HiFlyer

For you rescue guys, here's the FY2010 AF posture statement...note some discussion towards the back about recapping the "Personnel Recovery" mission. www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-100223-010.pdf

Even worse than his stupidity would have been the impact/effect on the rest of the studs if the guy who violated the IPs order was given a gold star. It would have validated the idea that the dash-1 was not to be followed...in this case, the guidance to initiate ejection at the 2000' AGL point in an "under control" situation, and the admonition that you can't land a T-38 with dual engine flameout because you will loose hydraulics in the flare and thus lose control. I think he said he was afraid of being injured in the ejection...he was terminally stupid and incredibly lucky!!

Not sure of the exact "urbal legend", but it's happened at least once. In 1971 or 72, we had a T-38 on a dual contact ride come back with a dual engine flameout on the recovery leg. They tried to restart multiple times with no luck. As they approached from the NW, passing 2000' AGL, Roger (the IP) ordered bailout. The stud didn't, so Roger did. The stud tried one more restart and got one lit, then landed on 13C. Roger landed a couple hundred yards short of Highway 90 after about two swings in the chute. The kid would have been dead (way below the envelope by then) if the engine hadn't lit. Roger was exonerated (he did the right thing) but the kid was hammered with an Art 15 or LOR for disobeying an order to eject, and tossed out of UPT. I was the T-38 RSU controler on the outside (13L) that day. And yes, Roger did take a little good natured ribbing afterwards from the rest of us, but he was dead right in his decisions and actions.

Thanks, but I just did my job like you guys do yours. I just enjoy talking about it.

Hey...right outside Mr. Oh's shop. I wonder if the old guy is still working? He took care of me pretty well starting back in the 70s! I still have some of the stuff he made for me in the early 90s...he makes a mean cashmere overcoat!

By the way, just looking at the various aircraft info sites, current engine possibilities from the GE T-700 family are: (60G with T-700/701s - 1630 SHP ea)...UH-60M engine( GE 700/701D) - 1994 SHP ea, the /701E, a 701D with FADEC added, or the MH-60M's GE CT7-8B-5 with 2600 SHP each.

I think first off, you need to learn "Pentagon-speak". This is not a "new CSAR aircraft"...its a "recapitalization" of the HH-60G fleet. Recap generally means replacing an existing unit with a modernized version of the same thing. In this case, they'll take the existing UH60M army variant as a starting point, fix it up with modernized equipment that performs the HH-60G mission but is the latest stuff (glass cockpit, newer gen electonics, newer version engines, transmissions, rotors, etc.), and call it the HH-60L. Its like replacing your Pentium 3 desktop with a Pentium 4 version; its got newer guts but still a basic desktop...it isn't a high end server. In the process, the budget weenies will fight tooth and nail to cut "unnecessary" add-ons (you know, engines, rotors, seats, etc.) and the end product will be something like a 60G, but maybe a little more maintainable because the guts are newer and still in production. The goal of recapitalization isn't usually to provide new capability, but rather to provide replacements for existing capabilities and take whatever small improvement comes with later version parts. Having spent about $2.5-3B on that (probably about $20M per bird plus R&D by the time they build it), the budget weenies will then fight every attempt to fund a CSAR-X for a few years because they'll say the AF just bought a new CSAR aircraft and in the remote chance they need to go farther the Marines or Spec Ops guys can go with an Osprey. If budget things get real tight, I suspect some study will suddenly prove they really don't need 112 and can get by with 85 or 70 or whatever they figure they can squeeze out of the POM. By the way, I'm not a rescue guy, but every day I do perform study work for the DoD that supports this process. On the flip side of this problem, everybody wants everything, but there isn't enough money for everybody to GET everything. so everybody gets screwed a little in order to give most of the people something.

I can. Actually, as I recall he hit some trees first, which knocked the flight path over towards the only open ground within miles, then hit the wires, which leveled his wings, then it bellied in to a small open field in the middle of the forest. When he came to, he was sitting in the field virtually undamaged, with the engine still running, and with no recognition of the time span between his last conscious period (climbing thru the 20s) and the moment he awoke in the field (typical of people who have seizures). He said he had a hard time understanding that he was suddenly on the ground and needed to shut the engine down. He was not, however, totally uninjured...he chipped a tooth when the seat fired and flipped him out of the cockpit and onto the ground beside the aircraft! The flight docs couldn't find a single thing wrong with him when he was examined. He was perfectly fine.

Glad you got that straighted out..look at the bright side, now you can make your own history!!

Yes. They won't pay anymore for transportation costs than $900, but will pay less if that's all you can substantiate (ie., aircraft rental, fuel, parking, etc. wind up at $700, thats all you'll get for transportation).

Sorry Square, I dumped your PM by mistake. Plz resend. And yes, we do a lot of the reinvention stuff!!

The article says HH-60L.

Happens all the time, but I don't drink that much any more so I don't mind.

Its hard to write without throwing in a few acronyms or ops terms from a while back that seem perfectly clear, but it happens. If something confuses you let me know and I'll try to clarify it.

Wait...I just re-read your question. What is this "old days" poop? That was only a few years ago...well, only four decades...well, okay, so it was a while back... I was talking to a few old P-38 guys at my father-in law's WWII fighter squadron reunion (402nd FS, 9th AF...9th AF, by the way, did the CAS mission, while another NAF did the bomber escort mission) a couple of years ago and was struck by the similarity with the way they went about their missions. Different era, different airplane, different ordnance (similar, I guess, guns, bombs, and napalm, but much earlier versions). At any rate, the way they described their daily missions was remarkably similar. They even used some Army L-19 observation planes to assist them, much like the FACs did in Vietnam. The rest of the time they used one guy to "FAC" the rest of them in to maximize their effectiveness. Their day-to-day routine was very similar to mine, except they flew more missions during the day (frequently double-turned) and their loss rates were much higher (in the 16 months they were in Europe, they lost all but two of their original twenty-something pilots...in my 12 months, we didn't have a pilot get hit).

Well, organization-wise all the FACS belonged to the 504th Tac Air Support Gp which was located near Saigon (Bien Hoa AB or Tan Son Hut AB...I can't remember which). The group had four squadrons, three in country (19th 20th and 21st TASS) and one at Nakhon Phanom (NKP), Thailand (22nd TASS). The NKP guys only did out-country work on the "trail" and were not assigned as FACs to an army unit for CAS work (I'm not saying they might not have occasionally done some for other people, but they weren't assigned to a standard ground unit). Each of the in-country squadrons then had a detachment at their assigned ground units. I was a 20th TASS guy, with the squadron at Danang. The 20th TASS had OV-10s at Chu Lai AB, the HQ for the Americal Division (my unit). There were more OV-10s up at either Hue Phu Bai or Quang Tri airfield outside Hue, north of Danang, to support the 1st Cav. The 20th also had O-2s at several other locations (Danang, Tam Ky, and up at Hue somewhere) to support the ARVN and US Special Forces units. That way, each Army Division had a FAC unit co-located at or near its HQ, and an ALO permanently assigned to the Division, who also served as the location commander for all the unit's FACs. I was at Chu Lai, assigned to support the northern most Americal Bde...the 196th Inf Bde (Light). Chu Lai was the dividing line between the center and northern Bdes so we could support both from the same location, but the third Americal Bde (198th Inf Bde) was farther south at Quang Ngai, so we kept two or three OV-10s down there for quicker response. First, you have to remember that this was the 60s and early seventies. It was largely a daytime war on our part, so we didn't worry too much about night time support for our grunts...the basic companies in the field pretty much hunkered down in the evening and didn't engage much. The OV-10 could fly about 3.5 hours on a mission when loaded for in-country CAS. That was four LAU-79 pods with seven 2.75" rockets each (two white phosphorus (willie pete) pods and two HE pods) and four M-60 (7.62mm) machine guns in the chin pods. We would plan to take off at first light, and fly four sorties during the day, which generally put one airplane in the air over each Bde's AO at all times. Sometimes we staggered a little to avoid becoming predictable. If you had an area of visible activity every morning, we'd occasionally take off an hour early and try to catch the bad guys before they hid for the day (or take off late to save gas, depart on schedule, then suddenly return late in the evening and try to catch them)...and it sometimes worked! As for CAS, it was a mixed bag. There were two basic kinds of support...Pre-plans (PP) and TIC support. For PPs, every day the Army woud review its intel and submit requests to 7th AF (thru each Corps "Direct Air Support Center" - DASC) for pre-planned strikes. Those were usually either hits on places the Army thought were bad guy locations, and LZ preps..strikes in advance of an attack or insertion. The former were notoriously bad ...the intel was frequently a report that "Six VC were seen at grid coords xxxxxxxx", or "A source says there are a dozen VC camped at grid coord xxxxxxx". Of course, by the time the sortie was actually fragged, it was two days later and even if the report was accurate (a rarity, in my opinion) they were long gone by then. But, the process allowed 7th AF to equitibly divide up the daily frag to give every unit a fair share of the action each day, and both the DASC and the FAC had the authority to move the strike if the Army changed plans or the six guys didn't cooperate and stay at their former location waving red flags or if there was a more important need somewhere else (TIC being one of those). So, each day I would get up and report to the det's ops center about an hour prior to take off. I'd brief with our Ops Officer and then go to the division's Tactical Operations Center (TOC) to get a tactical update from the duty officer. I'd note the latest recorded position of all US and foreign (usually only ARVN) units in the field (I say "recorded" because they were frequently moving and there was no real time reporting in those days) and get a list of all the fragged activity (my PPs during my time on-station). I'd then get a ride down to the aircraft, pre-flight, and launch. It was all pretty casual...as a FAC, we ran our own war and there wasn't too much on-scene supervision in a "single seat" airplane (the OV had two seats, of course, but we flew alone except for an occasional demo ride for a visitor). Given that we flew in the same geographic area supporting the same guys against the same enemy about five days a week, the process didn't need a lot of formality...we knew our business and we knew what everybody else was doing, too. We always had a few "hip pocket targets" we knew needed some attention, even if the tasking chain didn't. Besides, if we had air and didn't use them, they'd be out of gas in ten minutes and dump their load in the ocean anyway. In my case, the AO bordered the Marines to the north (the "Hostage" FACs flying marine OVs) and we'd frequently talk to them to exchange information about the activity on our respective sides of the line, particularly valuable because the enemy wandered back and forth a lot and getting the Marine Regiment and the Army Bde to formally exchange info was an exercise in futility. The FACs spoke the same language, however, so that worked well. Generally, I'd fly into the AO...about a 10-15 minute flight from Chu Lai...and do a quick recce of known positions or reported activity. If I had PP scheduled I'd talk to our radio operator at the Bde CP and get an update on what was going on to determine if I needed to move the PP to another location. If so, I'd have him notify the DASC (it was supposed to be a "request", but I generally didn't phrase it that way. He may have...) and I'd go put in the strike at whereever I determined was the most useful location. Most of my air was AF F-4s from Danang or F-100s from Tuy Hua, and Marine F-4s, A-4s and A-6s from Chu Lai and Danang. On the other hand, if a TIC erupted, the rules changed a little. If I had a PP already inbound, I'd divert it. Then I'd call for assets (via the radio operator at the CP) and the I Corps DASC ("I DASC") would first try to divert airborne assets for my use, or last, they'd launch alert aircraft if nothing was readily available. This was when it got a little interesting, because you might have a TIC with close contact and I DASC would send you four F-4s with 2000lb slicks (mk84s) previously enroute to hit the trail. As you might imagine, a mk 84 slick is not the most effective CAS weapon in the inventory, but it was the closest. When this happened you had to improvise. I might look at the ground and try to estimate where the bad guy's leadership might be supervising from...the crest of a nearby hill or a thick stand of trees a few hundred meters away...and dump the mk 84s there. If it didn't do anything else, it got their heads down and their ears bleeding. By the time that was over, maybe (usually) someone better suited would show up. We had A-1s at Danang and if we had a TIC we frequently got some of those. They were great, particularly because they were always loaded for anti-personnel missions (supporting SAR) and they had a couple of everything in the inventory onboard...20mm, 7.62, nape, mk81 (250lb) high drags, CBU, 2.75' rockets, and the ever-reliable .38 cal pistol the pilot would shoot out of the cockpit in a final act of defiance when he ran out of everything else (which took a while with A-1s!!). Not only that, but their slow speed made them incredibly accurate compared to a jet. In the course of a week, we usually flew four or five days, spent one day as the temporary ALO at the 196th HQ, and had one day off. When we were at the Bde, I'd check in with the Bde S-2 (Intel) and S-3 (Operations) and then hop a chopper ride out to a firebase to talk with they guys in the field. They frequently knew a lot of little details that didn't make it up to the Division or Brigade level and we'd work out "deals"...sort of like trick plays we'd work on the bad guys. We knew they monitored our radios, so we worked out little codes for special things. For instance there was a little hill that one guy swore had a one or two man observation post on it, but it was hard to predict when the guy was out of his hole. We had a code that we set up that alerted me when the Platoon leader thought the observer was up. I then called in and said I was out of fuel and ammo and was going home. I then casually headed in the direction of Chu Lai until I flew over the hill, then dumped the nose and fired everything I had at the top of the hill. I never saw anything, but the platoon leader later said he never saw movement again, so we either got him or scared him off, I guess. Finally, yes, we did go trolling for contact occasionally. It wasn't necessary most of the time, but if things were really quiet and boring, you could go out to a few of the places you knew were heavily visited by bad guys, and fiddle with the pitch to get the props a little out of sync. The resulting sound really grated on your nerves, so the bad guys would sometimes get pissed and fire a few shot at you. They weren't much of a threat, but now you had a valid "FAC under fire" situation and that was always good for a few flights of fighters from I DASC. They were mostly fighter guys, so they imagined 37mm or 57mm AAA blasting away at you. In our case it was usually a pissed off VC with a rifle or AK-47, but I didn't have to tell DASC about that. I had fun, the fighter guys who were also bored had fun, and the VC that survived had their fields plowed up for the spring planting. Everybody wins (well, almost everybody...not the guy with the AK and a few of his close friends, unless they ran fast for a ways before the fighters got there). All this fun and games was ruined by a bunch of eggheads in the research labs who came up with SPAAGs and MANPADs. Mobile 23mm stuff ("ZPU-23-4" in my day) and SA-7s changed the rules a lot. No more slowly hanging around at 1500' watching for the bad guys. What a shame. It was really a great mission!

Well, I'm not into political statements now, and certainly wasn't in 1970. I respect the intent of the award too much to be offered for one because I stubbed my toe due to my own lazyness!

Damn, I'm running out. Like police work, war is mostly boring. Well...there was the "Purple Heart" story. The latter part of my tour at Chu Lai we lived down on the beach across from our aircraft We had two "SEA-huts" (16x32 wood floored hootches with four foot plywood side walls topped with another 4 feet of screen, and a corregated metal roof) with a concrete patio between them. Given the occasional rocket or morter attack, and our thin-skinned huts buried in the pine trees which made the warheads tend to airbust above out roofs with significant frag effects (one...a 122mm rocket...went off above our hootch and sent frags thru the roof, thru our beds, and thru the floor. Had we been there, we'd have been in a world of hurt!). We decided it would be prudent to extend a small protective slit trench near the hootches to and under the concrete patio. With a few days of effort we did so, and provided space for about ten people with a little concrete overhead (about twelve feet wide by three feet under the patio and four inches thick on top). It was hard work because the sand was not easy to dig in nor maintain is a firmly shaped entrance, so when we finished the trenching we were beat, and elected to clear the approached at another time. As you might suspect, that kept getting put off, and scattered around the area between the hootch doors and the entrance were several small stumps from 2-3 inch pine trees we had cut down. Sure enough, several weeks later we got rocketed again and we all run for the trench. I managed to kick one of those stumps with my foot and landed in the trench on my head with a very badly stubbed toe (well, five of them, actually!). After the attack was over, we all went back to bed, but the next morning I woke up with my foot all black and blue and swollen up to the point I couldn't get my boot on. I had to stop flying for a few days. One of the nearby Navy corpsmen looked at my foot and decided there were no broken bones, then wrapped it up and gave me a cane to hobble around with (it really hurt!!). He then started to collect information for some paperwork, and I discovered it was for a possible Purple Heart submission for being wounded during an enemy attack (he was just being helpful, since it would have to be submitted by my AF chain, not the Marine chain). Two of my fellow pilots who drove me over to the aid station heard the discussion and were dying in fits of laughter, because they knew the real story. I could just imagine explaining to someone how I was wounded in the war... "I stubbed my toe while running for my life because I was too lazy to finish building a hole to hide in". Needless to say, I politely accepted the paperwork from the very nice corpsman, then trashed it when I got back to the hootch. It took months to live that down, not to mention explaining to the Squadron guys in Danang why one of the Det's pilots was medically grounded, but no paperwork was filed with the Flight Surgeon's office. My one and only "war wound"...

In my experience, several cases of beer (at least) would change hands. The pressure suits are made up of multiple layers which perform various functions (hold air, retard fire, provide shape control, provide comfort against the skin, carry comm and pressure lines, etc, and can only be worked on by properly trained people, so they are faced with the task of removing the liner for disposal and any other appropriate cleanup. Not a pleasent job, but that's life. The PSD techs are highly skilled and very dedicated, and I never knew a bad one in my 20+ years of flying the airplane, nor have I ever heard one complain about this less attractive side of the job. I've been with them when they dealt with dirty suits, dragged my ass out of a burning aircraft on one occasion, and cut pilots out of the suit after fatal crashs. Not fun, but they do a great job.

I don't believe there's an official list (didn't used to be), but common sense should tell you to stay away from certain types of foods...spicy and gassy foods, especially. In some respect its an individual tolerance thing. Before flight you try to go low carb, high protein, moderate quantity...low carb usually means low bulk), and I was careful the day before a high flight to some extent also. Most of the problems I know of were ultimately traced back to one of three things: actual food poisening, eating something unusual that your system wasn't familier with, or serious stupidity. The problem was that sometimes when you're deployed to strange places, the first two become common and the third isn't all that unusual. However, if you get burned once, you start getting very careful about your eating habits! By the way, this subject leads to colorful stories, but it really doesn't happen all that often. The guys are usually pretty careful.

Yeh...mine was even worse. Not only did I have the worst case of diaper rash in history, but my neck and cheeks were pretty raw from being covered in vomit for hours. Like the SR case, I wasn't about to bag the mission...I was four hours from home and my rear was going to get eaten away anyway, so I flew out the track before returning. It was a mission opportunity we didn't get too often and I wasn't going to abort...I'd already crapped in my suit, quitting wasn't going to help any. Of course, I didn't realize the bends would get so bad...I adjusted the suit pressure (the pressure inside the full pressure suit is adjustable) to give me about two PSI above the cockpit pressure so I thought I'd be okay. The vomiting came a little later in the sequence. Not the kind of flight experience I'd want to repeat. They tossed the liner and the helmet. Probably more than $20,000 for that flight!!

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far, away, I was in a pressure suit, four hours from home, and was attacked be a virus. Threw up in my helmet, pooped in my suit, and got the bends bad. Aborted and few home with vomit sloshing around my face, spent the night in the hospital all blue from burst capilaries (but luckily no CNS problems). I can understand the guys plight! It isn't any fun!

Currently, all active Duty go to IFS...there have been some variations in the past with Guard and Reserve guys. The normal progression is OTS, Brooks, UPT base (or UPT base-Brooks...it varies), then TDY to IFS from your UPT base. If you already have your commission, it will be pretty much the same except no OTS. SOS is a ringer...no clue there. I'd say that would be up to the flesh peddlers at Randolph for an SOS class.

No, thank God. I recognise several Lockheed guys who were tech reps with us when I started flying, but I knew them when they were somewhat older (in the the 70s). But, its scary anyway.

I feel old. Its scary when you recognize people in the pictures!!