Chief Warrant Officer Gordon Cimoli served 10 months in Iraq fly­ing a Black Hawk heli­copter. And, as you can imag­ine, he has stack of sto­ries that illus­trate the incred­i­ble strain that these pilots undergo. Here are a cou­ple of excerpts from his diaries…

We were descended for land­ing and we found that we couldn’t see any­thing at all. We could not see where the ground ended and the sky began. Fred slowed down and started a descent but we found that we were not really descend­ing as we intended to. Instead we lin­gered at 100 to 120 feet at almost zero for­ward air­speed. We finally made our descent to the ground and at about 25 feet we had a dust cloud sur­round­ing the air­craft. Remember, this is all under NVG’s [night vision gog­gles] with zero illu­mi­na­tion from the moon. We basi­cally landed with no visual ref­er­ence to the ground below us. It was cer­tainly scary but what we have come to expect
This type of fly­ing goes against all we were taught through­out our fly­ing career-​​when you can’t see the ground and/​or the hori­zon, you are fly­ing under IMC (instru­ment mete­o­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tions), but instead, we fly just as we are VMC (visual mete­o­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tions) even though we can­not see the ground or any­thing in front of us. It is def­i­nitely chal­leng­ing and at the end of every flight, Fred and I look at each other and ask, why are we doing this?
***
Shawn came in to the tent at 12:30am and told me about a Chinook crew that just went inad­ver­tent IMC (flew into the clouds on acci­dent). They recov­ered here to Udairi with no prob­lem. As it turned out, 2 more air­craft when into the clouds also. These were Alpha com­pany birds. One air­craft came back and the other air­craft did not. No one has had radio con­tact with this air­craft since they entered the clouds. Hope they come back.
I was talk­ing to Fred about it and it would be very easy to fly right into a cloud with­out real­iz­ing it at night. When we fly NVG flights, it is nearly impos­si­ble to see the ground and even more dif­fi­cult to see what is com­ing up in front of you. I can fore­see this hap­pen­ing to more crews if the weather were worse. The only thing we have going for us is that the weather is typ­i­cally not cloudy like it is in Germany. However, today, we had so much rain that it is now evap­o­rat­ing and form­ing low clouds.
While I was writ­ing a let­ter to Stef, the com­man­der walked into the tent to wake up the 1SG Not a good sign Sam just came in and stood next to me. He did not look good. I could tell that the worst had hap­pened and asked him, “Are they not com­ing back?” He said no. They found the air­craft not far from here. Sam walked back out with the Commander and the 1SG. More infor­ma­tion to fol­low. About an hour later, [the Commander] offi­cially told us the facts as they knew them at the time: 2 CH-47’s went IIMC, they recov­ered. 2 UH-60’s went IIMC and only one recov­ered. CPT Gibbons and 1SG Webb left in a Humvee and came upon the burn­ing wreck­age. There were no survivors.

It’s not clear, yet, why the Marines’ CH-​​53E Super Stallion heli­copter crashed near the bor­der of Jordan and Iraq (although weather is a prime sus­pect). But this New York Times arti­cle describes just how dan­ger­ous fly­ing one of the copters over Iraq can be.

[After three U.S. heli­copter were shot down by insur­gents in November, 2003], American com­man­ders ordered pilots to fly eva­sively at all times. American heli­copters rou­tinely fly at tree-​​top level, bob­bing and weav­ing on their way to their des­ti­na­tion. Like the Super Stallion that went down Wednesday, Army and Marine heli­copters often fly at night, when the threat of attack is dimin­ished. Helicopter pilots say that they are still rou­tinely shot at from the ground but that the tac­tics have largely pre­vented the insur­gents from hit­ting them.
Because the heli­copters fly so low, one of the prin­ci­pal dan­gers is elec­tri­cal and tele­phone wires, which the chop­pers often leap over in flight.
The CH-​​53E Super Stallion involved in the crash is the largest and heav­i­est heli­copter used by the American mil­i­tary.
“Look at its sheer size — it’s huge,” said Richard Aboulafia, a mil­i­tary indus­try ana­lyst at the Teal Group, a north­ern Virginia aero­space and con­sult­ing firm. “It’s a mon­ster, and with size comes the fact that it is not very maneu­ver­able.“
Weather, too, presents spe­cial prob­lems.
“Helicopters are fairly frag­ile pieces of equip­ment,” said Ivan Oelrich, direc­tor of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington non­profit group. “It’s rough for them to oper­ate in a dusty, desert envi­ron­ment where the dust can get into the machin­ery. And they are vul­ner­a­ble to ground fire because they fly at slow speeds, close to the ground…“
Before Wednesday’s crash, the CH-​​53E Super Stallion had a strong safety record, some­thing ana­lysts said was due to the matu­rity of its design and the reli­a­bil­ity of its equip­ment.
The heli­copter first came into ser­vice in 1981, although it is based on a design that dates to the Vietnam War. Produced by the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, the heli­copter was bought almost exclu­sively by the Marine Corps. Production ended about five years ago.

A three-​​engine craft, the heli­copter is designed to oper­ate in bad weather, day and night. It can lift more, carry it far­ther and fly faster than other heli­copters in the Pentagon’s fleet. Equipped with night vision abil­ity, it is designed to oper­ate in harsh ter­rain.
“This is a craft that can oper­ate day or night, in all types of weather,” said John Milliman, a spokesman for the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Md. “It is a very big, very rugged heli­copter than can carry a very heavy load.“
Still, for all its bulk, the craft remains vul­ner­a­ble. If forced to fly eva­sively in bad weather, a pilot could become dis­ori­ented.
Some American offi­cials have expressed worry that the harsh con­di­tions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fre­quency with which the heli­copters are deployed, could have ren­dered them vul­ner­a­ble.
At an October 2003 hear­ing of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Joel R. Hefley, Republican of Colorado, the chair­man, said the typ­i­cal Super Stallion return­ing from ser­vice in Afghanistan and Iraq was found to have 150 pounds of sand spread through­out its inte­rior.
Sand is thought to be one of the worst ene­mies of the heli­copter in Iraq, wear­ing down rotors and seep­ing into engines and elec­tron­ics. It can blind pilots, espe­cially on land­ing, when the heli­copters kick up huge clouds of dust. It mixes with lubri­cants and turns them into sticky masses of gum.
“The con­di­tions were harsh,” Mr. Hefley said. “The heat, the sand, the oper­a­tional tempo together resulted in our troops tak­ing a beat­ing.”

THERE’S MORE: A Kiowa scout copter has just crashed in Baghdad, the AP is reporting.