Lots of excitement since the last edition (it's been about two months). We've made it through the holidays, which is always interesting when you're deployed. People send some wild stuff to make the troops feel closer to home. Did you know they make turkey spam? Don't worry, the chow halls do a wonderful job preparing meals with lots of things to choose from. Some celebs even came to visit around Thanksgiving. Gary Sinise served me lunch. Apparently he has a band now, aptly named The Lt. Dan Band, though I didn’t get to see their show. Then we got to eat with Chris Farley’s brother (I guess his relation makes him a celebrity, nice of him to visit either way) and Kristy Swanson. Ten points if you can you connect Kristy Swanson and PeeWee Herman without using Kevin Bacon (or Google). Also, thanks to everyone who sent food and snacks and presents and Green Beans Coffee gift cards. Thanksgiving and Christmas was about as good as it gets without being at home thanks to your generosity.
And now for something completely different… Mom, you should stop reading now. So, there I was, flying along, happy as a clam because of what I get paid to do. Ten more points if you know when clams are the most happy. Again, no Google. My copilot, CW2 Robbie Hammond was on the controls as we were making our final approach into Kandahar Airfield (KAF). The whole crew was wearing night vision goggles, and with zero illumination provided by the nearly nonexistent moon, the green world in our 40 degree field of view was almost overpowered by all the lights on the airfield. As Robbie pulled back on the cyclic to slow the aircraft, he lowered the collective, the stick that makes you go up and down, to begin a descent from about 500 feet above ground level (AGL). After being cleared to land, Robbie lined us up on the long taxiway just to the right of the runway, and our rate of descent reached about 500 feet per minute. Now, if you start at 500 ft AGL, and descend at 500 fpm, do I need to do the math for you? Put a minute on the clock:
As we got closer to the ground, Robbie tried to bring in some power by raising the collective in order to slow our rate of descent. Imagine my surprise when he said, “Jeff, the collective won’t move.” I immediately remembered how the friction assembly, the clamp that holds the collective in place when we don’t want it to move, hadn’t felt very smooth earlier in the flight, almost ratchety. We had even discussed swapping the aircraft for a new one at the end of our mission. Given our current situation, we most definitely wanted the collective to move. I’ll throw out some numbers for helicopter pilots in the audience; we were approaching the taxiway at about 80 knots IAS, with about 30% power applied, not nearly enough power to bring the aircraft to a hover if we slowed all the way down to zero. “Let me see what it’s doing, I have the controls”. I pulled up on the collective, certain he just hadn’t tried hard enough to overcome the problematic friction assembly. He had; it wasn’t moving. We quickly checked to make sure a checklist or some other cockpit-essential item hadn’t gotten wedged in the flight controls. How’s that one minute looking now?
“Robbie, put me up tower.” Immediately, he moved my radio selector knob around to position three and I keyed the mike, “Tower, this is Daddy 54, I am declaring an emergency and I need the runway”. The taxiway to which we’d already been cleared had vehicle traffic and other aircraft further up the field, and since I knew we couldn’t bring our aircraft to a hover, I wasn’t sure how much asphalt I was going to need to stop. “Daddy 54, cleared to land, runway zero five. State the nature of your emergency”. Only 20 seconds left before we were going to touchdown whether we wanted to or not; I told the controller my collective was stuck. “Daddy 54, tower, unfamiliar, please describe the emergency if able.” Seriously?! “The thing that makes me go up and down is stuck and I need to land on the runway”. “Roger Daddy, cleared to land”
Ten seconds. I entered a shallow left turn toward the runway and it became clear that our current angle of approach wasn’t going to take us all the way to the pavement. Without getting too deep into helicopter aerodynamics, increasing my airspeed would have gotten me all the way to the runway surface, but at the cost of increasing my rate of descent and we were already coming down fast. So, I decided to rely on the sturdy landing gear Igor Sikorsky put on my Blackhawk, and continue to a touchdown point somewhere in the dirt just short of the runway. Since it’s difficult to see ground detail through night vision goggles that are being washed out by airfield lights, I just had to hope the terrain was somewhat even and that some ditch wasn’t waiting to roll us upside down, though I was reasonably certain that wasn’t the case.
Three seconds. I pulled back gently on the cyclic to bring the nose up slightly, just prior to reaching the ground. This slowed our rate of descent and decreased our airspeed just a bit, and what could have been a very hard landing, can now really only be described as “firm”. You’ve probably felt harder landings in a commercial jet. We probably touched down around 300 to 400 fpm, and somewhere between 50 and 60 knots. I jumped on the brakes as we rolled onto the pavement and over a blue taxiway light, which, thankfully, missed all three of our wheels and wasn’t tall enough to scrape the belly. We came to a stop just short of the runway. Thanks tower, didn’t need it after all. We shut down right there next to the approach end and got towed back to parking with fire trucks as our escorts.
So, that was it. I made it through the holidays without my family, I’ve been shot at a few times, and I made it safely though an emergency that’s not even taught in flight school. I’m ready to come home.
Happy New Year!
