Night Vision Goggles can’t always help you in the dark

During Desert Shield my unit was tasked with various support missions to support of the 101st Airborne Division and other units by delivering cargo or moving assets from one place to another. While we flew these missions, we also coordinated some of the flights to allow us to maintain currency with some flight training requirements. One requirement of Night Vision Goggle (NVG) qualified flight crews was to fly at least once every thirty days to maintain current NVG qualification. If you exceeded thirty days, you had to be re-certified by an Instructor Pilot (IP) and we tried to avoid that as IPs were usually busing with other training needs.

My NVG recertification flight during Desert Shield was also my Readiness Level 1 (RL1) Day/Night/NVG checkride. I was again flying with one of my favorite Instructor Pilots, CW3 Jerry Nollie. Jerry was a six-foot four-inch black gentleman from Georgia. He had an extremely personable manner in his instruction manner and I can't begin to tell you how much I learned from Jerry regarding how to fly the CH-47D with skill and precision. He just had a way of making you relaxed and confident in the cockpit.

We started the flight at dusk, allowing us to get all the day and night unaided maneuvers completed as night set in. One thing about the desert, is the transition from day to night seems faster due to the lack of trees and clouds. Once we had full darkness, we goggled up with our NVGs and started with all the maneuvers we could do at the airfield. Those tasks completed we flew out into the desert for the final training task, a running landing in the desert.

Landing in the desert in a helicopter is an exercise with your relationship with your helicopter, your crew and God. In the CH-47D this meant that as you started your descent to land, you were talking with your crew chief in the side door. He was telling you about the dust cloud as it started to catch up with the aircraft during deceleration. Your co-pilot (my IP Jerry, in this case) was giving you airspeed and altitude callouts can confirming the before landing checks. You were picking out a spot in the sand the looks to be obstacle free and fairly level.

Slowing to about 20 knots and descending through 75 feet the crew chief would tell you when the dust cloud was at the back of the aircraft, amidships and approaching the cabin. This is important as while passing through 20 feet, the cockpit was now surrounded by the dust cloud and you looked down through the chin bubble and tries to make some kind of visual contact with the ground. Copilot confirmed we were descending at less than 300 feet per minute and you felt for the back wheels touching the ground. You then reduced power and let the aircraft come to a stop, then you let the cloud settle and made sure that you didn't hit anything. Sounds like fun right?

Now, let's add to the fun. The leading edge of the Chinook rotor blade is a large aluminum D-Spar. At night, when sand hits the blades, you get sparks. Under NVGs, these sparks look like the 4th of July end of ceremony fireworks finale, only in green. It produced enough light that the goggles shutdown due to excessive light. Now Jerry, the crew and I were going to do a running landing in the desert under goggles, and I was scared to death.

We scouted around a bit and located what looked like a nice spot (Pretty much the area for miles was flat desert). We were trying to ensure there were no gullies that we might hit as that would be a bad thing. Visibility was crap because there was no moon, a thin overcast at high altitude and only starlight available. Since I'd done my day running landing without issue, Jerry didn't demonstrate one, I just flew it myself. We did our before landing checks, I confirmed what each crew member was doing on the approach and I picked a spot and started my descent.

It was dark, and it was so hard to see, then as we slowed and the dust cloud started, we got some help from the sparks at first and I got a good look at my chosen landing spot. As the cloud of dust started surrounding us our goggles started shutting down and Jerry called 20 feet and less than 300 feet per minute on the descent speed. I started looking down through the chin bubble and waited until I felt the rear wheels make contact and dumped the collective and neutralized the controls. I looked over at Jerry and he was pale as I'd ever seen a black man. We both agreed that was the scariest thing we ever did in a Chinook. We did our before takeoff checks and then I took off and we returned to base, NVG RL1 checkride complete.

A few days later, I put that training to use. This day’s mission was to a forward supply point near a small desert town called Nairyah, roughly 60 miles north of King Fahd International Airport (KFIA) and return to the airfield. These was a very routine flight and we really didn’t expect anything of any real interest to happen. One novel item was that we had a passenger in the jump seat between & behind the pilot seats. One of our flight surgeons (Major Rhonda Cornum) needed to get her hours in (Like pilots, they have a designated amount of flight time they must log periodically) and the Major needed to log some time, so she came along with us on this flight.

The flight route to Nairyah had been established early in our deployment and we all knew it by heart. Fly west from KFIA to a dirt road about 30 miles inland from the gulf coast, then follow the road north to Nairyah. The was done partially due to the fact that there were very few remarkable terrain features you could use to navigate in the desert. Army Aviation had just started to embrace Global Position System (GPS) technology. The GPSs in some of our aircraft were hand held Army Infantry GPS units adapted (poorly) for use in aircraft. The installation was very crude and the GPS only gave you a direction arrow and a distance, nothing like the modern GPS systems that are available later.

Some of our aircraft also had OMEGA Very Low Frequency (VLF) navigation devices that were part of the first generation of worldwide navigation devices. OMEGA gave you a visual display like a modern GPS but the OMEGA had limited accuracy of around +/- 4 miles which wasn’t very helpful in the desert. There is an old aviation joke that defines the acronym for Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) as “I Follow Roads”, we referred to this joke often flying this supply route.

The flight up to Nairyah was uneventful. It was a clear but moonless night and the amount of starlight available in the desert made it quite easy to see using the NVGs. NVGs amplify available light so that you can see in the dark. The AN/AVS-6 goggles we used amplified light 3000 to 4000 times, so a starlit night in the desert was a perfect working environment. We located the road landmark easily and both the GPS and the OMEGA (suspenders and belt you know) seemed to be working fine.

We landed in Nairyah and unloaded the cargo from inside the Chinook and we learned that part of our return load would be a 12,000 forklift that needed depot level repairs, rigged as an external load. This was a welcome surprise as we not only got to stay NVG current but we got some external load hook up practice at the same time. We loaded up what internal cargo and or passengers we had, then picked up and hovered over to the load. Hookup was uneventful as this was a often practiced maneuver for us and we took off flying south down our lonely little dirt road in the desert.

Like every flight, we’d been briefed on the weather before the flight, and it was the usual “Clear, blue & twenty-two” referring to a clear blue sky and 22 miles of visibility. But as aviators all too well know, weather conditions can and do change while you are in flight. That weather briefing was over 5 hours old when we left Nairyah but is was the most current information we had available as there was no weather reporting station in Nairyah. What we didn’t know but we learned soon enough was that a thick overcast cloud layer had formed in the south at several thousand feet and it was moving north.

We were cruising south, and were talking with the Major on the intercom as she was new to flying in a Chinook while hauling an external load. The further south we flew, the view in our NVGs gradually became dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. Since these devices only amplify ambient light and do not produce light, you learned to deal with variations in brightness as part of your training, but this change was so gradual that it probably took us twenty miles or more before we recognized there was a problem. It became evident that we were quickly losing our visibility and ability to see anything. Similar to driving into a fog that gets thicker and thicker till you can barely see in front of your car.

I was the pilot on the controls and CW3 Mark Hutchings was the Pilot-in-Command and was navigating. We all noticed that we really couldn’t see squat at about the same time. The loss of ambient light at this point was really problematic. We were far enough from any town, city or any other light source that you could not determine the horizon and tell where the sky stopped and the ground started. I turned on the infrared spotlight and that illuminated the exact spot on the ground below the aircraft and nothing else.

This was dangerous as you tended to fixate on the single spot and then lost your bearings and flew into the ground (bad idea). The only comforting thing was the fact the we’d flown this route several times and we knew for sure that the biggest change in the terrain was a rock outcropping that was about 50 foot tall. We were flying 300 ft. above ground level (AGL) which gave us a minimum of 200 ft. ground clearance for the load hanging below us.

We were in a pickle as we knew generally where we were at, but we were not exactly sure. Worse, I was having a harder time maintaining my altitude and attitude as I was lacking visual references needed to maintain Visual Flight Rules (VFR) flight. With no other viable choice, Mark told me to transition to instruments, maintain a wings level attitude, fly a 170-degree heading, 70 knot airspeed and keep the radar altimeter at 300 feet. I’ll be the first to admit this was against so many rules I cannot count, but sometimes you do what you have to do.

Mark told Major Cornum to monitor the radar altimeter while he tuned up the field Non-Directional Radio Beacon (NBD) setup at KFIA by the 101st when we arrived. Since KFIA was incomplete, there wasn’t an instrument approach available for us you use like we would have done stateside. Mark did some quick thinking and developed our navigation plan.

Since we’d flown west (270 degrees) outbound, then when the beacon was out our left door on the Heading Select Indicator (HSI) we would turn toward the NDB. We didn’t dare fly direct toward the airfield as we had no reconnaissance of that route and we didn’t know if there were any obstacles we might fly into. Flying per Mark’s plan, we at least knew that there was nothing for us to hit as long as I stayed at 300 ft.

So, there I was, flying instruments less than 500 feet off the ground while carrying an external load. This was not a situation I ever wanted to repeat. We got to the navigation turning point and I made a nice, slow, level turn toward the east and we followed that little arrow on the HSI hoping it would lead us to Oz (or at least back to the airfield). About 5 minutes after the turn, we started picking up ambient light from the airfield and the goggles began to work again. After another mile or two we were back in business flying the NVGs and were soon within radio range to talk to the tower.

We made our approach to the cargo ramp and set down the forklift, then hovered to the side and landed and unloaded the remaining cargo and passengers. Then the standard trip to refuel and parking in our spot on the taxiway. A safe end to one of the most hair raising and tense non-combat flights in my life. (WHEW!)