The second AR took place just prior to the helicopters’ beginning their climb into the mountains, and it went perfectly. The artistry here was not so much making the AR work, but deciding how much gas they should be carrying. Forrest says, “You kind of have to do a trade-off: the more gas you put on, the more you weigh; the heavier you are, the less altitude you can get. So you kind of balance it. Before we took off, we worked out what’s our minimum fuel, what’s our maximum fuel. And by the way, let’s take on a few pounds for Mom and the kids. That’s the fuel you dump later on when you say, ‘Oh, hell, I need to get out of here.’ ”
As soon as they finished the AR, they started penetrating the mountains, “alone and stupid,” as the mission commander puts it, without a Herc tanker playing the role of mother hen. The helicopters can fly low to the ground, hugging the terrain and staying invisible. While a Herc can fly blacked out, it’s not as nimble and, as will be demonstrated later in the war, it’s less capable of staying out of trouble down in the valleys. When they need gas, they’ll pick a meeting point, and the 130 will do a tail chase, catch up and then move ahead of them, top off the helos, and then head back to base to refuel.
By now it’s around ten P.M., and the two helicopters are flying at well in excess of ten thousand feet, as close to terrain as practical. They’re over a big plateau, a dry lake bed, when they get the first indication that this mission might be more of an adventure than they bargained for. Knife 03’s copilot, Capt. Keith Nicholas, says, “This is when we start seeing the first onset of clouds, a scattered deck, and then it becomes pretty much socked in, but we’ve got about a thousand feet or so between the terrain and the top of the clouds, and it’s clear underneath.”
The clouds above them blocked the moonlight, making it a bit more of a strain to see with their night-vision goggles, but as long as the two helicopters can keep each other in sight, they decided to continue. “We’re continuing for a good hour or so, and the cloud deck is creeping down, getting lower, and we’re looking at a point where we need to make a turn to get toward the survivor. But the valley where we’d done our route study and are intending to fly through is socked in.”
Nicholas was flying the helicopter, and Forrest was sitting on the floor behind the pilots, watching a console with a moving map display and handling radio communications with fire support, tankers, and command and control. On the 53s, the mission commander does all the coordinating; the pilots do the flying. And at this point, they were all worrying.
“I’m flying the helicopter, leading the two-ship in, and I stick my nose into weather, just to see how bad the viz is going to get. Hopefully we’ll break out and it shouldn’t be too bad. But we weren’t lucky enough. Viz really was poor at that point, so we turned around back to where we started in that flat lake bed area.”
Fortunately, when they got back to the lake bed, the visibility there was still acceptable, although the cloud deck had dropped down to between three hundred and four hundred feet above terrain. That limited the flying space for the helicopters.
With the pair of helicopters flying no more than one to two rotor diameters apart, they circled around the lake bed area while discussing their options. At that point, the decision was made to give Knife 04 the lead, letting him take the role of pathfinder. Nicholas says, “We’d tuck in close to him if the weather got too bad. Hopefully, we’d have viz on him, and he’d use the systems to get us through this valley and onto the next one, where the survivor was.”
Before they tried it, however, they sent Two into the valley to actually fly the route to see how it was. When he came back, the report was good. “The [clouds] are actually pretty thin; we can proceed on.”
Pathfinder missions are basic technique for the MH-53. Part of what the helicopter was designed to do is lead other aircraft into areas where their own navigation aids can’t take them. They did it in Desert Storm, although leading another 53 into the weather was a unique event.
With Lieutenant Mike flying Knife 04 in the lead, Captain Frank on the controls of 03, and only about thirty more minutes of flying time to the survivor, the crews are feeling optimistic. All they have to do is go through a few more miles of bad weather, and then if it breaks clear, they get the guy, get out of bad-guy land, and head home. While they don’t have direct communication with his special-ops unit, they’re getting messages via SATCOM from the Joint Special Operations Air Center (JSOAC), which is in contact with the SOF team, that he’s still alive, he’s stable, and they’re at the LZ waiting for the rescue choppers to come in.
About a mile into the weather, they’re two rotor diameters behind Knife 04 when the leading helicopter completely disappeared from sight.
At that point, Frank makes an immediate decision to abort the entire mission. It’s one thing to put twenty-two lives at risk to save one; that’s what they do in the Pave Low community. But the guys who fly those helicopters are neither foolhardy nor stupid. They understand there’s no point in tempting fate when the deck is so clearly stacked against you. The pilot asks Pete to make the call on the satellite radio, and the airborne mission commander comes back with what Frank says is the right question: “Let’s think about this—there’s a guy’s life on the line.” The two discuss it at length and ultimately agree that the rescue mission has to be aborted. The AMC got a mental image of two pieces of machinery trying to occupy the same space at the same time.
“Hey, guys,” Frank says on comm, “I’m breaking off, left turn.” His expectation is that the crewmembers scanning out the side windows will watch for terrain and clear him around. Since they’d been on the left side of the lead helo, he put his ship into a left 180-degree turn and went back to where the weather was clear, while Forrest called the other helicopter to say they’ve lost sight of him and are going back to their hold point.
Hearing that Knife 03 has elected to bail out, Knife 04 now moves to join them in clear airspace, and comes close to crashing. Nicholas recalls that 04 almost crashed during that turn, “because he went completely blind as well. Couldn’t see anything. I know 04’s VVI—his Vertical Velocity Indicator—had a pretty good sink rate, but he was able to salvage the aircraft and turn it around and recover.”
Forrest elaborated on what happened up there, in the dark, in the clouds. “You got a tight valley, so when we called and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do a one-eighty, ’ he has to give us a few seconds to get separation from him, so that he can make his turn and not worry about turning into us. Now, the valley’s a little bit narrower there, so he had to make a real tight turn at a real high altitude, and when you do that . . . the helicopter’s only got a certain speed, a window it can operate in, and he almost got bit by what will bite us about twenty minutes from this point.”
Once both helicopters were back over the plateau, they began flying a “wagon wheel,” a large circle with the birds on opposite sides of the wheel. Even there, however, the weather was rapidly deteriorating. The cloud deck was down to two hundred feet and what had been clear air was getting foggy. While flying the wheel, the pilots talk with each other. “Are we going to stay here and orbit and wait the weather out; are we going to land; or are we going to get out of these mountains and go to where the weather is better?”
Captain Frank concludes that the best thing they can do is dump gas and land. (Flying helicopters at high altitude is a juggling act—you can be too heavy to land as well as too heavy to take off. The solution is to dump gas, land, take off, and immediately find a tanker to refuel.) To the AMC, that didn’t make sense because that meant they wouldn’t be able to take off and go anywhere once the weather cleared. Forrest says, “In all honesty, the hardest decision in my life was made at that point, which was, ‘I know this guy is life or death, but I’ve got to leave him in the field. So at that point I made the hardest call I’ve ever made in my life. ‘Abort. We’re abort, guys.’ In my mind, I’m thinking that I’ve just, in essence, killed this guy, ’cause I can’t rescue him.”
Th
e issue is not one of personal bravery, not a matter of willingness to fight the elements. It’s a sensible conclusion based on the capabilities of the equipment they’ve been given to prosecute the mission. Copilot Nicholas says, “The problem with the weather is that we won’t be able to see any of the terrain around us, and being power-limited at those extreme altitudes, even with all the training and everything that we have, that helicopter just didn’t have enough power to make it over. So if we lost viz on the mountains, it increased our potential for running into terrain, and that’s what we did not want to happen.”
By this time, in the face of diminishing visibility, 03 and 04 had waited a bit too long to join up and head for safer territory. The problem with orbiting in a wagon wheel is that when you’re on opposite sides of the wheel, one ship is flying is one direction and the other is heading the other way. Now, 03 asks the pilot of 04 to take the lead and guide them south, out of the mountains. So 03 breaks out of the circle and attempts to rejoin 04, but they’re tail-chasing him from about a mile behind, trying to catch up.
Pilot Frank sees his wingman’s anticollision light flash twice, then watches as Knife 04 goes into the weather to the south and disappears. “I fly right up against it [the weather] as close as I can go, I know there’s terrain on both sides. What’s in my mind is ‘There’s no way I’m going in the weather—it’s a death sentence.’ ”
What they do is call the other ship. “Hey, we need you to come back. We need to rejoin up, get tighter with you, and then you lead us out of here.”
Unfortunately, while they were heading north into the valley that would take them to the survivor, the bad weather was creeping in behind them. Now, as they head south, they are trapped. Nicholas says, “We’re in a little sucker hole, so to speak, a pocket, and all the valleys that leave that area are totally socked in with weather.” And they can’t climb, and they can’t land.
The decision they make is just to stay airborne and let Knife 04 rejoin them, then use that ship as a pathfinder to lead them out, with the hope that the weather to the south was not as impenetrable as it was to the north.
The problem is that Knife 04 now can’t find them in the clouds. Nicholas attempted to provide 04 with GPS coordinates, but as he was transmitting, someone in another aircraft keyed in on the same frequency. “The radio call got stepped on, so he didn’t get to hear the coordinates. The last words Lieutenant Mike heard from us is, ‘Stand by.’ ”
Not knowing that 04 didn’t get the coordinates, the cockpit crew of Knife 03 has moved into survival mode. They’re taught to prioritize their tasks when stressed. Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Forrest explains: “The first thing to do is fly the helicopter. Second thing is to make sure you’re flying in the right place you want to go, and the third thing is to talk to somebody.”
The pilot, Captain Frank, is flying the aircraft; Abe, the center engineer, and the copilot are navigating; Clint, the left gunner, Brian “Daisy,” the tail gunner, and Jeff, the right engineer/gunner are scanning; and both the copilot and MC are on the radios. Forrest remembers that they’re literally flying from valley to valley, ridge to ridge, just trying to keep flying. On the moving map display they spot a valley that looks like it may take them out of trouble, but in order to get to it, they have to go over a small village and two ridgelines. They’re also acutely aware that when they arrived in country, they were warned that the moving map data was not up-to-date—it can’t be relied on for precision navigation when they’re in the soup. And they were in it but good. Frank says, “The weather is coming fast and furious. It’s snow, even though it looks like we’re in clouds with very low visibility.” The notion of using the map to try to find a place to fly to, dump gas, and land is looking less than realistic.
An MH-53 only three hundred feet above the ground, with clouds immediately overhead reflecting the sound back to earth, can wake up the neighborhood. But whether the locals know they’re overhead is not their biggest concern at that moment. Staying in the air is, and they’re still pushing the helicopter beyond its limits to accomplish that task.
They pass the village and have enough power to get over the first ridgeline. Right behind it is a second ridge that’s a little bit higher. The helicopter doesn’t have the muscle to get over it, forcing Frank to turn away from the high terrain.
Forrest says, “What happens is, we’ve got very few knots of speed to work with. You go too slow, you’re going to fall out of the sky. And what happens at this point was, he’s got to turn, and you either hit the terrain in front of you or you make the turn. And we’re probably only—what?—about seven degrees into the turn, banked, and we literally fall out of the sky at that point. I mean, once we started the turn to avoid the terrain, we departed controlled flight and started about a three-hundred-foot fall, right into the ground.”
In the pilot’s seat, Captain Frank realizes that calamity is about to strike at an accelerated pace. “There’s a way out of this valley on the other end, and we’re going to try and fly out of it that way, but when we get there we realize that it’s completely socked in; the weather is down to the tops of the terrain. So we start this left-hand turn. Maybe five or six seconds into the turn we fly over the village, and about another two seconds later we just run out of lift and basically come falling out of the sky.”
Why would a turn cause the helicopter to fall from the sky? New York Air National Guard Lt. Col. Graham Buschor has flown military helicopters for years. He’s a safety officer who has conducted crash investigations all over the country, and he was the copilot of the HH-60G helicopter that was forced to ditch in the Atlantic in the so-called “perfect storm.” Here’s his explanation in layman’s terms of why Knife 03 crashed—and why it was almost impossible not to in those circumstances and at that altitude.
“He turned to avoid terrain. Turning involves tilting the rotor. When you tilt the rotor you dump some of your lift. You add collective—power—to compensate for the lost lift, but the helicopter has no more power to give, so you start descending. The descent normally increases exponentially, faster and faster.
“The only way to recover from this situation is to get back to level flight and get the helo flying again. This requires altitude, of which he does not have enough.”
Buschor uses the analogy of an electric fan blowing directly on your face. If you turn the fan on an angle, the breeze hitting you isn’t as strong. In order to make it stronger, you either have to turn it back so it’s once again blowing in your face, or you need to increase the power—switch it from low to high. The problems were multiple: He had to make the turn or crash into the mountain; he already had the power set on high. There was no more power. Falling from the sky was, unfortunately, inevitable.
Instinctively, the pilot moves to the next problem: trying to get the helicopter level. Buschor explains, “When crashing, you want to try to crash level, and let the landing gear do what it was designed to do, absorb the impact. The engineers design aircraft to crash in a level attitude. No one wants to crash on their side or upside down, as the likelihood of fire, injury, damage, and death is greater. At such a high altitude, the helicopter is very sluggish to respond because of the thin air. It flies like a pig. What Frank did was level the airframe for impact, and prior to impact you pull the collective up to your armpit and use whatever energy you have left in the rotor to cushion the impact.
“It’s every helo pilot’s worst nightmare. You’ve got one chance to get it right. This all happens very, very quickly,” notes Buschor. “You have a highly skilled pilot in this situation.”
What does a three-hundred-foot fall feel like? “Like an elevator coming down,” recalls the copilot, Capt. Keith Nicholas. “But Frank did a fantastic job of leveling the aircraft and pulling the guts out of that bird, getting every last bit of energy he could out of that rotor system to cushion our fall. We were committed, we were going in, but he did a phenomenal job of airmanship.”
Frank recalls that they’d been in
precisely the same situation earlier in the mission, but he had enough altitude to fly out of it. “I was able to fly down sloping terrain and regain speed—which had dropped to about seventy knots indicated airspeed—for lift.” This time, that option wasn’t going to work. “I immediately pull the aircraft level. You can hear the engines whining, you hear the rotors slowing down. You’re pulling power and the rotor is just not biting the air anymore. You can feel the aircraft shaking. There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind what’s happening. Jeff, in the right door, reacts, saying I should punch the tip [auxiliary gas] tanks. Jettison them. But it was too late.
“At that point I bring the nose up to decelerate as much as I can. I’d already pointed my nose downslope, so that’s good. We’re heading down the slope of the hill we’re about to hit.” Hitting terrain in that direction will absorb impact, much like how a motorcycle rider jumping an obstacle wants to land on a downward-facing ramp. “I pulled the collective up to my armpit—by pure luck I happened to run out of collective just as we’re impacting the ground, and the aircraft skipped down the hill and stayed level.”
What the pilot was able to do was take the ship from about sixty degrees of bank angle to almost level by the time they hit the ground. It took somewhere between five and eight seconds to crash, but in that time, Nicholas was able to get off a call. “It’s one of those things where you’re probably already in the crash or going down; takes your brain a second or two to recognize that. Took me another second, probably, to punch the mike, and then another second to get my Mayday call out before we hit.”
The Mayday call didn’t include a location; there was no time for that. It was just a last-ditch effort to let whomever was monitoring radios know that they were going down. Because Nicholas was actively working, he didn’t have time to contemplate the consequences of what was happening to them. He could only register disbelief, or as he recalls the moment, “Can’t believe this is happening, but here we go.”
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