappy, the door gunner scared and the aircraft commander pissed off. Do any real damage and you’d have the maintenance officer crawling up your ass as well before the company commander got to you. The other thing to watch for was other aircraft coming out and hovering to the runway. You did not fly right out of the revetment.
As we were ready to depart, Tony said, “I’ll take it out and put it back and then you do it.” With the collective in his left hand and the cyclic in his right, he slowly and gently brought the bird up. On the Huey, the nose came up
first when in the hover position. In a hover, the nose of the UH-1H was actually five degrees above horizontal. Tony was so smooth that you hardly noticed the movement. He was holding the cyclic with his thumb and two fingers, and the cyclic never moved. Once we cleared the revetment, he reversed the procedure and put us back in, setting us down just as gently as when he’d picked up. “Okay, Dan, your turn.” Oh, wow, it was Dan and Tony now.
“I have the aircraft, Tony.”
“You have the aircraft,” he responded, indicating he recognized I had positive control of the aircraft.
With my left hand on the collective, right hand on the cyclic—my whole hand—I started coming up on the power. The aircraft broke ground.
“Oh, shit!” screamed the door gunner.
“We’re going to die!” wailed the crew chief, and I was shitting in my pants.
“All right, knock it off, you two,” Tony said to the crew. They were laughing their asses off.
“Oh, sir, can’t we screw with the new guy?” asked the crew chief. So that’s the way it’s going to be today?
I got the aircraft out and over to the runway, shaking a bit, but safe. We headed north up Highway 13 towards the village of Quan Loi. Highway 13 was known as “Thunder Road” and frequently was witness to ambushes by NVA troops coming out of the Iron Triangle that bordered it on the eastern side. Highway 13 was the main road, sparsely populated, unpaved of course, from Saigon, through Lai Khe, Quan Loi, and An Loc and right into Cambodia. In the summer, it was a dusty road. In monsoon season, it was a quagmire of mud. At any one time, you would see US Army convoys, overloaded Vietnamese buses, oxcarts and bicycles. Scattered along the side of the road were young children selling Coke to GIs or fruit to the locals. Mixed in was the occasional US mechanized platoon with their armored personnel carriers, really a metal box on tank tracks.
Tony pointed out landmarks to me as we were about one thousand feet on a clear day. I was taking it all in and feeling good that I was flying again.
BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM, went the guns on both sides. The engine suddenly lost rpm.
“Taking fire, going down,” screamed the door gunner.
Just then, the engine went quiet with engine rpm dropping quickly, and I slammed the collective down and entered into a textbook autorotation. I watched the instruments and saw nothing unusual except our low engine rpm, which was now steady but very low. Rotor rpm was looking good, and the road was a perfect landing site. I looked over at Tony, who was looking out his window. Surely he was going to take command of the aircraft and land this thing. Oh, no, he’s not! I flared at the right altitude, sucked in some collective, let her drop some more and pulled in more to make a no-slide soft landing. Mutt and Jeff were laughing their asses off again.
Tony looked at me for a minute with a smile. “Not bad for a new guy out on his first flight. I got it.”
“You have the aircraft,” I responded and began to breathe.
We flew up to a Vietnamese/Special Forces base camp that had a landing strip, at Chon Thanh. Tony said, “That was a textbook autorotation. Now let’s learn some combat autorotations. I’ll do the first one and then you do the next one.”
As we were flying out, he explained that in an autorotation, you had to have altitude, and if you didn’t have that, you’d best have airspeed. He never got above one hundred feet, but we were hauling ass over the treetops at one hundred knots where normal airspeed was eighty knots. When we were about five hundred yards from the end of the runway, he cut the power and lowered the collective slightly to maintain rotor rpm while raising the nose of the aircraft to bleed off airspeed. The result was a sliding touchdown on the runway.
“Okay, your turn.”
As he turned the controls over to me, I was fired up. In flight school, we never flew this low on a single-ship mission. Getting eyeball to eyeball with the monkeys in the trees was enough excitement, let alone knowing that I was going to chop the throttle as I approached the runway. Finally Tony did that for me.
“Ease back on your airspeed. Maintain rotor rpm. Lower collective. Watch your rotor rpm. Easy, easy…nice, Dan,” he said as I put the aircraft down softly on the runway. Mutt and Jeff said nothing.
“Can we do that again?” I said with obvious excitement.
“First let me demonstrate a combat takeoff. In flight school, you brought the aircraft to a hover and then eased it forward, pulling power. Here you won’t be able to bring it to a hover as you have only three seconds on the ground. You touch, count to three and get out of there. I’ve got the aircraft.”
“You have it,” I repeated and released the controls.
“A combat takeoff is gaining altitude and airspeed as quickly as possible, but especially airspeed. To execute, you ease forward on the cyclic—remembering that sitting at a hover, the nose is elevated five degrees, so that’s five degrees you don’t want in the takeoff—and come in with thirty pounds of torque quickly and smoothly. Naturally if you’re in a formation, you have to key on the bird in front of you, but he’ll be wanting out of there just as much as you. Do not overtorque the aircraft, which is forty-three pounds. Okay, here we go,” Tony instructed.3
All of a sudden, the nose came over and I could just visualize the main rotor blade hitting the ground in front of me. It didn’t, and the aircraft was racing over the ground and climbing fast. This was better than a Disneyland ride!
