CIMOLI’S COPTER DIARIES

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.

January 27th, 2005 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.