Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond

by Robert F. Curtis

  I made it a habit to give my student the first simulated engine failure of each familiarization flight over the highway bridge between the fields. Simple, the student had only to turn right or left and he was set up perfectly for the autorotation from the standard 1000 feet out-bound altitude.

  Simulated engine failures were a very important part of helicopter training in the old, reciprocating-engine aircraft; the reciprocating engines in 1950’s helicopters quit fairly often, at least compared with modern turbines. When the helicopter loses full engine power, the pilot has only seconds, as in maybe two or three seconds, to lower the collective pitch lever, the power control on helicopters, and enter autorotation. If he does not lower the collective in time, the rotors will slow to the point where a recovery cannot be made, the blades bend upwards, stall, and the aircraft literally falls from the sky.

  The simplest way to think of the process is to understand that in normal, powered flight, the engine drives the rotors. When the pilot pulls up on the collective pitch lever, air is pulled down through the rotors and produces lift. When the engine stops, the power to turn the rotors, and to thereby produce lift, is gone. By entering autorotation the pilot trades altitude for lift, with the power coming from gravity. the pilot rapidly lowers the collective all the way down, and as the helicopter starts to descend, the air flow reverses, providing lift to keep the aircraft flying and under control. With the airflow now coming up through the rotors, the pilot is trading altitude for lift. the helicopter has entered autorotation.

  All the pilot must do once autorotation is established is to get his airspeed right in order to glide the proper distance and, of course, find a place to land. Properly done, an autorotation is a steep, fast, but relatively normal landing. Done wrong, the result is a sure crash; hence, all helicopter pilots were taught engine failure procedures from nearly the first day of flight school. every time the student flew the helo over a spot where he could not make a safe autorotative landing, a large set of woods for example, the instructor would cut the throttle. After a few flights, all students flew over areas where autorotations were possible as much as they could, their helicopters flying zigzag through the sky, almost like they were dodging ground fire.

  There was little conversation between us on the outbound trip. the captain had completed his work at the main airfield practice area—hovering, landing and lifting off, simple things—and was on his way to the first confined area landings (small fields, usually surrounded by trees, instead of wide open areas of airfields) of the ten flight hour transition syllabus. All his work had been well within standards and his control touch was smooth, so I felt no apprehension about his ability to handle a simple forced landing, the same kind all Army pilots had practiced a thousand times in flight school.

  I lit a cigarette. trying to match the practiced skill of the instructors at Fort Wolters and Fort Rucker, who could induce a simulated engine without the student suspecting what was coming, I started to put my cigarette lighter back into my pocket, but instead quickly grabbed the throttle and turned it to idle. Whether or not he was fooled, the captain responded perfectly. I felt slightly light in my seat as the collective came down rapidly to enter the auto. As the captain adjusted the rudders to keep the aircraft in trim and turned right, lining up neatly for the level green field below, he kept the airspeed at exactly 70 knots, just as the book called for.

  I relaxed again. the captain had done everything correctly. Since practice engine failures like this one were not continued all the way to a landing, as we passed through 500 feet I called for the captain to recover. As he rolled the throttle back on to get engine power restored, there was a slight cough from behind us, and then silence. In flight school, the instructors described the sound of a dead engine as the same as “a mouse pissing on cotton.” that was an inadequate description since the silence was closer to going completely deaf, at least to me it was.

  After the slightest moment of hesitation, my flight school and instructor training took over. throwing the freshly lit cigarette to the captain I yelled what instructors always yell when the situation is getting beyond the other pilot’s control, “I’ve got it” and grabbed the flight controls.

  Turns, the rotation speed of the rotor, are life in a helicopter. Without the correct speed of rotation the rotor blades do not produce lift and the aircraft, with no flight capability, just falls and your life ends. I immediately checked to see that the rotor speed was high enough, “in the green,” and simultaneously made sure the airspeed stayed at the specified 70 knots and kept the H-13 lined up for the spot in the green field the captain had already picked out.

  As I had practiced a thousand times, at an estimated 75 feet above the ground I pulled the nose back, flaring the helicopter to reduce the airspeed and break the high rate of descent. At about 20 feet above the ground I pushed the cyclic stick forward to level the aircraft. As I did the rate of descent immediately started to build again, so at 10 feet I jerked the collective pitch lever about halfway up to trade rotor speed for lift, to break the final rate of descent.

  As the helicopter slowed its rate of descent, I smoothly used the remaining collective to touch down so gently that neither of us felt the actual touch. the remaining forward speed stopped as I lowered the collective after we touched, allowing the OH-13e to slide the two skid lengths the operator’s manual, the “-10,” called for. From the time the engine stopped, until the aircraft was motionless on the ground, was less than 20 seconds.

  In the post landing silence I realized that the captain was still holding the lit cigarette as we watched the rotor blades slowly spin to a stop. the helicopter was very, very quiet.

  “You stay with the bird, Sir, and I’ll go find a phone.” I said to the captain, who opened the Plexiglas door and threw out the un-smoked, but still burning, cigarette.

  Before I left the helicopter to walk the 100 yards to the road, I got the rotor blade tie down out of its storage, slid the padded metal loop over the rear blade and tied the ribbon ends to the tail boom, securing the blades so that they did not flap around in the wind. Satisfied the bird was OK, or at least certain there was no damage beyond a dead engine, I began to walk across the grass over to the road. From the first day of flight school, the instructors had prepared us for this by making us do countless simulated engine failures, and now it had happened. And I had made it without further damage to the aircraft. But as I walked toward the road on the other side of the field, my knees went weak, a little wobbly.

  Flagging down a car on the road between the fields, I asked the driver to take me to the Rod and Gun Club about a mile away, the closest place with a phone. the enlisted man that answered back at the airfield passed me to the maintenance officer, an old, very experienced chief warrant officer 4 (CW4).

  “No, I didn’t do any damage landing it,” I said in answer to his first question. He didn’t ask if I was OK, since if I was making the call, that much was obvious.

  “No, I have no idea why it quit,” I said in answer to his second question.

  “See you in a few minutes,” he said as he hung the phone up.

  * * *

  I was in total awe of the maintenance officer. He had been in one of the very first helicopter training classes that the Army ever held in the early ‘50s, and was later one of the pilots in the Army’s equivalent of the Blue Angels, the helicopter demonstration team. He could make a helicopter sing. Once he took me up on a maintenance check flight and instead of doing a normal takeoff, he took the OH-13E off backwards. We slowly flew around the traffic pattern, turned final, and then came to a hover, all facing 180 degrees from the normal heading. Another time, after an ice storm, he said, “Let’s go flying,” but instead of having the helicopter towed out onto the ice-covered ramp he had it moved to the edge of the hanger and then had the hanger doors opened wide. He started it up and ground taxied, moved it forward with the skids dragging on the concrete instead of coming to a hover, until we were clear enough to lift up without
blowing things around inside the hanger. The entire airfield was covered in a coat of glaze ice, so we had it to ourselves. Flying out to the main runway he climbed to 1000 feet and then entered autorotation. He flared at 75 feet like we were supposed to, leveled, “popped” up the collective to break our rate of descent, but instead of stopping after touch-down, the helicopter slid down the runway without even slowing down. After a hundred yards he rolled the throttle back on and back up we went again. He did two more before he hovered back over to the ramp. When he rolled the throttle off to shut down, the torque caused the helicopter to spin slowly on the ice until all momentum was lost.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later the CW4 pulled up in his personal pickup truck accompanied by one of the sergeants who worked for him. He parked on the side of the road between the two green fields and looked out at the helicopter sitting in the middle of the spot the captain had picked. It was so near the center, it looked like it had been towed out there. Leaving the captain with the aircraft, I walked over to him. He didn’t say anything until I was about 20 feet away from him.

  “The least you could have done was land the Goddamn thing closer to the road, you dumb shit! I’m going to get my boots muddy just walking out there,” he shouted, loud enough for the captain and the sergeant to hear.

  I was surprised and slightly hurt by the comment. Somehow I expected praise, thank-God-you-are-OK, or some other expression of relief, but not that comment. the best I could manage in reply was a weak, embarrassed smile, until it dawned on me slowly that this was praise. Praise, because he implied that I had enough skill to put the helicopter anywhere, even with a dead engine.

  The CW4 quizzed me on what happened. When I got to the simulated engine failure part, he held up his hand to stop me and walked to the cockpit of the helicopter. Looking inside, the CW4 pointed to the carburetor heat. the lever with the round black knob marked with an “H” was in the up position. It was off.

  In cold weather, the fuel flowing through the carb needs heat to keep moisture in the air from forming ice and stopping the fuel flow when you reduce power. the heat from the engine exhaust is ducted to the carb to make this happen. If the outside air temperature is near or below freezing, carb heat must be used, particularly when making rapid power changes. I had forgotten to pull the heat on when I cut the throttle; ice formed, the engine quit, all as advertised in the most basic helicopter flying classes.

  Quickly examining the aircraft, the CW4 found no damage. the ice in the carb went away as soon as the fuel flow stopped.

  “Get in and fly it home,” the CW4 snapped.

  Again, I was surprised and even more, apprehensive. After all, I had just survived my first engine failure, but the CW4 was adamant. the captain and I got back onboard and started the H-13 up. When I looked, the maintenance officer was already gone. He did not even wait to see if we got off alright.

  The flight home was without incident, but the ragging I got from the other instructors hurt, at first. then I realized that they all had done similar, stupid things, things like cutting down a flag pole with the rotors or chopping down bushes from landing too close, and they all had survived them and learned from them. Now I had joined the club with my first real emergency, even if it was self-induced.

  I never did that particular stupid evolution again. But, I managed a variation on a theme and caused another engine on another OH-13E to shut down in flight again a few months later. I survived that one, too, with no damage to helicopter, pilot, or passenger, but the maintenance officer was mad at me again. that too is another story.

  4

  THE PLAYTEX CLUB

  PHU BAI, VIETNAM ■ SEPTEMBER 1970

  * * *

  The black lacquer plaques with the enameled squadron patch in the center and the flags of the Allies participating in the war across the top were hung around the walls of the bar in the Playtex Officer’s Club. They were just about at eye level, and below each plaque was a Polaroid of the pilot who owned the plaque, the man who would have it presented to him when he left country. The plaques were hung in order of “shortness.” that is, the newest man had his hung at the far end of the room, next to the door out onto the patio. Around the wall back toward the bar itself, they were ordered until, over the bar, there were only five left.

  In the center of the bar, over the chrome and red vinyl barstools, stolen from who knows where, was the plaque of the next man to leave. When that man received his plaque from the commanding officer, the CO, and took the jeep ride over to the Phu Bai airfield to catch the C-130 south to Cam Rahn and back to the states, the next man in line would move all the plaques up until his was in the center.

  If you were killed, the executive officer, the XO, would go to the Club that same day, usually as soon as he received the word, and remove your plaque. It would be placed in the boxes containing the personal effects of the man and mailed to his family with the date not filled in. The photo was never mailed. It was just discarded or put with the other small things that were the un-official company history. By the time the pilots came back from that day’s missions, no sign would remain that the man or his plaque had ever been there.

  Most units gave out plaques when you left, but not “C” Company, 159th Aviation Battalion, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) in 1970. The radio call sign of “C” Co was Playtex (unofficial motto, “We give living support”) and the day you checked in, you were presented with your plaque and had your picture taken with the safety officer’s Polaroid. As soon as the gook shop (casual, racist slang, common then, for the concession shop run by Vietnamese that sold hats and cowboy holsters for our .38s, made unit patches, did sewing, etc.) down the mud street from the officer’s area got the steel plate engraved with your name and in-country date, the plaque was put up at the end of the line.

  The officer’s area in Playtex consisted of SEA (South East Asia) Huts. They were plywood, gray painted, single story buildings with tin roofs, built quickly by combat engineers. The Club was a rectangular room that occupied the southern half of the eastern-most shack. It had been built two years before when Playtex moved into the compound. The walls were varnished plywood, an attempt to make it seem more like some of the real world Officer’s Clubs the older pilots had seen in their travels. The floor was covered with those one-foot squares of linoleum that everyone that ever served in the Army spent so many hours pushing a buffer over. The northern half of the Club building contained two rooms, the one next door was a single room occupied by the company XO and the one on the far end was home to two of the company warrant officers.

  In front of the wall of the Club that adjoined the XO’s room was the bar. The builders had done a good job on the woodwork, very professional looking carpentry amid the squatter’s-camp look of the rest of the company area. The mirror behind the bar reflected bottles of liquors, mostly unfamiliar to the pilots since nearly all were too young to drink stateside. Displayed over the top of the mirror was a bra and various bits of female underwear, souvenirs of R&R exploits. Under the counter, were the cabinets where the hard liquor was supposed to be locked up, but these shelves stayed empty because the Club never closed and no one ever bothered to lock the booze up. To the right of the mirror was a door that led to the storeroom where the extra beer and soft drinks were kept.

  To the right of the storeroom door were the two refrigerators that held the beer and soft drinks ready for consumption. The freezer compartments of both held long stainless steel trays from the mess hall that were used to make ice. An ice pick was usually handy on top of the refrigerator so that the pilot who wanted ice could break some off. The water used to make the ice was potable but only just. When frozen, the water had swirls of dirt, like marbling in praline ice cream. The pilots just broke the ice around the swirls and left most of the grit in the tray until someone got disgusted enough to throw it out and start over again.

  Because the Club was an “unofficial” one, it received no support from the official system of alcohol di
stribution. To buy the hard liquor, the pilots pooled their ration cards and gave them to the Club Officer. This system ensured plentiful booze because each officer was authorized two quarts of hard liquor each month and the non-drinker’s cards provided for the heavy drinkers. The Club Officer would check out a helicopter and take the ration cards to the Class 6 (liquor store in military language) store in Da Nang once a month or so and buy the booze. The beer and soft drinks mostly came from the small post exchange (PX) over by the runway at Phu Bai, a mile or so away. Both soft drinks and beer were in steel, not aluminum, cans and were often flat from the long shipment from the states and the months in storage.

  On the wall near the ceiling, to the right of the two bar refrigerators, was an exhaust fan with bend blades and a motor that made a labored sound as it turned. The wall around the fan was scared and stained from being a target. Once a month or so, the company would order and receive a shipment of bar glasses and just as regularly break them all that night. The game was to see who could get a glass, or at least most of the glass, through the fan without stopping it. If there were no glasses, beer cans were tried, but since they were steel cans, the fan usually stopped when the first one made it into the blades.

  Below and to the right of the fan, among the stained and drooping Playboy Playmates of the month, hung two rocket propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, one a Russian RPG-7 and the other a Chinese RPG-2. Scrounged from the grunts, they were operational weapons, but only served as decorations since no one could get any of the grenades to fire from them. The Chinese one was more like a piece of pipe with a crude trigger hanging on the bottom than a weapon. The Russian version was more advanced and even had the telescopic sight still attached. The bell-shaped exhaust of the Russian RPG looked like one of the blunder-busses in the old drawings of the Pilgrims.