In many ways, my journey through flight school was either a gentle bit of divine guidance or an incredible amount of luck. I suspect the former but I can't rule out the latter, I just find it amazing how the stars had to align for me to achieve my goal. For one, I must be one hell of a test taker. One of the primary screening items is the Flight Aptitude Suitability Test (FAST). People study for it like lawyers study for the bar exam. Me I take my lunch hour from the motor pool where I was learning how to maintain snowmobiles and take the test cold, without any study prep at all.
I also had help from my older brother preceded me in my quest to be an Army aviator and he learned the hard way about a Conjugate Gaze disorder we both have that is detected by the "Red Lens Test" (Conjugate gaze is abnormal when either or both eyes fail to move in unison.) In layman's terms; when a fast moving object is observed by someone with this disorder, your eyes do not track at exactly the same speed (one lags slightly behind the other) and this produces an overlapping or dual visual image. The oddity is, that unless you have the issue demonstrated using something like the Red Lens Test, you do not notice it. Your brain will tend to track to your dominate eye (left in my case) and you don't notice the double vision during the event. Regardless, when my brother told me of his experience during the Red Lens Test I took notice of his answer when he failed the test and what the correct answer should have been. (The test is simply holding a red colored lens over one eye, and the doc shines a light into you eyes and moves it all around.) My brother and I saw two lights when it is moving (one red, one white) and a pink light when stationary (The brain combines the light colors and registers pink.) So the 4 times I tool the red lens test (Only required on the Class I flight physical to get into flight school.) I lied like a thief.
In my previous posts, I discussed my great fortune with both my Hyperparathyroidism diagnosis and surgery to remove a benign tumor in my neck. The only reason it was discovered was the Class I flight physical that the aviation board requires you to take again once you arrive at Fort Rucker (Just to make sure you are actually the person whose test results were submitted before your selection board.) The tumor wasn't causing much havoc with my blood chemistry the first teo flight physicals. (My original had been lost during the application process I had to get a second one completed and delivered overnight to the board.) This lucky diagnosis prevented irreversible bone damage that could have caused my bones to become so brittle that I could break a bone just sitting in a chair. (I met a poor unfortunate individual who had such an malady, he was not a happy person.)
I'd also mentioned that I'd finally gotten medical clearance to fly five months after I'd had my surgery to remove my tumor. My flight surgeon overlooked one tiny single sentence paragraph in the manual that indicated that my malady disqualified me from selection. Then again, when the consult clerk (Mrs. Barnett) had told me I was disqualified (DQ'd) and I was stepping out of her office to go pack my bags, she casually commented how it was too bad I hadn't flown yet. I just barely heard he say it. There I was in my Army issue Air Force sage green flight suit and Aviator sunglasses as I executed that perfect about face movement in her office doorway and stood there with a Cheshire Cat grin. Another miracle had occurred.
Luck was still with me when I was assigned to two individuals. My Instructor Pilot, a wonderful gentleman by the name of Hugh Rhoads and by Bravo Company roommate WOC James Herzog. Mr. Rhoads reminded me of my maternal grandfather (Alton Carr) and he treated me in a grandfatherly manner. He was friendly and patient but could be firm and demanding when it was needed. Jim Herzog on the other had was the exact opposite in my ways. I was the oldest member of the class having turned 29 before being cleared to fly. Jim was a still wet 18 and the youngest member of Royal Blue Flight 88-02. Jim sat in our room in the barracks and patiently talked with me until 4 AM well knowing we had to get up at 6 AM. It was mostly this discussion that kept me from quitting after discovering my fear of heights during my "Nickel Ride" with Mr. Rhoads. Jim was a good influence on me. He was wise beyond his years and had been a Civil Air Patrol fixed wing pilot before he joined the Army. Between these to individuals, I made it through primary flight training and moved on the to Huey transition.
Just so it is clear, there were several sections of flight training. Basic Flight in the TH55A "Osage". The TH55A was a Hughes 300 piston engine helicopter that is rugged beyond its slight appearance.
Then you moved on to the Huey Transition with the UH-1D/H
Then Basic Instruments in the UH1 flight simulator
Then back to the UH-1D/H for Advanced Instruments, Basic Combat Skills and Night Vision Goggles (NVGs)
After Graduation, I was awarded a CH-47D transition.
Back to my lucky breaks. After Jim Herzog helped me to get through primary flight, we moved into Hueys and our first turbine powered helicopters. The TH-55A was powered by a 6 cylinder horizontally opposed, air-cooled Lycoming 180 horsepower gasoline engine. If that brings to mind a Volkswagen engine, it is pretty close, just 2 more cylinders and a few other aircraft specific items. The biggest thing on the TH-55A was the manual throttle. As you increased lift you have to manually twist the throttle to increase power. With turbine engines, there was a governor to do that for you (YAY).
The Huey transition was pretty much play time for me. The Huey flies so easy and had hydraulic controls which were smooth and user friendly. The one thing that I had trouble with in the Huey transition was sloped landings. The Huey has skids for landing gear and that is nice except on the slopes where you can roll over sideways if you are not very careful. Since one skid touches before the other on a side slope landing it can create a pivot point for a roll over. So we were training to wait until the uphill skid touched down then to ease the other one down in a fluid but controlled movement. I did the maneuver well enough to be signed off as ready for my check ride when another curve ball was sent my way.
In all my other training, your final evaluation was made by a "Check Pilot" this involved swapping instructors with another student and having him evaluate you and by proxy your instructor. For the Huey Transition, by stick buddy and I were selected for evaluation by "Lowe Standards". We were flying out of Lowe Army Heliport at Fort Rucker and The Standards office was the team that made sure all the flight instructors were training to the correct standards. They usually gave check rides to the flight instructors, but as I learned that day, they form time to time gave check rides too students too.
Every training flight breaks down in to 5 parts. Table talk/Flight planning, Pre-Flight, The Training flight, Post-Flight and debrief. Table talk is a discussion about the topic of choice with your instructor. During a check ride, it is a spot check on your academic training about flight rules, aircraft knowledge, weather limitations and such. Emergency Procedures (EPs) are a instructor favorite as you have to memorize all IMMEDIATE ACTION emergency procedures as you will not have time to pull out the checklist. In a Huey it isn't bad, about 7 pages of Immediate Action items and say 24 pages or so for all EP's. This check ride was our first with an actual active army instructor pilot, All before were contractors and as civilians, there was a bit more casual interaction. Our check pilot was a Master Warrant Officer 5 and a Master Aviator, so he'd been around for quite a while and I was intimidated by him. He turned out to be a pretty nice guy but I was still pretty gun shy about the entire situation. In most cases, we only spent about 15 to 30 minutes at the table before going to operations and drawing an aircraft, I guess we spent about 45 minutes to a hour with this check pilot partly because there was not class briefing and maybe because it just seemed to last forever.
Finally, he had mercy upon us, and gave us the benefit of the doubt and we went out to the helicopter. You got a different bird every flight and it could be a D model or an H model. Not a great difference between the 2 but it was something we discussed both at the table and at the aircraft. The major difference being the location of the pitot tube that is part of the airspeed measurement system. D model it is on the nose, H model it is on top of the canopy. for what it is worth. Pre-flight was pretty uneventful, and actually one of my favorite parts as I was very attentive to details. "If it is broke on the ground, it will not fix itself in the air" was our motto. I was selected to fly first and so that both a relief and scary as I wanted to get it over, but I'd never flown with him so I was unsure about how his cockpit manner would be.
Every training flight had the same order of events. Get the aircraft started and though all required checks, hover taxi to the takeoff pad, take off then depart the traffic pattern then fly a route to the training area to train. No training maneuvers were done at Lowe, there were satellite training airfields for those purposes and to reduce congestion. 250 Huey were based at Lowe, so departure and arrival at the 11 helipads was busy. During the check ride, I was responsible for all radio calls to Ground and Tower and responsible for making sure all check list items were completed. I liked talking on the radio (it was something I was familiar with in the Army) and I liked Lowe because they had the best controllers and they all new their stuff. You called with your tail number (01 Golf is the one pictured above) and the pad you were parked on (H14 or whatever) and they would tell you the helipad to hover taxi to for takeoff. We were on the south side of the airfield and were taking off to the east then departing to the south via the south low-level corridor. The only reason this was noteworthy was that the low-level corridor was called that because you had to stay below 150 AGL to stay out of the approach path of the instrument approach to Carnes Army Airfield to the east. Due to this by policy, once you departed the airfield and started decent into the corridor, you had to turn the aircraft over to the instructor, as you were not yet proficient in low-level flight (90 knots, less than 100 ft above the trees.)
This was my first argument with my instructor. As when I started my decent, I per the policy told him he had the flight controls. He told me to fly it myself. I tried to politely but firmly let him know that was against the rules and he had the flight controls. He started to get a tad frustrated with me, and told me that he was the one who made that rule, and he was not going to fail me for not following it, He said I appeared that I knew how to fly the aircraft and he trusted my judgement. So I got to fly low level for the first time, on my check ride. Only once he told me to bring it up a but (50 feet above the highest obstacle) so I guess I did pretty well. About halfway down the route he tool the controls and did something I'd never seen before (or since for that matter). He was in the left (instructors) seat and I was in the right. Your collective pitch control (Up and down and airspeed/power) is on the left side of your seat and you use you left hand. They cyclic (Direction) is in between your legs and you use your right hand on it. When he tool the controls, he used his cyclic with his left hand, and my collective with his right hand, reaching over the console. At this point I decided he was a bit of a different breed of pilot, Interesting, but different.
We flew to the training area, and we went through all the maneuvers I was being graded on till we got to slopes. IT didn't take a rocket scientist to see that this maneuver had me terrified and super tense. after 3 aborted attempts, he very nicely demonstrated how HE did the maneuver and had me feel how he did it by having my hand on the controls but letting him do the maneuver (he did use his collective most the flight after the corridor), He demonstrated his technique both left and right sides then had be do it myself, with dramatically improved results. Then were were off to the stage field for maneuvers there.
The most fun you can have in a UH-1 is a low level autorotation. You are approaching the runway at 90 knots, 50 feet above the trees when your instructor rolls off the throttle and you start dropping. You have to immediately pull back on the Cyclic (stick) and raise the nose slightly while the aircraft starts to descend. At 50 feet above the ground you pull up slightly on the collective in your right hand which flattens your descent angle and slightly extends you glide time. When you feel the skids touch, you slowly begin to decrease the collective so it starts to act like a brake and you use your pedals to keep the nose pointed in the direction you want to go as the rotor will have some torque effect as you slide to a stop. Once you stop, you neutralize the controls and the instructor rolls on the throttle again for the next maneuver. Apparently, I did it right as he said I couldn't do another low level auto and we went on to the next item on the checklist, the simulated engine failure from altitude.
A simulated engine failure (autorotation) from altitude is like an elevator ride going down. You are cruising along fat, dumb and happy when your instructor rolls the throttle to idle to simulate an engine failure. (I am interjecting a bit of technical knowledge here, because I feel it needs to be explained.) The rotor system is equipped with a sprag clutch (one way clutch) that engages when power is applied from the engine, but disengages automatically when power is lost allowing the rotor system to freewheel. The rotor system is in many ways similar to a flywheel and due to Newton's law of motion it wants to stay in motion. This concept allows you to be able to establish and control and autorotative descent. When power is lost you have to IMMEDIATELY lower the collective as far as it will go down (we called it dumping the collective) and stomp on the right pedal to compensate for the lack of torque to keep your nose pointing forward. This puts the blades in a negative pitch so that they would be pushing down if power was applied and this allows the air going up through the rotors to help maintain the rotor speed. You also slow your forward airspeed to 70 knots from the normal cruise speed of 90 knots. Maintaining the rotor speed is crucial as you use this at the bottom of the descent to cushion your landing. The helicopter is going down in a very steep glide of about 3 feet down to 1 foot forward but you can turn and maneuver like you were still in powered flight. You pick your touchdown point and and watch your altimeter to ensure that when you get to 100 feet above the ground you pull INITIAL pitch on the collective.
This point is critical in the autorotation as you don't get a second chance on a real engine failure so you have to get it right. Initial pitch flattens you descent angle from 3 to 1 to about 1 to 7 maybe 1 to 10 depending on your airspeed and slows your rate of descent. But you do this by sacrificing that rotor speed you worked so hard to keep on the descent. So for a moment, you descent almost stops, and from 100 feet to around 50 you glide has changed to about what a fixed wing would use to land on the runway. This being the objective. As rotor speed starts to decay, you feel the aircraft start to drop faster and you then apply more collective (we called it cushion) to soften the impact of the landing and then from this point it is like the low-level auto and you slide to a stop. It is just a much shorted slide as you've been decelerating during the descent and even more during initial and cushion phases.
Not that I have all the technical garbage out of the way, back to the checkride. I did my simulated engine failure like a champ, not the best I ever did, but well above standard to get a good grade., then it was off to the edge of the airfield for the remaining tasks like s simulated engine failure at a hover (Super easy, you feel the helo start to drop, apply cushion and right pedal to maintain heading.) The entire maneuver is like 3 seconds and done. At this point, my part as student under eval was completed and I switched places with my stick buddy (he was a first lieutenant and I can't remember his name, it may be in my log book.) but he got in the pilots seat and I in the crew chief seat between and behind the pilots seats. As far as riding goes it is the best seat in the house. His checkride was essentially the reverse of mine, So he started with his hover work, then we hovered out to the lanes to get into the traffic pattern to do his autorotations. We completed his low-level auto, which is almost as much fun riding as being the pilot, then on the next pattern we went up to traffic pattern altitude of 600 ft above ground level (AGL) which was around 840 feet on the altimeter allowing for the airfield elevation of 240 ft. Our instructor rolled off the throttle at the appropriate point and we entered autorotation as we should then things almost went really bad. My stick buddy badly misjudged when to pull initial pitch and pulled it at about 250 feet AGL instead of 100 feet. Lucky for us, the instructor was on his toes and he grabbed the controls an initiated a powered recovery (he rolled the throttle back on) and landed with power. This is very dicey in a turbine powered aircraft as there is a lag from the time you apply power until the turbine comes up to speed. and it was a close call.
The instructor gave my buddy the controls again and told him to repeat the maneuver. and the second time was almost exactly like the first except the instructor was much more vigilant and took the controls a second time a bit faster so that landing wasn't quite as exciting. I'd kept quiet the first time as I wasn't the instructor, but as we were sitting on the lane and he was talking to by buddy about what was going wrong it didn't appear the instructor had noticed exactly why the maneuver was failing and I timidly chimed in that I thought I knew why, and mentioned the too high initial pitch application on the way down. So we went around again and our instructor had me call out when to apply initial pitch and we landed the autorotation just like the book. My buddy (and the instructor I think) were relieved and we went on to complete the checkride without any other items of great interest. (as far as our flying it).
The only other thing of note on the the return to Lowe Army Heliport was the normal peak recovery period traffic flow to the heliport. 250 helicopters would fly back and land at 11 different helipads in a 15 minute time span. IT was something impressive to see and listen to on the radio. One controller in the tower directed the landing traffic and once on the ground, he turned you over to the ground controller to taxi instructions to your parking spot. There were 5 landmarks around the airfield where you would call the tower and give your tail number and you parking pad as a response to the controller when he called you out. As you would approach the landmark for your approach direction, the tower controller would call out to you. Our checkpoint was the Macedonia Water Tower. The exchange would go something like this:
TOWER: Number 1 for Macedonia, say tail number and parking.
US (01D): 01D parking Hotel 14 (Pad H-14)
TOWER: 01D land 06 right contact ground, Number 2 for Macedonia say tail number and parking.
Once you knew the local area and the landmarks, you could tell the tower controller just walked in a slow circle and kept calling out the approaching aircraft and he would give them their landing pad and taxi instructions. It was something to behold. He knew every parking location and would give you clearance to the nearest of 11 helipads to approach. I never once caught him in a mistake.
We passed our checkride and I even got a complement from the instructor for my observation of the issue on the standard auto issue and speaking up. And the story will continue....
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