The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  A bigger pressure on military families is the need for flexible working hours. For example, her husband Ken is working ashore so that he can care for Mason, but this comes at a cost known as the ‘flexibility stigma’.

  ‘He sometimes feels hamstrung because he can’t leave Mason and travel interstate for a course,’ she says.

  The couple spent ten months apart in 2016, and 2017 is looking little better. Fortunately, Ken is a couple of years behind her in the navy’s warfare stream. If they were at the same level they would probably both be offered postings at the same time and so one of them would have to sacrifice it in order to take care of Mason. So far, both have been able to keep their careers progressing.

  ‘We have been doing it for quite a while and we are good at communicating. The navy has also helped with leave when possible.’

  Social media and phone communications are shut down during boardings or other operations – code-named as particular designated ‘states’ – and that can be a difficult time for crew and families. Other designated states on board a warship refer to various equipment and systems such as ‘going black’ to shadow a target, which means no lights; ‘emcon silent’, which means no radar or other emissions for maximum stealth; and ‘ultra-quiet’ when everything is shut down and all on board remain still for a minefield transit.

  Henry’s predecessor as CO of Darwin, Commander Terry Morrison, says he had first-hand experience of communication shut-downs. ‘I had people saying to me, “Oh it’s terrible, we don’t know if we’re coming or going.”’

  To ward off any strife, Morrison always sent out a preformatted email to the families. ‘I basically just said, “Look, we’re all safe, everyone is safe, everyone is fine but we just need to shut our communications down for the time being because we’re going into an operation.” Part of it is because of the bandwidth requirement – there will be a lot of data going back and forth – so we can’t let someone go on Skype. I have to send back photos of the boarding as well.’

  But the main reason is to maintain operational security. ‘We don’t want the information going to people ashore about something that we’re currently trying to wade through methodically,’ says Morrison. ‘Don’t jump at shadows, don’t start sending out to people that we’ve got these narcotics. I need to control that, and also where we are, and all that sort of thing. It’s all sensitive. It’s all part of our tactics not to give that away.’

  The biggest morale setback for Darwin during her 2016 deployment would occur after the May patrol, with the tragic death of leading seaman chef Cameron Acreman, twenty-seven, in a hotel room in Muscat, Oman, in June.

  It was a crushing blow. Everyone on board knew the popular and outgoing sailor, a chefo ‘killick’, who kept his shipmates entertained with his lively banter during meal times and beyond. His death affected the ship deeply. He had been Darwin’s ‘sailor of the quarter’ in May 2016 for his ‘professionalism, sense of humour and willingness to go the extra mile’. He also beat Chief Petty Officer and Country Women’s Association member Joy Newman in a charity scone bake-off in front of a large, hungry crowd in the galley.

  For Henry and Quadrio, Cameron Acreman’s sudden death was a particularly dark time. Both men left the ship when it arrived in Darwin to attend his funeral in Queensland.

  ‘Meeting Cameron’s parents Terry and Heather was one of the toughest things that I have ever done,’ says Henry.

  15

  Birdies

  It is 19 May and the huge weapons haul of 27 February feels as if it happened a long time ago. Day three of the new two-week patrol dawns fine and sunny with a rising sea state as Darwin steams northeast away from Africa inside her patrol box. It proves to be quite an eventful day.

  The ship’s helicopter, Orko, is airborne and scanning the ocean for smugglers, while the skipper and senior officers make final plans for the replenishment at sea later in the morning, when we will take on aviation fuel from the German navy tanker FSG Spessart.

  After I have breakfast in the wardroom and chat with XO Tina Brown about the strains a navy career places on family life, it’s time to head to the hangar for a visit with helicopter maintenance boss, or ‘birdy’, Chief Petty Officer Nathan Blanch.

  At 8 a.m. we are walking along the main passageway – called The Esplanade after the city of Darwin’s main drag – that runs from the ship’s ‘waist’ to the flight deck at the stern. (The waist is the centre of a guided missile frigate, which viewed from above curves inwards like the human waistline.) We have just reached the hangar door when all hell breaks loose. The emergency call ‘Pan Pan Pan’ erupts over the intercom, or ‘pipe’. This is not an exercise. The mood on board switches instantly to ‘game on’ as the ship’s company hurries to their emergency stations. For the visitor, that means quickly getting out of the way and cramming into the back of the Helicopter Control Officer shack attached to the superstructure above and at the front of the flight deck, for a bird’s eye view of the action.

  The reason for the emergency is that a ‘chip indicator’ on the Sikorsky Seahawk has caused pilot and flight commander Lieutenant Commander Kye Hayman to shut down one of the machine’s two turbine engines. The indicator means that there is the threat of foreign matter in the engine oil, which could potentially cause terminal damage to the helicopter’s power plant.

  The aircraft is about twenty-eight nautical miles (fifty-one kilometres) away from the ship. Its three crew members are Hayman, Aviation Warfare Officer, Lieutenant Clare Nickels, and loadmaster/sensor operator, Leading Seaman Dan Colbert.

  The bird has approximately twenty minutes’ flying time towards the only possible landing place in a vast ocean, with two-to three-metre waves and strong winds that would normally mean it would be a straightforward landing but today, with one engine down, it could be anything but.

  The ship is in full emergency mode as the Seahawk flies into view. The fire-fighting crews are on red alert. All compartments below the flight deck have been cleared in case of a crash landing and a lethal fuel fire that could quickly spread to the decks below.

  Landing a chopper on a moving ship in the middle of the ocean is never easy and with a question mark over one engine it becomes even more dangerous. From the control shack it appears to the novice observer that the rolling flight deck is nowhere near big enough to accommodate the rapidly approaching nine-tonne helicopter. It is a nail-biting moment for the inexperienced observer.

  While the bird makes its final approach to its floating landing pad, Hayman decides to restart the suspect engine in case he needs the extra burst of power. With its huge rotor blades seemingly just centimetres from the reinforced shack windows the machine appears to grow bigger and bigger, hovering above the deck before finally thudding aboard in a textbook landing.

  ‘If the engine was going to die we’d squeeze whatever life it had left out of it just to help us arrive to the ship,’ Hayman tells me later.

  Single-engine operations are highly risky at sea because of the large amount of power that the Seahawk requires to hover and land on a flight deck.

  ‘We generally don’t like to hover or approach for take-off and landing to a ship with one engine,’ he says.

  All three members of the crew are visibly shaken but greatly relieved as they set foot on the flight deck and the adrenaline rush begins to fade.

  ‘You do get worked up and a little bit more critical of the aircraft and how the other engine’s performing,’ Hayman admits. ‘It was a great sense of relief to land, shut the aircraft down safely, get the crew back safely and then sit down and have a cup of tea.’

  After emerging from the helicopter Clare Nickels declares, ‘That was the longest twenty-eight miles of my life.’ She later admits to quietly ‘freaking out’ and wondering how she would escape a sinking helicopter through the small escape window with all her flight gear on, although she felt reassured when the training kicked in and the team calmly went through their checklists and about their business as per the
intense training regime. But she says the loss of two crew when an army Black Hawk helicopter crashed off the deck of HMAS Kanimbla off Fiji in 2006 flashed through her mind while Orko was flying for those last twenty minutes across the empty ocean back to Darwin. The Seahawk and Black Hawk are virtually identical machines but adapted for different jobs, and Nickels is not the only one reflecting on the 2006 disaster. Many of the ship’s company are also talking about how choppers sink when they ditch into the sea. They know all too well how quickly the Seahawk would turn upside down and disappear beneath the waves.

  All navy helicopter crews dread having to ditch, even though they are trained to escape from a rapidly sinking, inverted chopper. They all undertake an intense helicopter underwater escape training (HUET) course and must renew the qualification every two years. This takes place at a purpose-built facility at naval aviation headquarters at HMAS Albatross.

  It is because of their top-heavy design that choppers will almost immediately capsize in water. The Seahawk is fitted with emergency floats but no one is confident of their ability to keep the machine on the surface for long. Hayman says that the last thing a crew does before take-off is to talk about emergency procedures and particularly their underwater escape drills. ‘The training we conduct at Albatross shows that you can get out within a few seconds, all going well.’

  Phill Henry is waiting in the hangar to hear first-hand about the incident and to reassure the crew that they have done a good job. After the bird’s rotors are folded up and the maintenance crew have wheeled it into the hangar, Hayman briefs his team of ‘birdies’ to make sure that only correct information runs along the ship’s grapevine. Then he retires to the wardroom for a well-earned cuppa.

  ‘It’s not a pleasant thing to do to shut one of your two engines down in flight,’ he says. ‘There’s certainly plenty of other aircrew out there in the Seahawk world who have [done it] but it does get the heart racing a little bit. Fortunately, we were relatively close to the ship but the indications we were getting inside the cockpit suggested that the engine probably wasn’t performing as well as it should be and once you see those indications you secure the engine.’

  Born in Penrith in western Sydney and raised on the Sunshine Coast, the straight-talking Hayman began his career as a trainee army pilot before transferring to the navy. The former Domino’s pizza store boss was too tall for the army’s Kiowa training helicopters but could fit safely into the navy’s Squirrel machines. He lives at Vincentia in Jervis Bay, New South Wales, with his wife Lisa and four children. Darwin is his second deployment to the region following a stint on HMAS Parramatta in 2010.

  A helicopter is a great force multiplier for a navy frigate. The bird is used for a multitude of missions, including its primary role in anti-submarine warfare as well as search and rescue, ‘hash and trash’ (cargo), vertical replenishment, personnel transfers, offensive overwatch (sitting above a target with weapons at the ready) and hunting smugglers. It can also ‘sanitise’ (search and clear) vast areas of ocean in a short time.

  Orko had replaced an unserviceable helicopter, and before it arrived, Darwin’s flying routine had been below par due to maintenance problems with the original machine. ‘The previous aircraft was suffering some gremlins that just meant the availability wasn’t what it needed to be,’ Henry explains. ‘So we were averaging probably only about thirty to forty per cent of the sorties due to those maintenance issues.’

  There are two complete chopper crews on board the frigate, and typically a surface search mission takes a helicopter no further than 250 kilometres away from the ship. In Darwin, Orko generally flew from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. and again from 10 a.m. until midday to scan the ocean for dhows and other vessels used by smugglers.

  While the warship’s sensors are effective for close-in search operations against metal vessels, the wooden dhows favoured by smugglers are difficult to detect electronically. The chopper also has powerful electro-optical and infra-red cameras to assist with searching in often rough seas.

  The ‘mark-one eyeball’ (human eye) and powerful binoculars employed by lookouts on board the ships’ gun direction platform above the bridge are also effective against close-in targets, but the helicopter extends the ship’s ‘eyes’ out to hundreds of kilometres. It can also hover over suspect vessels to deploy a fast-roping boarding team or conduct detailed intelligence gathering.

  On this patrol Phill Henry is able to coordinate his own flying operations with the French frigate Nivôse and its helicopter, as well as a French maritime patrol aircraft operating from the islands.

  ‘We’re looking at when the maritime patrol aircraft last flew and noting that our predominant smuggler is a wooden dhow doing five to six knots,’ he says. ‘So if they’ve sanitised an area then we’d look at when someone might have got through [and] when’s the best time to go up again. For instance the French patrol aircraft was flying this morning and it flew yesterday so we won’t be flying today.’

  Before the engine emergency Henry had planned to have the helicopter airborne for five hours a day during most of the fourteen-day patrol. Soon after leaving Dar es Salaam the chopper was at one hour’s notice to fly, but as the patrol wore on, maintenance and crew rest requirements have widened the gap.

  ‘We try and get into a cycle where effectively they fly in the mornings and are finished – not just the pilots but the maintainers and everyone – by mid-afternoon to be ready again for the next morning,’ Henry had said when the patrol started. ‘We’ll be averaging five hours a day on this patrol.’

  Unfortunately the Orko’s engine problem now causes two full days of flying to be lost.

  The daily flying routine includes a briefing at 3 p.m. to outline the next day’s mission. Just before take-off, the Principal Warfare Officer and Aviation Warfare Officer meet in the ops room to finalise the plan, based on any new information. The search pattern is planned in advance but can be altered at any time during the flight.

  The Seahawk helicopter is a technically advanced fighting machine. The sensor operator (‘senso’) sits on the left-hand side facing forward to a bank of consoles and screens. He or she also operates the Mag-58 machine gun when necessary. Stepping up through the right-hand door, I perch on the right-hand side across from the senso and immediately behind the pilot for my flight on day ten of the patrol. Beside the pilot in the left-hand front seat sits the Aviation Warfare Officer.

  As the machine climbs away from the ship, the vastness of the Indian Ocean soon becomes apparent. Within minutes Darwin is out of sight and there is nothing below but white caps and 4000 metres of deep blue sea. After swooping on a couple of legitimate fishing vessels and a demonstration of the chopper’s anti-submarine warfare capabilities, it is back to the mother ship for winch drills and the most challenging phase of the flight – the landing.

  Soon the heaving deck comes into view through the open side door while the deck crew stand ready to fix the chains that will fasten the machine onto the deck.

  At this point I clutch my harness release mechanism as the preflight safety briefing runs vividly through his mind. Fortunately, this is a relatively calm day and the landing goes off without a hitch, but that is not always the case. There is some remarkable vision on YouTube featuring navy helicopters landing on ships in impossibly rough seas. As the chopper settles on the steel deck the ground crew give the thumbs up and I can breathe again.

  Like most pilots, Kye Hayman is relaxed when he talks about what to non-flyers can sound utterly frightening. Unlike a fixed landing zone on terra firma, the ship can manoeuvre to give the pilot the best possible wind and sea conditions for the take-off and landing under the so-called helicopter operating limits. Depending on the take-off weight of the machine those limits are roughly four to five degrees of pitch and up to fifteen degrees of roll. The officer of the watch will position the ship into the wind, and in addition to finding the dead centre of the rocking flight deck on final approach, the pilot must also place a probe attached to
the underside of the machine into a metre-square trap on the deck.

  ‘We basically fly a three- to five-degree approach to the ship as you would approach a runway keeping that landing point fixed in the windscreen and then we move over the deck and we transition from the approach into the hover,’ Hayman says.

  The pilot then lines the bird up with white painted lines on the ship. When the Aviation Warfare Officer confirms it is in the correct position, the RAST (recover, assist, secure and traverse) probe attached to the helicopter is positioned directly over the trap on the deck of the ship, where it is hooked in. If there is a major problem with the aircraft or if the seas are very rough, there is another riskier method for getting the chopper onto the deck.

  ‘We can lower a messenger cable out through that probe and a cable comes up through the ship, we join them together then raise that cable up and it hooks into the aircraft and we use hydraulic pressure from the ship to bring us down into the trap,’ Hayman says.

  For all pilots, most of their flying will be ninety per cent routine and ten per cent gut-wrenching fear. Kye Hayman says the take-off and landing phases are the most intense, and he regards night landings in rough weather as the biggest test of all. ‘It’s one of those things that you wouldn’t tell your mother about because she’d go, “What are you doing?” It’s excitement and sheer terror all at the same time and when you recover on the ship at night all the crew breathe a sigh of relief that we’re here, particularly after a long sortie when you’re fatigued.’

  Clare Nickels agrees that night operations at sea are the most challenging for the aircrew. ‘When you depart at night you can’t wear your NVDs [night vision devices] so you have no idea what’s around you and you are glared out by all of the lights from the deck. You lift up from the deck, you slide across the deck, you turn away and the pilot has to put the nose down in order to climb, which is not as counter-intuitive as it seems, but basically you’ve gone from a whole bunch of lights to complete darkness and you have to make sure that you’re watching all of the instruments to make sure that you’re climbing away. It’s nice when you see the radar altimeter climb through about 200 to 500 feet because then you know that you’re definitely very clear of the ground.’