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

  Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2014 by

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

  908 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083

  and

  10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford, OX1 2EW

  Copyright 2014 © Robert F. Curtis

  ISBN 978-1-61200-275-0

  eISBN 9781612002767

  Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-276-7

  Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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  CONTENTS

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  INTRODUCTION: Helicopters

  FLYING LIFE ONE: The Army 1968–1971

  1: The Accidental Aviator

  2: Chasing Buzzards

  3: Engine Failure

  4: The Playtex Club

  5: First takeoff of the Day

  6: Luck and Superstition

  7: Survival Instruments

  8: Tracers

  9: Army Night Flight

  10: Flares

  11: Napalm

  12: Last ’Nam Flight

  FLYING LIFE TWO: The National Guard 1972–1975

  13: Truck Strike

  14: National Guard Night Flight

  15: Tornados

  16: National Guard Summers

  FLYING LIFE THREE: The Marine Corps 1975–1973

  17: Night Vision Goggles

  18: Marine Corps Night Flight

  19: Wires

  20: Externals

  21: The Ritual

  22: Special Operations Capable

  23: Broken on a moroccan Beach

  FLYING LIFE FOUR: The British Royal Navy 1983–1985

  24: Sand

  25: Introducing the Arctic to Captain Curtis

  26: Royal Navy Night Flight—the Difficult Valley

  27: Troop Lifting, with Night and Heavy Snow Showers

  28: Long Flight Home

  29: Sea Fog

  30: Day and Night Passengers

  31: Final Flight with the Royal Navy

  EPILOGUE: The Wall, 20 Years After

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Now this is no shit,

  There I was, 10,000 feet,

  I had a pocket full of nickels and

  There wasn’t a soft drink machine for miles,

  So I turned to my copilot and said, ‘Alice,’

  When all of a sudden, there was Plexiglass flying everywhere.

  The men, they were scared, but not me.

  Down below us we saw a man on a bicycle.

  We knew he was going to church,

  Because it was Sunday.

  So, we rolled in on him.

  It was ten to one!

  But we finally got that little SOB”

  —Typical flying war story, circa 1971

  This book is dedicated to the maintenance men who kept all the aircraft I flew whole through their non-stop labors. I trusted you with my life every day and your skill validated that trust. It is dedicated to the crewmen who flew with me and trusted me to bring them back as I trusted them to keep the helicopters ready, because after all, the aircraft was theirs, not mine. It is dedicated to the pilots who sat in the other seat while I flew and vice versa, each of us trusting the other’s skill and judgment. It is dedicated to the wives and families that watched us all go out in our fragile machines full of potential single-point failures. Watched us go and hoped for our return. Finally, it is dedicated to those who ran out of luck and superstition. We miss you.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  A perfect flight is usually one you don’t remember. When you are old, and if you are a military pilot, should you live to be old, you discover that you tried your entire flying career for perfect flights. Sometimes, very rarely but sometimes, you have a perfect flight in that everything you did was spot on—you could do no wrong that day. But somehow, some of them, when you were not that good, some of the less than perfect ones, stick in your mind even when you are well past flying and should have forgotten them …

  The thing is, for helicopter pilots at least, war stories don’t even require a war. War is only marginally more dangerous for transport helicopter pilots than peace is, since there is very little difference in wartime missions and peacetime missions. the nights are just as dark, the weather just as bad, the loads just as heavy. today you can’t even say that you only get shot at in wartime—get close enough to someone’s marijuana patch stateside and you will take incoming; maybe not a missile, but an assault rifle shot is still incoming fire. And it’s not just gunfire—flying a premature baby on a medevac from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia, at night, in bad weather, is just as terrifying as doing a night combat resupply to a mountain top in Vietnam.

  Someone once told me that the primary, and perhaps only, difference between a fairy tale and a war story is that a fairy tale starts off with, “Once upon a time, a long time ago …” while a war story starts off with, “Now this is no shit, there I was … ” At some point in my military life I figured out that both fairy tales and war stories are equally true.

  Now, this is no shit, for serious aviators, especially military aviators, flying is far closer to being a religion than being a job. All the things necessary to a religion are present, except perhaps a deity. But as with many people’s personal religion, a deity is not really necessary; all you need are rituals to provide purpose and comfort and therefore a reason to believe. the comfort comes through prayer, singing, and the promise of better things to come. the purpose is to do something most people cannot, be it getting to heaven or being respected by your brother pilots.

  If flying is a religion, then the instructor pilots are the priests. Instructors show you the way to come through the trials and tribulations of the present into a better future, or any future at all, period. they teach you which sins are venial and which are mortal. they introduce you to the secrets of the order, test your virtue during your check flights to determine if you are worthy, and instill the rituals of aviation into you until no pilot can fly without performing the proper ceremonies. If you cannot meet the instructor priest’s stern tests or if you show unorthodox tendencies, they will excommunicate you as a heretic. Learn well, show the proper attitude and you may become one of them. And, if you make a mistake that kills you, they will come to your memorial service and sing about God guarding and guiding the men who fly through his great spaces of the sky.

  The Holy Books of Flying are the operator manual for your aircraft, The Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR), the Aeronautical Information manual (AIM), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Regulations—the international version of the FAR if you are going to be flying outside the US, the military directives which each service issues by the pound, and texts on weather and
aerodynamics. The novice studies them to learn the right path and the masters return to them often to maintain their orthodoxy.

  Most religions teach that if one follows the path laid out in the Holy Books and the guidance of the Holy men, the future will be some form of paradise. Flying also preaches that the path to heaven or the future or, as noted, any future at all, lies in complete orthodoxy: the following of the rules, a course of actions that spells out precisely how to behave in all situations and thereby know exactly what will happen in the immediate future. the entire process of flight training, therefore, becomes teaching the student pilots how to plan and predict the future.

  Any pilot who has been flying for a number of years can tell the future, a fact self-evident in that the pilot is still alive. But in learning to predict the future, pilots, like the very religious, become the most predictable of people. After all, a pilot must know in advance when he will start the engine, which route to taxi the aircraft, where to takeoff, to what altitude to climb, at what speed to climb, the route to follow, how much fuel will be burned en route, where the landing will be, how the landing will be done, and finally which route to taxi the aircraft to the gate or ramp spot. All events are timed to the second and each has a fallback, in case the first plan does not work. there is another third fallback in case the second fallback doesn’t work either, and finally, the pilot knows how to crash the aircraft in the way most likely to let the crew survive if nothing at all works.

  In other words, the pilot has been trained in what to do and how to react to all possible situations. the Holy Books give him THE WORD and the instructor/priests have drilled the pilot and tested the pilot and passed judgment on the pilot until, at last, the pilot is prepared and blessed. But unlike most modern religions, the price of failure to follow the Holy Writ of Aviation is not paid in the future on some judgment day, it is often paid right then and there if the pilot does the wrong thing during a failure or flies into unsuitable weather for his machine and/or level of skill and training, or he just loses concentration for a moment. more likely though, he will pay when he strays from the path of righteousness and tries some-thing on his own, something not taught him by the instructors/priests. the pilot becomes a heretic; that is, he gets “creative,” which brings us back to war stories.

  The Holy Books cannot contain everything: there are just too many possibilities. So, like many people living in primitive, pre-literate societies, pilots tell each other stories, war stories or flying stories. the purpose of these stories is to pass on knowledge that is not written. Often with great embellishment and even exaggeration, the storyteller in effect says, “this happened. I did this about it. It worked or it didn’t work.” the listener takes it all in and files it away for later. He may or may not use it, but at least he knows that as Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, “the thing that has been, it is that which shall be: and that which is done is that which shall be done: and There is no new Thing under the sun.” Whatever happens to your air-craft, someone has seen it before.

  One of the primary lessons of war stories, one of the things the Holy Books never say, is that you must always be calm. this does not mean that you do not have to react very, very quickly at times—failure to reduce the power when the engine quits, in some helicopters within two seconds, means the rotor blades slow to the point where they cannot provide enough lift and you will fall from the sky and die—but it does mean that even when you do have a situation that requires immediate action, you must remain cool and calm.

  * * *

  Once, right after I reached my first assignment as a brand new Army warrant officer, a WO-1, I flew as copilot/map holder on a U-8, a small twin-engine 1960’s fixed-wing. Being strictly a rotary-wing pilot, I knew nothing about fixed-wing aircraft, but the aircraft commander on this flight was my boss, a major, and was a god in my eyes. He had flown C-46s (large twin-engine cargo planes) during WWII and had been flying helicopters ever since the Army had them. Now we were flying the U-8 down to Atlanta and he wanted some company, so I was along in the copilot seat, tuning radios and holding the charts as we flew southeast. We were in the clouds over the Smoky Mountains and some ice was building up on the wings, not a good thing in my eyes, but the aircraft had rubber de-icing boots on the leading edges of the wings to knock the ice off when it got too thick.

  Then, an hour into the flight, the major turned to me and smiled, calm and collected. From his position in the left seat, he reached over with his right hand and pointed at one of the myriad gauges on the plane’s dash, the one marked “number 2 engine oil pressure.” It had fallen well into the red zone on the low side, signaling the engine would fail soon from lack of oil. Looking over at the right wing, I could see oil streaming back from the leaking engine across the wing. He reached for the lever to feather the engine, to bring the prop’s pitch back to zero so that it would not windmill and keep turning the engine after he shut it down. If it did windmill without oil, the engine might explode and take us out of the sky. The lever would not move. Ice had gotten into the control cables and locked it up. He looked at me and smiled; cool, calm, and collected.

  “Center, Army U-P, declaring an emergency: We are losing one of our engines and cannot maintain altitude. Request you vector us down one of the long valleys around here in our descent,” he called over the VHF radio. The entire time his voice was a calm and smooth as if he were ordering lunch at the Officer’s Club, not dropping an airplane out of the sky, quite possibly into a mountain ridge.

  “Roger, Army. Turn heading 120. There’s an airport straight ahead ten miles away.” The tone of the controller’s voice matched the major’s—calm, routine.

  The major reduced power and we started down, still unable to see any-thing through the gray of the clouds. A few minutes later the controller said, “Losing you on radar in ground clutter. Call when you are clear of the clouds.”

  After an eternity, an eternity being perhaps five minutes when you are headed down through the clouds not knowing what is below you, we came out the bottom of the cloud and could see we had descended into nearly the center of a broad valley, mountain ridges rising above us on both sides. Good job, FAA radar. As we got below the icing level the ice in the cables went away and the major feathered the number J engine without difficulty, and the now-feathered prop stopped turning. The airport was directly in front of us as the controller said it would be, and our landing was utterly routine. After we were parked on the ramp and the other engine was shut down, the major looked over at me and smiled again.

  * * *

  Cool and calm, always be cool and calm even when you have to move fast to keep something bad from happening. Be cool and calm, something the books can’t say, but something the religion of flying requires of you if you are to face the fire successfully and come through. Always, because the mission must be done.

  The purpose of the following stories is not to provide any startling new truths or show a slice of flying that has not been written about in great and bloody detail by nearly everyone that ever controlled an aircraft or thought about controlling an aircraft. Rather, I have written this to show places and moments out of a flying career that have stayed with me when all the others have faded into a blur with the years. these stories in it are as true as all war stories are.

  Jean Renoir is quoted as saying, “the only things that are important in life are the things you remember.” Yet a perfect flight is one you don’t remember. You look at your log book later in wonder, as if some magic happened to you and you never knew it. Did someone make a false entry? A perfect flight went completely as planned. It was planned and briefed on time. the preflight inspection found no new faults, takeoff and climb-out were unremarkable, and flight en route to your destination was normal. You descended to the runway, ship deck, or landing zone; landed; dropped your load or your passengers; and returned home. the aircraft worked like it was supposed to. Neither you nor the copilot, nor any of the crew, did anything that they weren’t supposed to do. You didn’t scar
e yourself even once. And an hour after the flight was debriefed, it was well on its way to being forgotten. By the next week, the flight was forgotten altogether. even looking at it in your log book does not bring it back. It’s gone.

  Perfect flights are always what a pilot wants, or at least pilots who live to be old want. these imperfect flights I remember …

  INTRODUCTION Helicopters

  * * *

  To understand helicopter-flying war stories we, the storyteller and the listener, must have a common ground. the storyteller must remember that things, such as acronyms and common aviation terms, are a foreign language to non-aviation folk. He must also remember to explain why some things are more important than others. the reader must understand the basic principles of helicopter flight to have a better understanding of the nature of the machines that figure in all these war stories and why the storyteller considers some events more important than others.

  First, “helicopter,” “aircraft,” “helo,” “bird,” even in rare cases “copter” are all names for a helicopter used by the aircrews that fly them, the controllers that handle them, and the maintainers who keep them in the air. Notice that “chopper” is not listed among the names of these machines. Few, if any, of the pilots and crewmen I know or have known ever use that term and cringe when they hear others use it, perhaps because they do not like the image of rotor blades doing anything except lifting the aircraft.

  According to an old saying, helicopters really don’t want to fly. Unlike most fixed-wing aircraft, the best helicopter design in the world is inherently unstable. A trimmed up airplane in flight will hold its flight path in-definitely. most of the older helicopters will hold their trimmed-up flight path for a very short while, after which they veer off in a random direction. Without the computer-controlled stability systems installed into modern helos, the pilot must manually fly them all the time or they fall from the sky in the aforementioned random directions.