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

by Robert F. Curtis

  After refueling, we put the covers on the helicopters to bed them down and checked into a motel for the night. The next morning, after preflight and checking weather, we took off on our second leg to Birmingham, Alabama. Our flight path took us directly over the downtown part of Birmingham. As I looked down at the city, I began to nearly panic. At Wolters and Rucker, the instructors taught us what do if your engine quits—how to do an autorotation under nearly all conditions.

  If you must go into trees, you plan your flare (to provide an initial break to your very rapid rate of descent) high enough that you are just above the treetops when you have used up all that energy. As the airspeed is converted to lift and your fall stops, you level the nose and as you start to build a descent rate again, hold the helicopter steady so that you settle straight down into the trees. As your skids enter the branches pull, all the collective you have to slow your fall. You want to slow the rotor blades as much as possible before the trees take them off and turn them into projectiles.

  If you must go into water with a dead engine, you jettison the doors on the way down if you can. Then as you approach the surface, do the same procedures you would do for going into trees, only when you touch the water, roll the helicopter to the left so that the blades hit the water and stop, then you can get out without getting hit by them.

  But how do you autorotate into a city? Pick the building you want to hit and go toward it?

  Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the USSR in the 1950s, faced this decision when years later, the engine on his traffic helicopter quit over a city. He picked the only open area he could reach in autorotation, but when he got close he could see the field was a playground full of children. Rather than risk hurting them, witnesses on the ground said that at the last second, it looked like he pushed the nose of the helicopter straight down. He impacted the ground short of the field. He died with honor.

  As I cleared the city, the feeling of near-panic passed, but ever after, I avoided cities whenever possible. I didn’t want to have to make the decision that Powers did.

  The second reason I remember this flight is that my first near mid-air collision happened between Birmingham and Nashville. Near Muscle Shoals, I was cruising along at 75 knots and 1,000 feet when I saw a dot on the right side of the bubble, just a tiny black spot really. By the time I got my head turned the 45 degrees from straight ahead to 2 o’clock, I was looking at the underside of a jet fighter as it flashed by in what must have been a 90-degree bank. I read the word “NAVY” painted on the underside of his wings as he went by. He must have seen me a second or two before I saw him, giving him time to take evasive action. I had no time to do anything.

  Three days and 9.3 flight hours after we left Fort Rucker, we parked the TH-13Ts next to their OH-13E older brothers.

  * * *

  But now, five years later, I was headed north in a flight of three Huey’s, freshly rebuilt from the depot, not old, tired TH-13Ts freed from duty as trainers. Instead of smelling of sweat and student fear like the TH-13Ts, the Hueys smelled of new paint and freshness. They also cruised at 110 knots, not 75. We made Birmingham in 1.8 hours. I remembered clearly the feeling of near-panic the last time I flew this way, but the turbine engine in the Huey made the fear recede almost completely away. Turbines don’t quit as easily as reciprocating engines. In another 1.4 hours we were landing in Nashville for our second refueling stop. Then, 1.4 hours after Nashville, we were shutting down on our parking spots at the Boone National Guard Center in Frankfort, but the day was not over for me.

  I called my wife and told her I would be at Bluegrass Field, Lexington’s airport, in an hour and asked her to pick me up. I handed the Huey logbook to the maintenance man and picked up the logbook for the OH-58A, Bureau number 72-21287. I would be flying over to Lexington as soon as I was ready to go. I stowed my bag in the back seat and preflighted the Kiowa in the fading light. Forty-five minutes later, I was hovering out to the runway. Fifteen minutes after that I was landing at Bluegrass, with my wife and son already there waiting for me.

  Eighteen clock hours and 8.3 flight hours after I woke up in Gulfport, my day was over. Just like I had been three years before in Vietnam, I was tired, so tired. But the next day, after my son and wife waved goodbye, I flew the OH-58A solo from Lexington, Kentucky, to Fort Eustis, Virginia. Well, not actually Fort Eustis, since we were told not to bring the aircraft into the Army airfields there because there was no ramp space available. Instead, I was to fly into Newport News, the closest civilian field.

  I flew across the Appalachians in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia using a road map and the Cincinnati and Washington Sectional Aeronautical Charts since the aircraft had no navigation radios. It was a boring flight since not only did I have no one to talk to, I could not listen to commercial Am radio because the OH-58A did not have an automatic direction finder (ADF). Since I was not in a hurry, I stopped for refueling in Charleston, West Virginia; Roanoke, Virginia; Lynchburg, Virginia; Navy Norfolk, Virginia; and finally at Newport News. I had arrived for the second half of summer camp after 5 hours of flight time on the second day, for a total of 13.3 for the trip from Gulfport, the most flight time I got in two days in my three years as a Kentucky National Guardsman. Four days later, I flew the OH-58A back to Kentucky with only two fuel stops, Lynchburg and Bristol, Tennessee. My sectionals and road map worked fine for navigation aids both going and coming home. Who needs navigation radios when you have these?

  Just under one year later, on June 14, 1975, I flew my final flight in an Army aircraft. It was a very old UH-1B, Bureau Number 60-03562, with the big red buzz numbers still on the doors from its days as a student training aircraft at Ft. Rucker, from Ft. Campbell. I was the copilot on the flight back to the Boone National Guard Center because the other pilot wanted to do a fly-by of the house of a girl he had met the night before. His detour meant that we burned more fuel than we should have, so when we landed at Frankfort after 1.9 hours of flight in a helicopter usually only good for 1.5, there were only fumes left in the fuel tank.

  National Guard Mission complete. Luck and superstition got me through again.

  Ah, youth…

  FLYING LIFE THREE

  * * *

  THE MARINE CORPS

  1975–1993

  Ever since reading F. Lee Bailey’s “The Defense Never Rests” in Vietnam, I wanted to be a lawyer. With high test scores on the law school admission test, I applied to two law schools and was accepted by both. While walking through the Student Center two days before the deadline for accepting an offer, I saw a film clip of military aircraft flying. It was the USMC Officer Selection Officer, looking for recruits. As we talked I thought back to Covington, Kentucky, seven years before. This time there would be no” rice paddies and all the VC I could kill.” I would be an officer and aviator. After all, F. Lee Bailey had been a naval aviator before he was a lawyer, so I could do it, too. You are never too old to go to law school, but you can get too old for flying. That evening I asked my wife what she thought about it and when she said flying stories were more interesting than law stories, I knew she was right. I turned down law school and enlisted in the USMC.

  17

  NIGHT VISION GOGGLES

  YUMA, ARIZONA ■ AUGUST 1978

  To learn tactics and advanced tactics is complicated and requires an extended period of flying with experienced pilots. Once the officer has advanced completely through the syllabus in the squadron, and has shown promise as an instructor, he may be sent to Weapons Tactics Instructor (WTI) School, the most prestigious flying course I ever attended—and the most fun…

  The second Marine Aviation Weapons and tactics Instructor class at Marine Weapons and tactics Squadron-1 (mAWtS-1), conducted at Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, Arizona in the fall of 1978, was going very well indeed. All the students were very experienced aviators, and aviation support personnel from all portions of Marine Corps air wing had been hand selected for their skill and were to be the future t
rainers of the Marine Corps tactical pilots and air controllers. As the instructors always told us when they had something particularly difficult in mind for us to do: “we were the cream of the crop—never again would we be as technically and tactically proficient in our aircraft, as Marines, as we would be when we graduated from this course.”

  But even the cream of the crop can make mistakes.

  On the first day of class, the major who was the lead helicopter instructor walked in flanked by two of his assistant instructors. One assistant was ceremoniously carrying a frozen chicken and the other was carrying a feather pillow held out reverently before him in both hands.

  “Gentlemen,” the chief instructor began, “You will shortly all be issued one of these chickens and a pillow. If by chance, you should happen to hit a saguaro cactus while flying in this course, you will land your helicopter immediately, stuff the chicken in the hole, and cut open the pillow with your survival knife, sprinkle feathers all around, and swear you had a bird strike. Are there any questions about this procedure?”

  It seems a student in the last class had hit an endangered cactus, thereby damaging his CH-53 and coincidentally giving away the fact that he was flying lower than allowed, “flat hatting,” as it is called in Naval aviation. It has been a problem since the first aircraft got off the ground. It often leads to a situation where the pilot “ties the record for low flying.” You can’t break the record but when you impact the surface you do tie it, adding your name to the way-too-long list of pilots who died doing something they knew they shouldn’t.

  Mid-way through the four-week course we went into the main classroom for instruction on “Night Vision Goggles” (NVG). None of us students had ever heard of “Night Vision Goggles” until we got to Yuma, but if they would help us see better for night missions, we were all for them. Every aviator has scary stories about night flight or “night fright,” as it was often called, as witnessed by the night firebase resupply and flare drop missions I had flown. One saying went that only bats and twats flew at night, leaving which we were open for discussion. MAWTS-1 had every single pair of NVGs the Marine Corps owned at that time, 20 sets in all.

  One rule every soldier must know is that tracers work both ways; that is, you can see where your bullets are going but the enemy can see where they are coming from. The same is true for light sources like flares or search-lights. You may be able to see the enemy using them, but they can see you too. NVGs allowed us to see the enemy, but because they are passive, the enemy could not see the source of what was providing us with vision.

  The goggles are passive because they work by amplifying ambient light. The first generation NVGs really needed moonlight, the more the better. Starlight worked somewhat if it was a very clear night, but not very well to see clearly through the lenses. NVGs were not originally developed for flying. The original units were monocular “Starlight” scopes developed for use by snipers in Vietnam. Other original uses included vehicle drivers, sentries, etc., who used the goggles instead of artificial light. The ones we would use were developed for vehicle drivers and had not been modified for us in aircraft.

  After a lecture on light frequencies, emergency removal procedures, and how to mount the NVGs on our helmets, the WTI cadre passed out the goggles. They were very heavy, so much so that they had to be counterbalanced to keep you from injuring your neck by just wearing them. The twenty-eight ounces of dead weight hanging on the front of your flight helmet had to be balanced by lead plates hung on the back of your helmet using Velcro attachments. We had to have our helmets modified so that we could strap the goggles on and then snap them down so they wouldn’t fall off in flight. The staff stressed how important it was to take good care of them because they were very expensive and delicate; never mind, as they reminded us over and over again, that the few sets they handed out to us were every pair the Marine Corps owned.

  As mentioned, the NVGs work by taking existing light and amplifying it. The pilot sees two round images, one for each eye, on what is, in effect, a miniature monochrome green-tinted television screen. The NVGs could be adjusted for diopter and focus. Actually, they had to be adjusted for focus when you wanted to look from outside the aircraft to inside the cockpit. This first generation NVG was “full face,” meaning that when they were attached to your helmet you could not see around them, the pilot could only see through them in two circles of green light that provided only 40 degrees of vision. The NVGs also were designed to protect themselves by momentarily shutting down when exposed to too much light, thus preventing tube burnout. More on this later…

  Our instructors were confident, even though they had barely more experience with NVGs than we did. At least they did what all military aviators always do, and acted cool in the face of a very new procedure, as in “death before embarrassment.” As the head of the Helicopter Branch explained, “this is going to be a little harder than usual, but you guys can hack it.” We agreed because we were all “hackers” or we wouldn’t be there—and because, being aviators ourselves, we too were acting cool.

  At the preflight mission briefing, a light should have come on or alarm bells gone off inside our heads when the instructor said, “Normally, you wouldn’t want to do this unless the moon was a little higher and brighter.” In the Marine Corps, a statement like that almost guarantees something bad is going to happen. It is almost like Marines aren’t happy unless there is some pain, physical or psychological, in all events. But the briefing officer again stressed that we were the cream of the crop and could handle it.

  That was the theory anyway…

  My instructor and I had grown to be friends during the time I had been at mAWtS-1. Like me, he had flown in Vietnam, Marine 46s instead of Army 47s, in I Corps, the northern-most part of the country, just like me. He too had lots of total flight time and was very relaxed about the whole WTI thing, be it going one-on-one with fighters, nap-of-the-earth flying, evading missiles, flying on NVGs, whatever. He also had a slight tendency to stutter occasionally, but it was never a problem, since it mostly happened when he was drinking and no matter what, he did not drink and fly.

  After going through the normal crew briefing, preflight, and start up, we taxied our CH-46F out to the runway and took off for Laguna Army Airfield, to the northeast of Yuma. I can’t say the crew chief and first Mec (mechanic, a crew chief in training) were very happy about it because anything new made them uncomfortable, and the NVGs were definitely new, but they trusted us enough to get in the back of the helicopter and go flying. Or perhaps I should say that they were Marines and did as ordered. In either case, it was full darkness when we landed at Laguna to “goggle up” and get that training “X” in the box. Only the pilots would be on NVGs, since we did not have enough for the crew to wear them too, meaning that even though we might be able to see, the crew had only blackness to look at, yet another thing that made them less than happy. The sky was clear but the moon, forecast to be small and low, was nowhere to be seen as we started our training evolution.

  After landing in the sand next to the runway at Laguna, I held the flight controls while the instructor rigged our aircraft. As they told us in ground school training, these early NVGs were very sensitive to certain portions of the light spectrum, particularly the red portion. Unfortunately it was the same red commonly used in aircraft to preserve pilot’s night vision, so the red of our normal cockpit lighting would cause the lenses to shut down to protect themselves from overload and burnout. In fact, any bright light in the visual spectrum would shut them down. They warned us in class that if the NVGs were getting too much light, they would show what looked like a test pattern and shut themselves down. When the light source was removed or you looked away from it, the NVGs would come back on in about five seconds.

  Five seconds is a very long time when you are close to the ground in a helicopter and cannot see outside the cockpit.

  After completing the taping over of all our cockpit lights (a pin hole was left in some of the taped over lig
hts, e.g. The fire warning lights, the master caution lights, etc., so that we would know when they came on and we had an emergency), the instructor put his goggles on. As I watched him, I noticed that it was a moderately “dark” night. Yes, there was finally a moon but it was only a thin sliver, just above the mountains. I hoped this wouldn’t be too bad, but had a lot of confidence in my own ability and after all, I had one of those “God-like” instructors in the other seat. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us.

  The instructor took the controls and told me to put my own goggles on. It took me a lot longer than it took him, since I was doing it only for the second time. I finally got them on and was looking out the right cockpit window, trying to adjust them when I saw another CH-46 go past us, just outside our rotors at about what seemed like 40 or 50 knots, flying backwards.

  The instructor saw it too and was on the radio immediately, “46 on Luguna, you’re drifting backwards. YOU ARE DRIFTING BACKWARDS! You damn near ran us over!” he yelled into the mic. No stutter in his voice that time.

  The pilot of the other helo “rogered” our call with only a minor shake in his voice to betray his fear at not knowing where his helicopter was going, and although we could no longer see them, he assured us that they were stabilized. It was another warning we did not pay attention to. If he can’t see, what made us think we could? Ah, we’re hackers and he isn’t. That must be it.