nights like these

So I finally understand the old army slogan, ‘we do more before 8 a.m. then most people do all day’. It’s a simple matter of time difference; else it’s some sort of inside joke between Joes. Honestly, I’m fairly certain there are more then enough underemployed Joes to suffice without adding more troops. Oh if all warriors were as diligent and industrious as sailors…

For weeks now I’ve promised an entry concerning the lesson God is teaching me lately. However, one thing after another continues to creep or jump in the way. Surely soon, I’ll get to some meat and substance, as it is what I really want to write even now. Alas, I find myself relating a story from a couple days ago you might find interesting. I’ll warn you, there is quite a bit of aviation jargon. I’ll do my best to explain everything, if you are still confused, let me know and I’ll further refine and define. Without further ado, nights like these.

For those of you new to my web log, I am deployed in Kuwait, serving as a pilot in the facility of an air ambulance squadron. Coalition forces proudly claim we own the night. I prefer to think of it as on loan. Though our technology allows us an advantage, it is not always a gift. There is a reason the night is so coveted by military leaders and yet so slippery. For the night in the desert is dark. Very dark.

And what a night it was. We stand twenty-four hour alert shifts. We launch on a moments notice. The notice comes in the form of a ‘nine line’, a brilliant name gleaned from the fact it contains nine lines of information describing what sort of injury, the wounded’s locale and other peripheral information.

The day began slowly. Nothing happened. Though this means no flight time, it also means no injuries, no death and no tears from mothers and sisters of those fighting bravely. My crew drove home from dinner blaring Wilson Phillip’s Hold On, all singing along. A cop pulled us over for going too slow. Apparently this gentleman didn’t share our appreciation of one of the ninety’s real gems (sarcasm). We cracked up as he yelled his face red despite the fact we couldn’t hear a word he said due to the music. When we turned the music down, he was so flustered, he drove off. We thought this was the highlight of the night. How does it get any better then getting reamed for singing along to Wilson Phillips and serenading the troops?

The night was only just beginning. I was just about to lie down to sleep when the nine line came in. 2230 perhaps. Selene sleepily rose to take her throne low on the horizon above an ever-thickening layer of spotted clouds. Over the hand held radio came a raspy voice, ‘medevac, medevac, medevac!’ I couldn’t help but wonder why people never get hurt in the daytime. I put on my side arm and hurried into the tactical operations center, toc. The squadron duty officer was furiously chatting away on the telephone, scribbling notes. She hung up the phone and told the crews now assembled, we were flying to western Iraq. Immediately we began loading additional ammo clips, checking our side arms and rifles.

When flying into Iraq, it is required we fly as a flight of two. This requirement acts as a safeguard against the chance of one helicopter going down without aide. As is standard operating procedure, the co-pilots, played in this case by Lieutenant Junior Grade Mike ‘Long John’ Silver and a dashing young Lieutenant (yours truly) quickly grabbed our gear and the ‘football’ and ran to start up the alert helicopters. The football is our secret briefcase filled with the current passwords and frequencies in Iraq. And yes, we stole the name from the president’s nuclear code briefcase.

Quickly, the rest of the crews arrive and we spin up the bird. Pat Larsen, a pilot I cruised with the past year was assigned as the helicopter aircraft commander, HAC, for this particular event. A HAC is the one who signs for the aircraft. In a nutshell, it is his bird and consequently his flight. The other aircraft, commanded by Lieutenant Joe Adams, call out they are up and ready.

I lower my NVD’s and taxi behind them. ‘Tower, Dustoff Evac zero-five and flight, approaching hold short for the active.’

‘Roger, Dustoff Evac zero-five, wind three-three-zero at twelve, cleared to take off.’ We launch in order. The excitement of the rush to get to the bird and launch is still evident in the idle chitchat and excited voices over the internal communication system, ICS. Dustoff Evac zero-five, Dash One, lifts. I pull us into a hover, check the gauges and call, ‘Two’s in’.

A moment later the form flight is bustering (flying as fast as the aircraft will allow) at two hundred feet, skimming along the desert floor. Dash One, the lead aircraft sets in the locale and heads direct. My aircraft, Dash Two, follows behind, keeping them at our ten o’clock. It wasn’t until this moment we realize just how dark it was. The precious light of the moon was masked behind an ever-growing layer of spotted clouds high above us.

‘It’s a varsity night boys,’ I call over the ICS. How right I was, for it was a dark night. One of those terribly dark nights. In the desert, when there is no light, there is NO light. In low light situations on goggles you get a situation called scintillation; an effect borne from the way goggles gather ambient light (a flash of light from the ionization of a phosphor struck by an energetic photon or particle). The normally crisp green and black images are now laced with tiny flickering dots. It looks very much like a television station you can’t quite pick up.

Joe’s voice over the radio: ‘Looks like we have fog forming below us.’

‘I don’t know man; it actually looks like the difference in the shadows of the moon poking through the clouds,’ Pat answered.

As we flew deeper into Iraq the weather started to get a little worse by the second; a false horizon formed. We were bustering at one hundred, thirty-eight knots (roughly equivalent to one hundred, sixty mph) at two hundred feet and below. The excitable chitchat lessoned. It’s clear this is going to be a night we are put to the test. I am at the controls. Without warning, dash one made a startling climb.

‘What in the world are they doing? Why are they climbing?’ I almost yelled the question.

‘Climbing…they're not climbing!’ Pat replied. Immediately I recognized vertigo. A false horizon (a cloud layer resembling the visible horizon but above it) formed in the distance tricking my brain. Vertigo is a play of deception with your senses acting as the stage.

‘Vertigo, Vertigo!’ I cry, passing the controls. We were in a fifteen-degree nose down dive! It came on so quickly; I felt no effect of the ‘leans’, the typical clue of its onset. One moment perfect, the next completely in the grasp of vertigo. Recognition is the key. Luckily I recognized and passed the controls and we were saved the very fate of the doomed marine h-53 of one year ago. Until that moment, I didn’t understand how the pilot of the marine helicopter could suddenly loose all awareness and crash straight into the ground, killing all thirty-five men aboard. That crew was in the exact situation I now found myself in; Dash Two on a low light, low-level flight. I suddenly became very aware of my situation.

Pat took controls and leveled us out from the diving turn, reestablishing straight and level flight. It took a moment, but I re-caged. The weather suddenly took a turn for the worse (if that was even possible). A glance at the gauges showed us still fifteen miles from the crash scene. The left seat, the HAC, had controls. We swap duties, I began making the calls and running the show. The pilot at the control’s only job was to fly. Just fly. No brainpower extended anywhere else besides keeping the equal proportions of blue on the top and brown on the bottom of attitude gyro. Knowing first hand how difficult the formation flying had become, I began backing him on the gauges.

‘Air speed’s looking good. I’ve got you a hundred, ninety feet. Dash One is at ten for about fifteen (ten o’clock for a distance of fifteen rotor arches). Looking good.’ I continue to call out our numbers, not only for safety and his benefit, but to help get my mind around reality. Mere moments later, the nose pitches up and airspeed drops through the floor.

‘Watch your nose attitude. Watch your climb. Dude, watch your nose up!’ The second I mention it, Pat confesses vertigo and passes me the controls but not before over compensating for his lack of perception by pushing hard forward on the cyclic. The result it now a hard nose down one thousand feet per minute rate of descent at one hundred, sixty five feet and minimal airspeed.

My heart jumps. I immediately level the nose and pull in as much power as I can. Good thought, poor execution. I am not completely over my vertigo, but I now have the controls. I pulled in too much collective and see red on the NR gauge (NR=rotor speed. The gauges stay green during normal operation; red indicates a significant rise or drop in rotor speed. A dramatic power pull increases the blade pitch, increasing the ‘bite’. This slows down the rotors causing a condition called drooping because the transmission cannot handle the additional strain and the helicopter begins to loose the ability to stay in the air). The power did its job and got us to three hundred feet before we began to droop.

Yanking that much collective (the collective is the lever at the pilot’s left hand which controls the vertical axis) was a rookie mistake. But in defense, I was scared. No lie, scared. The lightening change from extreme nose up, to nose down, then level put me back in the throes of vertigo. I hung on as long as I could. You are taught to trust the gauges. I don’t talk. I just look at the gauges. Pat, gathering his wits, flips the C-PW (contingency power) switch giving us more power and alleviating the drooping. ‘Trust the gauges,’ I tell myself, ‘Trust the gauges.’

It is amazing how much your brain can actually handle. We are flying in a tactical formation over Iraq, doing our best to maintain flight integrity while in condition midnight (completely blacked out). Somehow your brain filters out the superfluous. Unfortunately, one thing we failed to recognize was the low-lying cloudbank we had flown into.

Pat, now re-caged, took the controls. As he does, we go zero-zero (zero vertical visibility, zero horizontal visibility). We are completely blind. There is nothing. We could have been upside down for all I knew. No reference to anything. Dash One, while only a few hundred feet away, was gone. As a pilot, this is as terrifying a moment as you can imagine. We brief the procedures for inadvertent IMC (instrument metrological conditions) before every flight. Unfortunately this time it came at the most inopportune time; on a low light, low level, high air speed, form flight when both pilots are experiencing vertigo.

It is nearly impossible to describe the sensation. The closest simile I can conjure is driving full throttle, blind folded through intense traffic while reaching behind you to smack the kids. Discombobulating and frightening to say the least.

Most who survive a moment of physical crisis tell the same story; you are overcome with a sense of calm as your mind begins to wash out peripheral information and your better sense takes over, whether it is natural reaction or in this case training. Time slows down as your mind speeds up, once again proving the relativity of time and the immensely spectacular brain the Creator provided.

As so often happens in times of peril, the crew gelled in a remarkable way, any dissidence prior to the current situation dissipated in a single heartbeat. The moment we recognized our situation, Pat instantly began the loss of visual contact procedures as briefed that morning.

‘Loss of visual contact,’ he called over the radio.
‘Roger, we are currently heading three-zero-zero, two hundred feet,’ came the voice from Dash One.

‘Rog, turning right one-one-zero.’ We broke away, beginning a climb in order to separate altitudes. I looked around frantically. Still no idea where they were. Through my goggles I can see only green. Worse, a flat green. There is no differentiation between sky and ground. Screw being tactical, I threw the anti collision lights on. Pat continued to make calls try to coordinate a rendezvous. I heard Dash One calling their turn. The goal of the turns when you encounter inadvertent instrument conditions, especially whit the loss of visual contact is to get out of the situation you put yourself into and create a safe distance between yourself and your playmate.

Turns completed, we began the arduous adventure of rendezvousing. Pat, performing ever bit the role of competent pilot, presented a steady platform; wings level steady altitude. Petty Officer Petrie, who remained stationed just behind the pilots ever since he rushed up to turn the altitude hold on while we were experiencing vertigo, backed us up on the gauges.

Like I said, the weather was zero-zero. Seemingly, ten very long, very uncomfortable minutes later a call comes from the back, ‘got ‘em…four o’clock high, coming down!’ Dash One called two hundred feet; we reported level four hundred so what were they doing above us? Clearly the night was affecting everyone. As I catch sight of our playmate, they descend from above and pass right behind us, within several hundred feet, on their way to their called altitude of two hundred feet! Scary.

Dash One tells us they are passing controls back and forth; vertigo. Yeah, no kidding. This night is turning into a disaster. It is not until this very moment I was able to even think past the essentials of flying to consider the mission. We were in a horrible situation, promising to get worse, and still had not found the crash site.

Luckily, when things seemed at their worst we see a strobe. The crashed Australians (yes we were risking the lives of 10 good men and 60 million dollars worth of us technology for Australians), put out a strobe. The little blinking light created a point of reference to the ground. Essentially, a twenty-dollar piece of equipment saved us. In an area where the sand stretches for miles and miles with no topographic deviation, anything that delineates ground from sky immediately re-cages your brain.

We began a slow controlled descent to an altitude of two hundred feet. Visibility increased to roughly a tenth of a mile. Through my goggles I could see the non-infrared strobe light from about .5 nm out, but no further. To extend beyond that miniscule arch was to once again be blind. On a typical night, where the visibility was normal, the fact they placed a non-infrared strobe out would infuriate me because with each pulse our goggles would bloom out. This night, however, it allowed us to actually find the crash site.

Pat, the HAC, took off his goggles and switched to an instrument only scan. Though a deviation in standard operating procedures it was a brilliant move. We made it as simple as possible; he flew, I controlled him around the crash site. It was seriously a brilliant move. The goggles were killing us, almost literally. Though he no longer had any visual reference to where we were, we now had a stable platform and were orbiting the crash site safe and controlled. The next thought was to land and aid our allies.

I analyzed the situation. From what we knew to be the injury (a broken leg and possible broken back) and the immense difficulty in simply flying to the crash site, I felt it wasn’t worth it. It just was not worth it. The moment I verbalized this to my crew, Dash One calls for us to set up as an octagon gun ship. They were going in!

‘Come right. All right, roll out. Easy right,’ I called as we traced an octagon around the crash site. The crew in the back is still experiencing vertigo. It is much easier for a pilot to overpower the false sense of motion because we can look at the gauges for proof. Unfortunately for the gentlemen in the back, they have no such luxury. The corpsman, Chief Owen, continued to ask for our altitude and ask why we were descending in a left hand turn despite our right hand orbits. Now out of imminent danger, we laugh a bit as he was clearly turned around and full into a bad case of the leans with no chance of getting past it anytime soon.

Dash One descended to perform a landing zone evaluation. They made several low passes and found a clear lane by which to enter and began their pattern to land. ‘I can’t take this one Mike, I’ve got vertigo, you’ve got it,’ Joe told his co-pilot. It was a brave decision. Mike ‘Long John’ Silver is a very skilled aviator, but he lacks the experience of a pilot like Joe Adams. However, it was the only way to land and help this guy. Petty Officer Carlile felt none of the effects of the vertigo plague and began making the calls to guide Mike into the landing zone.

Mike did not have full vertigo. However, he did have the leans. He felt a very real sensation of a right hand turn. A pilot naturally combats this by putting in a bit of left cyclic thus the dangers of vertigo. Carlile called him straight. Mike fought every feeling in his body and the urge to conform to the sensations ever arguing and persuading him to put in just a little left stick, just a little left pedal. Carlile’s calls were true and Dash One landed safely behind and left of the crash site.

The sand kicked up while coming into the zone splashed off their rotors creating a fire of green light around their helicopter as seen by our orbiting bird. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. I can't tell you how great it was to see them safe on deck.

‘Well done boys, well done!’ I called over the radio. It was the first time I gave any real credence to the possibility of my friends balling it up and dying. It is a prospect all to real, thus one we put in our pocket, hide and forget about.

Dash One quickly prosecuted the Medevac. We are left with one last obstacle; how do we coordinate a safe rendezvous and fly in formation through the same conditions back across the Iraqi plains to Kuwait? I still had a good eye on our playmate. By giving directions for Pat to loop wide around, we were able to allow Dash One to launch and fall in directly behind them with interval.

Once again, we are totally in the blind. The air-to- air tacan read one point six miles of separation. Dash One assured us they were at five hundred feet. We claimed seven hundred feet and simply push despite IMC and lost contact. We are in a loose combat cruise formation of sorts. There was adequate spacing to allow for any deviation.
‘We’re climbing to see if we can get above the goo,’ Pat called as he began a slow climb. All of a sudden a flicker of black, then we push through into the black darkness of a clear night with light green puffy clouds below us. ‘Joe, looks to be VFR on-top around thirteen hundred feet.’

When we crossed the boarder into Kuwait we dissolved the formation. Dash One took the highly sedated patient to Camp Arifjan and we turned northeast heading home. Barely a word was spoken from the time we departed the soup, till the moment we got on deck. Then it was all smiles and slaps on the back. As you can imagine we were all pretty glad to be back on deck.

I have nearly died a couple times since I’ve had this job, but this was hands down the scariest of them all. We ordered a pizza and discussed the flight. Pat pointed out the obvious, ‘someone should have died there, we are good pilots, but we are not good enough to get out of that one. That was luck.’ I’ll put it one further, it was God's protection.

I suppose I’m supposed to wrap this up with a moral or a witty remark to the extent of it all in a day’s work or some nonsense, but not this time. The next day I ate lunch alone. A funny thought came to mind; I nearly proved my religion. God clearly has work for those of us on that crew to complete. I felt obligated and thankful. Praise be to God.