Sea Stories - Helicopter Operations

[Gunboat1]

Sea Stories: Helicopter Operations

 

Everyone is familiar with the concept of US Navy carrier aviation, if for no other reason than the 1986 blockbuster movie Top Gun. Another, lesser-known cinematic masterpiece illustrating the technical complexity and risks attendant to carrier aviation is the 1954 film The Bridges at Toko Ri, starring William Holden and Mickey Rooney. I highly recommend watching this movie when you can. It is excellent.

There is another, mostly unsung but very important facet of naval aviation: the small combatant helicopter detachment. Every cruiser, destroyer and frigate in the US Navy has the capability to embark one or two helicopters, usually MH-60 Seahawk aircraft. This flexible, capable helo offers tremendous advantages in ocean surveillance, and is the weapon of choice when hunting a submarine, as it allows the ship to remain far from that potent adversary while using the helo to help locate the sub, and then to drop homing torpedoes on it for the kill. The embarked helo also provides some useful transportation and logistic support capability.

Getting a fast-moving jet onto the deck of an aircraft carrier, in all weather and at night is obviously a very demanding task. When you meet a carrier pilot wearing his “wings of gold”, be sure to extend him the proper degree of respect for his skill and not inconsiderable store of personal courage. But consider the fact that a carrier is a huge, relatively stable ship which rarely rolls, pitches or yaws severely. A frigate or destroyer is another matter entirely, as these relatively small, skinny fast ships do all of the above, pretty much all of the time, and in bad weather, to an extreme degree. And the flight deck of a surface combatant is a very small piece of real estate upon which to land, while avoiding crashing your rotor disk into any part of the ship.

So how do helo pilots manage to launch and recover from small combatants? Launching isn't the hard part, as the helicopter and the ship are initially moving together; the helo pilot picks the moment, pulls rotor pitch to create lift, and takes off, immediately establishing his own stable flight motion. But landing is a different matter. First, the pilot has to FIND his ship, a small moving speck in an enormous ocean. He then lines up behind the ship, on an angle of approach which the deck is designed for, at the proper altitude. He matches the ship's course and speed, which have been selected to minimize the motion of the ship (and therefore the flight deck.) The ship's flight deck has a number of lights of various colors which help the pilot to see the deck, and to visually recognize its motion, its outlines and specifically where he needs to set his bird down to prevent flying his rotors into the ship's structure. The pilot is also in radio communication with the Helicopter Control Officer aboard the ship. This officer directs the ship's crew and equipment in supporting the launch and recovery of the aircraft. He adjusts the lighting, directs the deck crew and coordinates all aspects of the landing from the ship's perspective. (I was the HCO for my Guided Missile Frigate. When doing this, I sat in a small booth on the back side of the helo hangar, overlooking the flight deck. When the helo hovered to land, his rotor tips were spinning about ten feet right in front of my face. Needless to say, I was always hopeful that the pilot was on his game that day, as a slight miscalculation of too-far-forward was likely to kill us both.)

When all is ready, the pilot moves into a stable hover above the center of the flight deck, and lowers a metal fitting on the end of a wire cable. A deck crewman has to stand under the hovering helo to first contact the wire with an electrically-grounded probe on a fiberglass pole, as the spinning rotors generate an electrical static charge which can easily kill a man if it is not first discharged to ground. You don't simply reach up and grab the wire, if you want to live. The wire is grounded, and the fitting is then inserted into a metal device called the Recovery Assist, Securing and Traversing (RAST) system, more commonly known to sailors as the “Bear Trap.” This runs along a track in the deck, and can be moved from flight deck center to inside the helo hangar.

The helo is now tethered to the ship, but still hovering in flight. And when the pilot judges that the ship is momentarily as stable as it is going to be, he indicates readiness and the ship winches him down to the deck using a powered winch hauling in on the cable. When his wheels are on deck, the jaws of the "Bear Trap" close, locking the cable in place and firmly fastening the bird to the ship (hence the name “Bear Trap.”) And presto, the helo has landed. Once the rotors and tail pylon have been folded to reduce the size of the aircraft for storage, the RAST tows the helo into the hangar and the hangar door is closed.

Imagine doing this at night, in rainy weather and high seas. Tip of the hat to the helo aviators. “Wings of Gold” indeed.

Another typical evolution ships conduct is Helo In-flight Refueling (HIFR), which greatly extends the flight time of the helo. Rather than landing to refuel, the helo hovers over the deck and a refueling hose is connected to his fuel port (after suitable electrical grounding per the above.) He then hovers just off the ship's quarter, but above the water so that if he crashes, he doesn't crash onto the flight deck while pumping high-pressure jet fuel and causing a massive fire aboard the ship. And jet fuel is pumped into his fuel tanks at high pressure and speed as he matches the ship's course and speed through the water in a stable hover. When he is full, he ejects the probe and proceeds on whatever mission he was pursuing before refueling.

I once flew off and back onto my ship with a naval aviator who had played a small part in a historic cold-war drama. This was 1988, and he was nearing the end of a long US Navy Reserve career, still flying the obsolescent LAMPS Mark I Sea Sprite aircraft. But on October 27^th, 1962, he had been flying above a Soviet Foxtrot-class diesel attack submarine, the B-59, at the height of the tensest moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The B-59 and several other Soviet diesel subs (each carrying one T-5 nuclear-tipped torpedo) were approaching the US Navy's ships which were blockading Cuba as a result of the detection of Soviet nuclear missiles which had been stationed there. The US Navy wanted to give these submarines the clear message that they were considered potentially hostile and that steps would be taken to defend against them if they did not surface and withdraw. As there was no other way to communicate with a submerged Russian submarine, the Secretary of Defense authorized the Navy to drop “Practice Depth Charges,” grenade-sized explosives which were designed to simulate the real, lethal thing in training. The explosions were intended to tell the submerged submarines that it was time to go “anywhere but here. “

My pilot hovered his helicopter above the B-59, and attempted to drop a PDC from the external launcher, onto the submerged sub. Nothing happened, as the PDC hung up in the launcher, as they sometimes did. So our hero, thinking fast, passed control of the bird to his copilot, opened the door of the aircraft, leaned out over the Caribbean Sea and kicked the launcher several times until the PDC dropped free and sank, doing its thing at the proper depth. BOOM. Splash.

Years later, it was determined that the Captain of the B-59 had believed that he was under genuine depth charge attack, and he had been out of communication with Moscow for several days. He gave orders and intended to LAUNCH HIS NUCLEAR-TIPPED TORPEDO at the Navy ships. This was only prevented by the veto of an embarked senior officer aboard the boat. The Cuban Missile Crisis might have had a much different ending, but for the good judgment and restraint of one Soviet naval officer.

[aomagrat]

In 1988 my barracks roommate was a rescue swimmer with a helicopter squadron.  His helicopter went out one night on a mission and was never seen again.  Only a little floating wreckage was found.  No bodies were recovered.  AW2 John Taylor along with his crew members are on eternal search and rescue.

[tadbart]

Godspeed to your roommate, @aomagrat . "There is no greater love..."

The videos of helicopters landing in rough seas are INTENSE.

[Mrs.Cicero]

WOW! One of my uncles was on one of the aircraft carriers involved... I'll have to ask which one because I don't remember the name...