What that means to pararescueman Caleb Ethridge, a staff sergeant from Bakersfield, California, is that he’s got time to eat an MRE, use the latrine, and put on clothing that’s more appropriate to where they are and where they’re going than where they’ve been. The temperature at the FARP is near zero, and after flying from Kandahar’s three-thousand-foot elevation to their current seven thousand feet with the windows open, he’s really cold—even when he puts on the high-tech polypropylene long johns and the fleece that’s part of their kit.
Ethridge also works on the helos—identified by the call signs Gecko 11I and 12—with the other three PJs, T.Sgt. Patrick Harding, SrA Michael Flores, and S.Sgt. Bob Roberts, to prepare the cramped interiors for the upcoming mission. They dump extra rations and water, as well as the fast rope that is only needed to put guys onto the ground, not to pull them out. Anything that can not only give them more room in the back but also reduce their gross weight will be left behind.
Ethridge finds himself reflecting on how important it is to judiciously discard excess weight. He recalls how just two weeks earlier he got the lesson of a lifetime on the issue of weight limitations for HH-60Gs operating at high altitudes. He’d been aboard one of two Pave Hawks being ferried over the Hindu Kush mountains from Kandahar to Karshi-Khanabad. The 66th ERQS had received orders to pull out of their original base at Jacobabad and establish a second operating base up at K-2. Truth be told, “lesson of a lifetime” downplays what happened. The veteran gunner aboard the same helo, T.Sgt. Troy Durocher, says it’s as close as he’s ever come to dying on a helicopter.
The story is best told by the pilot of the Pave Hawk that was designated Gecko 17, for the mission that began on the morning of February 16. 1st Lt. Thomas J. Cahill, a twelve-year Army Black Hawk pilot who switched to the Air Force four years earlier to fly CSAR, took off in the morning as flight lead of the two HH-60Gs, Gecko 17 and 18, with another flight-lead qualified pilot, Capt. Ed Lengel, flying as his copilot. Ethridge and M.Sgt. Brian Oswald were the two PJs on board, and S.Sgt. Josh Fetters was the flight engineer. Their assignment was to take the two helos up the eastern side of Afghanistan, refuel at Bagram, and then go through the Hindu Kush mountains, aerial refuel north of the Kush, and continue on a northwest heading to K-2.
About an hour after they left Bagram, the remaining two Pave Hawks at Kandahar were tasked to pick up the Aussie SAS soldier that three PJs from the 38th were planning on parachuting to. Cahill was able to monitor the progress of that mission on the same SATCOM channel that his ship used to communicate with the Joint Search and Rescue Center in PSAB—Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
It didn’t take long till they had to put aside monitoring the other mission and just concentrate on keeping their aircraft flying. Cahill describes it this way: “We started getting into a bad snowstorm, and I was working my way up the mountain, and as you know, we’re already power-limited. At about eleven thousand feet the digital electronic control fuel unit on my number one engine failed on me. And then we lost power to that engine.”
At that moment, Cahill is convinced that they’re going to die. “We’re heavy, we’ve got six crewmembers, we’re up at eleven thousand feet, and only five hundred feet above ground level. With two engines on the 60, that’s pushing the limits. With one engine, what I was down to now, I just didn’t think it was going to work out.
“Keep in mind that we’re up in the Hindus. There’s nobody to talk to. The only radio that we had was the SATCOM, but concurrently on the SATCOM that other mission was going on, so the last thing that I was going to do was get on the radio at the last second and try to spit something out when I knew they had some stuff going on. Besides, from the time we lost the power till when we hit the ground only took four seconds. So there was really no time to get anything out.”
He was also acutely aware of the fact that they were in hostile territory. On the way up they’d overflown at least nine enemy emplacements, equipped with anything from rifles to 23mm guns to RPGs, but weren’t fired upon, probably because by the time the Taliban forces saw the helicopters and manned their weapons, the helos were already over the ridgeline and out of sight.
At the last second, as they were falling through the sky, Cahill spotted a little patch of snow on the side of the mountain. “I just figured, well, I’ll continue to try to fly the helicopter and see if we can work something out.”
His ace in the hole was sitting next to him, in the left seat. Ed Lengel was also a flight lead, an experienced pilot. The only reason he was flying as copilot was that he needed to catch a ride up to K-2. Cahill says it’s what Lengel did that saved them. “He reached up into the center console above his head and grabbed the throttle for the number one engine and basically did a manual override called a ‘DEC lockout.’ He took the throttle and pulled it down, and went full forward with it to give it all the gas that he possibly could.
“He did it instinctively, and that’s what somebody with a lot of experience will do. The standard setup, a flight lead with a newer copilot, that guy’s probably not going to do that unless the other pilot directs him to do it. But seeing how everything happened so fast when it failed, and it started falling so quickly, nobody had a chance to say anything.”
Even if they had, they might not have been understood because the low-rotor-speed horn had gone off. It’s a loud, constant klaxon that they can’t make go away, except by increasing rotor rpm. And that clearly wasn’t possible.
“Ed reached up and bypassed the throttle, and we had just enough power before I impacted the snow to clear a giant boulder that was in our way. First, if we hadn’t had just that one little quick boost of power, we probably would’ve hit the boulder. And then, second, I was able to somehow get the helicopter to impact that one area of snow, ’cause everywhere else was pretty much just rock, glacier face.”
It might seem that a critical moment like the crash would be indelibly and realistically emblazoned in Cahill’s memory, but both he and Lengel have discussed what they recall seeing. It’s surprisingly similar—and surreal. Cahill says, “Just prior to crashing, what I have in my head is that it was almost like daytime. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the adrenaline of a crash sequence or what, but that one piece of both our memories is that it was quite bright out at the time. After we hit the side of the hill and realized that the aircraft was still at least semiflyable, at that point is when it pretty much got pitch-black.”
They impacted the side of the mountain at about a thirty-degree angle, nose up. And that was when the fun began. What apparently saved the helicopter from being busted apart on impact was a fifteen-foot-deep snow pack. That, however, didn’t stop the rotor blade tips from flexing down hard, and chopping off a good portion of all four tips on contact. Cahill had a moment to register surprise that the rotors were still moving, and that they weren’t on fire. Literally, just a moment.
Because the helicopter immediately began sliding backward, and only four feet behind them was a vertical cliff with a two-thousand-foot drop, straight down. The HH-60G has wheels, not skids, and the brakes on those wheels were not holding in the ice and snow they’d landed on. Looking out the gunner’s window in the left rear of the plane, Troy Durocher hit his intercom switch and shouted, “Power, power, power. We’re sliding back.”
Durocher remembers hearing Cahill acknowledge with an “Okay,” but the brakes didn’t do any good. They continued sliding. “I tell him, ‘Stop back!’ so he pretty much tried flying it on the ground, but we didn’t have the power to take off. Now we’re about two and a half feet in front of this two-thousand-foot drop-off. The stab’s just hanging over it right now and the wheel is about two and a half feet in front of the drop.”
Durocher is thirty-seven years old and he’s been in the service since he was eighteen. He’s seen combat in 1993 in Northern Iraq, and he’s spent time flying in a special-operations squadron. But on this night, he says, “the pucker factor hit a thousand and one percent.
This was the scariest night I’ve ever had in a helicopter. It was probably the closest I’ve come to dying.”
When Cahill heard his gunner calling for power, there was only thing he could do: “pull in a lot of power and put a lot of forward cyclic, which pretty much put the rotor system into the snow. By the time we finally stopped, the guys in the back told us that the tail rotor system and the stabilator had just cleared two giant rocks that were behind us by maybe two or three inches on each side. And that we had about another foot before the tail would’ve gone right over the cliff.”
He had about two seconds to marvel at the fact that they were all still alive. Then he had to figure out their next move. “I was debating what to do. I didn’t know if I should shut the helicopter down or . . . Keep in mind, we’re sitting here about ten thousand, five hundred feet and it’s snowing. We’re up in the middle of nowhere. There’s no way anybody could possibly get to us. My other aircraft was circling about a mile away, but did not know what our status was, ’cause at this point we didn’t have radio contact with them anymore. I also knew there was no way they could pick any of us up. And I knew the second I would’ve shut that aircraft down, the rotor system would’ve started to hang a little more and would have hit the rocks. At that point, the rotor system would have come off the aircraft.
“So I just told everyone, ‘Look, we’re gonna try to get this helicopter up this mountain here.”
Thinking about the event months later, he recalls that the last thing that came out of his mouth before they impacted—not over the intercom, but to himself—was, “I’m sorry, Cheyane.” Cheyane is Cahill’s daughter, and that day was her fourth birthday. He had actually been happy about making the flight up to K-2 because he’d have telephone access there and would be able to call Cheyane.
“The last thing that went through my mind, as we were getting ready to hit the side of the hill, I thought, ‘This is going to be a terrible thing for my daughter to always think that her dad died on her birthday.’ ”
But they’d survived the crash, so rather than being preoccupied with the immediate possibility that he was going to die, he put his mind back in gear and began working on how they were going to live. Cahill told Lengel to do the calculations on the helicopter’s computer. The answers weren’t encouraging. At that moment they didn’t even have the power to hover just one foot above the ground.
The only solution was to lighten the load, and the easiest way to do that was by dumping fuel. That presented a number of problems. First, they had to defeat a switch that prevents fuel from being dumped while the HH-60G is sitting on the ground. It’s a little switch on the right-hand side of the undercarriage that automatically clicks into the off position when the helo settles in for a landing. Informing the crew of his plan, the pilot also advised the guys in the back that one of them might have to lean out the door, reach down, and press the button to override it in order to allow the dump control switch in the cockpit to work.
Luck was with them, however. Because they were pulling enough power to keep the helo from sliding back off the cliff, they had enough weight off the wheels that the switch was no longer depressed. In essence, they fooled the device into thinking the helicopter was flying.
That was the good news. The bad news was that they were now confronted with the consequences of that action. Cahill says, “Keep in mind that no one’s ever done this, at least to my knowledge, no HH-60G crewmember’s ever dumped gas while their helicopter’s been running on the ground. When we’re dumping gas it comes out of the left side of the helicopter, just aft of the transition area, where the tail boom starts. And it flows out at a fairly good rate. And we’re starting to smell the fumes and one of the backenders got concerned about a fire breaking out.”
The concerned “backender” was Durocher. “I said, ‘Sir, if there’s a fire, meet off the nose and we’ll break out the hot dogs and marshmallows.’ Brian Oswald was the PJ on my side. And he and I look at each other like this.” Durocher pops his eyes wide open, lifts his eyebrows, and his jaw drops. It’s a “We’ve never been here before” look. He says, “I can’t believe we lived through that landing, and then we can’t take off, we’re in the fuel.”
When Gecko 17 hit the side of the mountain, they had roughly twenty-nine hundred pounds of gas on board, not quite five hundred gallons. They calculated that they had to get down to around one thousand pounds in order to have enough power for a two-foot hover. That would allow them to hover high enough to turn the ship around and fly it off the mountain. It meant dumping three hundred gallons of gas, while just sitting there knowing that jet fuel was gushing out of the helicopter in close proximity to hot exhaust from the jet engines.
Cahill remembers his briefing to the crew: “ ‘Look, if a fire does break out, what we’re going to do is, everybody just hop out of the helicopter on the right-hand side, jump into the snow.’ I wanted everybody out except me. Then what I was going to do is just let the helicopter drift backwards, off the side of the hill, ’cause there was a vertical cliff there. And it may sound good now, maybe magnanimous, but at the time all I was thinking was, ‘I want to try and save as many people as possible.’ ”
That action would have been a suicide move for the thirty-three-year-old pilot that would have left his wife of sixteen years, Roxane, to raise their three children, Ryan, Doss, and Cheyane, alone. “If I just pulled a little bit more power and brought the cyclic backwards, ’cause I had it almost full forward—about four or five inches forward—if I would’ve just come back with it, I could have just easily let it slide off the side of the mountain. At that point, I just figured we’d only lose one helicopter and one guy, rather than the other five guys.”
On the first try, they dumped five hundred pounds of gas, then stopped the outflow of fuel and tried to hover. Durocher was watching out the left side and as soon as the helo lifted, he saw the tail swinging toward the ridgeline. He hit the intercom and said, “Stop the tail left and put it back down.” They still didn’t have enough power to get off the ground. Once more, the pilots dumped another five hundred pounds of fuel. Still not enough.
Cahill remembers telling Troy Durocher, “Dude, I need you to get everything out of this helicopter you possibly can.” He responded by throwing a few cases of MREs, water bottles, some ammunition for the miniguns, and some odds and ends out the door. The problem was, there wasn’t much to toss out. They weren’t on a tactical mission, loaded for battle. It was just supposed to be a nice nighttime ride over the Kush, getting a pair of 60s from K-1 to K-2.
Watching as best he could from the right front seat, Cahill had the feeling that what was going overboard wasn’t going to be enough to get them off the hill. He said, “All right, before you throw anything else out, let me dump the rest of this gas.” He was thinking that if that didn’t work, he’d begin dumping guns and would tell the PJs to dump all their gear out. Clearly he knew that every pound mattered.
It was about that time when the PJs suggested that they’d be willing to get off and hike down the mountain by themselves. Ethridge was actually nonchalant about the suggestion. He’d climbed to the 14,494-foot peak of Mount Whitney in Northern California several times. Cahill remembers looking at the pararescuemen, contemplating the notion that they were willing to get off a helicopter and walk down the mountain, not even knowing where they were. He said, “Dude, that’s really strange.” Ethridge responded, “Yeah, but that’s okay. We can do that.”
“I don’t know if the guys in their heads actually realized how far from anybody friendly we were. When I assessed everything,” Cahill says, “I realized that if we had to go into a survival situation, we would have been in a bad position. We really would’ve.” But in the back of his mind at the time, he thought, “Brian is one of those guys where if I would have told him, ‘We’re gonna shut down. It’s your job to lead us down the side of the hill,’ he would have done that.”
Also weighing on Cahill’s mind at that moment was what was happeni
ng with the other ship, Gecko 18, that he presumed was circling somewhere close by. He knew that asking them to land in order to evacuate his crew was out of the question. There was no way they’d be able to lift off with an additional six guys on board. The best they could do was note their position and get a radio call off via SATCOM. But his real worry was that his own crash landing could turn out to be a death knell for the other crew, as well. “My concern is that the other aircraft doesn’t have a superexperienced crew. I’m a little bit worried about what’s going to happen to them, ’cause I knew if we would’ve bit it in the side of that hill, or not made it off, now those guys are sitting there. And the weather’s moving in, getting worse and worse.”
There was still one more option that might get them all off the mountain. If he could turn the helicopter ninety degrees, they might be able to quite literally fly it off the hill. Problem was, he couldn’t do the standard maneuver to turn a 60 around—a pedal turn. That’s bringing the helo to a one-foot hover, then turning with the pedal controls. The problem was the boulders the tail had wedged itself between.
The trick that finally worked was hopping the helo forward three or four times in order to get it to a spot about forty feet off the nose that was flat enough for him to do a two-foot hover and do a pedal turn to the right ninety degrees until he could actually see a good flight path off the side of the hill.
Next step was to do precisely what the Knife 04 crew had done after rescuing the downed crew and having trouble taking off due to limited power at high altitude. In that case, they could get a rolling start and build up steam by flying a foot or two off the ground for half a mile. On the side of the mountain, Cahill and Lengel didn’t have half a mile, but thought they had enough room to get a running start to where effective translational lift (ETL) would kick in. Cahill says, “As long as I could do that, fly it off the side of the hill staying at one or two feet until I got past ETL, I thought I’d have enough power to continue flying.”
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