With his NVGs once again working, it’s easy for Cline, sitting in the left seat, to look left about sixty degrees and see what appears to be a nice valley almost precisely on the heading the helos were requesting.
As they’re making the turn, they hear good news from Chalk 3. He needs to be on the hose for only another two to four minutes. Chris Langston again begins calling the play-by-play while signaling with infrared lights visible only through night-vision goggles. The signals clear the helicopter from the precontact position to move up and attempt to stab the end of their twenty-foot-long refueling probe into the center of the forty-two-inch-diameter paradrogue at the end of the hose trailing from the underwing-mounted pod.
“Strike one,” calls Langston. In the cockpit, the FE resets the hose.
Moments later on the intercom, the crew hears from the left loadmaster again. “Swing and a miss. Strike two.” The FE automatically resets the hose. And again the helicopter misses. And again. It is beginning to seem like watching a bad baseball game. You’d leave, but you can’t get your car out of the parking lot until everyone in front of you leaves. For almost another twenty miles down the refueling track, the pilots of Chalk 3 keep whiffing.
In the cargo compartment, the radio operator has been scanning from the right forward window, and he does not like what he’s seeing. Whether it’s a function of depth perception through NVGs, or his relative lack of experience in this kind of terrain, he’s convinced that if the aircraft moves even slightly to the right, the wing tip is going to impact the mountain, and he gets on the intercom to pass that warning to the cockpit. “The terrain is awful close out here. Don’t go any further right.”
He gets a little solace when both the pilot and copilot acknowledge him. “Okay, we won’t come any further right. We’re pressing on ahead.”
Rodney Young has been “Radio” on 130s for only three years, but he grew up in an Air Force family—his dad is a retired chief master sergeant and his mom a master sergeant—and he joined up to fly. He’d wanted to be a loadmaster but there were no slots available when he was ready to enlist, so he opted for the radio job. He’d always been comfortable in airplanes. But now he can feel the nervousness in his stomach, and listening to the navs disagree about which way they should be heading is not improving the situation, because it underscores that they aren’t where they thought they were or where they are supposed to be. “I know the terrain is rising and we’re picking through to find the lowest altitude to get through, but it doesn’t seem that anything is working for us. It doesn’t seem like the mountains are moving [aside] fast enough for us to get into these gaps.”
Rodney is watching his SCNS (self-contained navigation systems) panel, so he knows their altitude, heading, and airspeed. “And I’m hearing altitudes called off—this mountain is this height, this mountain is that height. Basically I know what height we’re at and what height that mountain’s at. We need to get a little bit higher.”
It’s not that he’s uncomfortable with the fact that their flight plan has been changing, often by the second. Those plans are always altered by terrain. What’s bothering him is that the right side navigator, Maj. Don Tyler, who’s watching the moving map display and who is trying to coax the malfunctioning Infrared Detection System into providing some useful images, is telling the pilots to go in one direction, and the left nav, Maj. George Akins, who’s keeping his eyes glued to the radar, is saying they should go in a different direction. And the FE is reminding them that they need to avoid the area where the missile had been fired at the reconnaissance plane as they were heading out. This is a crew that Rodney has flown with often; he was at the MC-130P Schoolhouse with Akins; he trusts them implicitly. But he also trusts his instincts, and his instincts are sending a message to his stomach: they’re in trouble.
Up in the cockpit, the aircraft commander is flying the plane and trying to sort out what Rodney accurately described as conflicting information being presented by the navigators. Cline explains how it looked from the left seat. “We initially turned down a valley on the 210 heading the helos had requested. With Chalk 3 swinging and missing all the way through the eight- or nine-mile-long valley, we found ourselves slowly turning due south, onto a 180-degree heading. We could see that there was a Y in the terrain about five miles ahead of us. We had to go left or right into branches of the valley; climbing and going straight was not an option. At this point we are already over ten miles south of the original helicopter air refueling track and getting closer to the objective area and the area of the SAM launch. The right branch ran on about a 210 heading, which is the way the helos wanted to go, and it angled away from the objective area, whereas the left branch ran on about a 120 heading. I saw that we could have easily cleared the terrain to the left, but not wanting to get any closer to the objective area because of noise and the potential missile threat, I asked the navs specifically if the terrain on the right was going to ‘box us in.’ This is where Murphy took over once again. I did receive conflicting info from my navs, but it was mostly for good reason. George, the left nav, said there was terrain up over ten thousand feet in that direction (which was correct), and Don said no, that we weren’t going to be boxed in, that there was terrain down to ninety-two hundred feet (we were at ninety-five hundred feet when I asked the question). Looking right, down the valley on the 210 heading, that is exactly what I thought I saw: terrain up over ten thousand on one side, and a nice cut in the terrain down to below our altitude on the other, so what the navs told me seemed to make perfect sense. I remember looking down the valley and not being concerned at all with what I saw. Yep, we’re going to go up here about five miles, turn right about twenty degrees through this—there was an arch of significantly higher terrain off to the left. It looked like the terrain was significantly lower off to the right about five miles ahead of us.”
The conflicting info from the navs occurs because they are getting their information from different sources. Akins is getting his information manually off a paper 1:500,000 chart, and the pilots expect him to be able to identify only the highest terrain. They know he’s trying to read contour lines on the paper chart in a darkened flight deck as they bounce along. Tyler, on the other hand, is using the GPS moving map display on a laptop computer. The software allows him to roll the cursor over any given point on the chart and it gives an exact elevation for that point. He had routinely used that feature to determine the exact heights of cuts in higher ridges they flew through on other missions.
Cline says, “Our bad luck was that Don was referring to terrain down the left valley. He was looking for the lowest terrain in general and I thought he was referring to terrain down the valley on the right. Knowing where each nav was getting his information from combined with the visual illusion to make these two pieces of seemingly conflicting info make perfect sense to me. Murphy strikes again.”
The fact that they’re still dragging a 47 Echo behind them is certainly complicating the task of flying the plane. During refueling, they can do only about 110 knots—126 mph—barely above what the manual says is stall speed. What’s more, they’re heavy with roughly 48,000 pounds of fuel in the wing tanks and the internal Benson tank, an auxiliary 1,800-gallon fuel reservoir that some tanker 130s carry inside the cargo bay. As a consequence, the controls are fairly sluggish. To top it off, the optimistic viewpoint Cline had several miles back about the helicopter needing only a few more minutes on the hose had faded like an aging starlet’s looks. Things were, indeed, getting uglier.
From the left paratroop door where he’d been signaling the helo’s pilots, Langston cuts in on the intercom. “He’s coming in really hard. Holy shit, I hope he doesn’t do that again!”
Not only is the pilot missing the drogue, he’s lunging at it, getting ever more aggressive. Everyone on comms inside the tanker can tell by the rising tone of the normally calm loadmaster’s voice that he’s genuinely concerned. What he’s watching the helo do after the latest miss is back up, and then do the
exact same thing again.
Murphy was just biding his time.
The next time the helo lunges forward, Ditka 03 hits a bit of turbulence, popping the hose straight up into the end of the rotor blades. “He cut the hose!” Langston shouts.
The warning is directed at the flight engineer, Jeff Doss, who, if it’s true, needs to immediately turn off the fuel supply. There’s momentary confusion in the cockpit. Doss attempts to get the situation clarified: “Confirm he has cut the hose.”
Langston responds, saying, “Hey, the hose is not cut. He just collapsed the drogue.”
Doss recalls that there was some discussion back and forth, with the pilot asking Langston questions about what happened and what he was seeing. Finally, the FE interrupts in a rather loud voice, trying to drown everyone else out, “Confirm that the hose is in the pod.”
And at that point he recalls Langston responding, “Yes, the hose is in the pod.”
The difference between a cut hose and a collapsed paradrogue is important enough for the pilot to involve himself in the discussion. Cline explains: “It was a pretty important distinction from our point of view, emergency pro cedure-wise. The hydraulic system is active at that point, so it’s only the drag that’s on that parachute out there holding that basket up that keeps the hose out. Without the drag on that chute out there, the hose just shoots back into the pod; the hydraulics overcome the drag, and the hose wraps into the pod as fast as it can, which is the case if you just cut the parachute drogue material and it collapsed. As long as the big metal coupling is still on the end of the hose, it’ll get inside the pod and hit the limit switches and shut the thing off. Kind of no harm, no foul. But obviously, if he’s actually cut the whole thing off the aircraft, you’ve got a three-inch-diameter open fuel line thrashing around inside the pod, because there’s nothing to stop it. It’ll just go inside the pod and kind of start to bird-nest in there. You can have the pod up there whipping this open fuel line against hydraulics and electrics, and it’s a pretty delicate control assembly up inside that pod. So again, in my mind at that point, the terrain wasn’t my biggest concern. I saw what I saw, and I was really worried about what was going on inside the pod.”
The flight engineer is equally concerned. He compares what could be happening inside the pod to a bait-casting reel run amok. “You’ve got some metal braided hose with fuel in it spinning around inside of a metal pod. You risk having what we call a ‘wing off light.’ ” He explains, “That’s an affectionate term for ‘you’re going to blow your wing off.’ If it happens to spark out there, you’ve got a pod full of fuel. At that point there’s an emergency procedure we follow that closes the refueling valve and takes power off the pod to keep the hose from spinning around inside.”
Whether the drogue was merely collapsed and still attached to the hose, or cut clean off, the hose would have whipped back into the pod like spaghetti slurped from a spoon. The difference is whether gas is pouring onto the wing and spraying the fuselage, creating a high risk for fire, or whether the hose has merely been rendered unusable for continued refueling. In either event, the emergency procedure that the flight engineer is going to undertake is essentially the same: shut off the fuel flow and shut off the hydraulics to the pod under the left wing. And that’s what Doss does. Without waiting to be told, he reaches with both hands for the electrical panel overhead, flips the appropriate switches, and turns the proper knobs. Glancing up almost directly above his head, Cline watches him do it.
Right about then, Doss comes on comms to remind the pilots that they still have a refueling hose deployed from the right wing. At this point, he doesn’t believe anyone will really care, but since certain flight characteristics are altered when the hoses are out, reminding them is more or less a conditioned response. The FE actually considers cutting the hose free; he even has his right hand on the cage covering the switch that controls the guillotine inside the pod, but stops short. His thinking: There’s still a helicopter out there that needs gas; with the left hose useless, cutting the right hose off would mean Ditka 03 would be unable to pass fuel.
Cline is still concerned with the possibility of damage to the left wing, and he calls Langston.
“Chris, look out on the wing; how’s the wing look? How’s the pod look?”
He hears what he hoped to hear. There’s no metal hanging out, no torn-open panels. No fuel spray. No fire. Nothing to be concerned about. With a final glance upward to make absolutely certain that the FE has shut off the fuel and the hydraulics, he turns his attention back to flying the plane, asking the navs which way he should be heading.
One of the navs says, “Go to the right.”
Cline responds, “I see it.” What he sees, and the FE confirms, is a cut in the ridgeline the plane is headed toward. A few seconds elapse, and the left nav, who’s got his eyes glued to the radar screen, says, “I’m not painting.”
“Painting” means the radar sweep in front is clear. If the plane is higher than the peaks the radar is showing, they’re “painting clear.”
How could they, in a matter of seconds, go from having a gap to fly through, to having a rock wall of the Hindu Kush range in their face? Part of the answer rests with the corollary to Murphy’s Law, “at the worst possible time.” Only Murphy could have scripted the worst possible time to have the distraction of the hose strike occur. Here’s what John Cline thinks happened:
“When I refocused my attention out front, the horizon line is a low-contrast ridgeline. We had the big snow-filled bowl down this valley, and then that high overcast made for not a huge amount of contrast between where the mountains ended and the skies began. What I’d thought I saw, five miles previous, ended up being just kind of a crease in the ridgeline itself, not the actual dividing line between the sky and the mountains. Turns out the ridge was about two hundred or three hundred feet higher than that. The supposed open area to the right turned out to be just kind of a shadowing effect off of a big outcropping of rock, which was throwing a shadow up against a big open snowfield. So the out straight ahead means to just climb over the thing—all of a sudden the terrain is a lot higher than what I had perceived just a couple miles before. And my out to go to the right—a mirage. It evaporated in front of our eyes. So at that point, what can you do?”
All the pilot can do now is throw the throttles forward in an attempt to get the airplane to climb. Cline is thinking, “Hey, we’re going to scare the hell out of ourselves here,” but they all believe they’re going to make it over ridgeline. He’s pulling the aircraft back, trying to will it to climb at the same time that he’s pushed the throttles all the way forward. And he’s remembering the simulator training at Kirtland, where pilots are put through stall situations so severe, so unrealistic, they do it believing that until they’d tried everything else in their bag of tricks, they’d never put an airplane into the kind of scenario where they pull and pull and pull on the yoke until the plane begins buffeting. Now, however, the trick bag was empty and Cline and copilot Jason Wright are reviewing what they learned not only on the sim, but also from reading dozens of C-130 accident reports. What pops up in their minds, in big, bold type: The full power-on stall characteristics of a C-130, especially one that has pods out on the end of each wing, as does the MC-130P Combat Shadow, typically involve a wing roll that ends unpleasantly with the plane cartwheeling into the ground.
The action that this message translates to, in Cline’s words, is, “You gotta keep the wings level on this airplane.” And what’s going through his mind, knowing that they were going to be close to terrain, is, “Hey, we’re not dead yet, we’re not dead yet. Keep flying, keep flying.”
So with his right hand, Cline has pushed the power all the way up on all four throttles, causing the propellers on the constant-speed engines to take the maximum bite possible of the cold, thin air. His left hand is instinctively pulling back on the yoke, actually flying the plane, applying trim with a little switch on the left-hand side that makes the control
forces on the stick lighter as the airspeed changes. His feet are on the rudder pedals, just trying to “keep the ball centered,” as they say, so the tail’s not meandering right or left like a gimpy dog running down the street with its front and back legs out of alignment.
The copilot, meantime, is pretty much an observer of the process. It’s not a time for conversation, and the only question Wright asks is if Cline wants him to reconfigure from 70 percent to 50 percent flaps.
What he asks is, “Do you want flaps fifty?”
What the pilot responds with is, “Close the bleeds.”
It’s directed at the engineer, who says, “They’re already closed.” The “bleeds” are valves that bleed hot air off the engines. It’s used to keep the aircraft interior warm, and to run other systems on the aircraft. While keeping them open may make the temperature in the back more comfortable, it actually drains power from the engines, and protocol in OEF has been to fly their combat missions with the bleeds closed all the time. In contrast to the cargo compartment, which is freezing cold, the flight deck stays comfortably warm because of all the radiant heat energy coming off the avionics beneath the cockpit.
Once again, the copilot asks if he should reset the flaps to 50 percent. And once again, the pilot ignores the question.
The decision to leave the flaps set where they’d been is a judgment call. Cline has been running through his head everything he’s ever been taught or learned from flying 130s, and nothing matches the situation they are currently in. The classic notion of trading speed for altitude won’t work, because he needs both at the same time if they’re going to fly out of the terrain trap they’re in. If they reduced the flap setting to 50 percent, they might pick up some airspeed, but in all likelihood, the plane would lose lift and they’d sink a bit. When he’d pushed the power in and pulled the nose up, their speed dropped quickly from 115 to 100 knots, which is technically the plane’s stall speed.
None Braver Page 16