View from Angels One

We changed internet providers... It took me a while to figure out how to log into my blog. Stupid geographically aware servers.

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For reasons known only to the military altitude is referred to as angels for each thousand feet and cherubs for each hundred feet. Flying at 500 feet would be cherubs 5. Angels One is one thousand feet. I guess if we just said it plainly it wouldn't be cool or something.

Cabin class in the UH-60

Getting a ride in a Blackhawk can be a lot of fun, but it can also be something of a shock to a newcomer. Being a military transport, our purpose is to get people and cargo from one place to another quickly and safely. Comfort on the other hand, is optional. In a perfect world everyone would bring themselves and one bag of a size that they don't mind putting on their lap for the duration of the flight. Sometimes people will travel with Tuff Bins or duffle bags and schedule those so we expect them and can make room for them. Most times however, they just show up to the helicopter with a full size ruck sack, a duffle bag and a "carry on" bag. Guess where they go? Yep, in the lap. There have been some seriously shoe horned passengers in our birds.

The next gotcha is that not all seats in the helicopter are created equal. Fully configured we have four forward facing seats in the back of the cargo compartment, four rear facing seats in the middle of the compartment and three front facing seats forward of them. For some reason people seem to want to get in the rear most right side front facing seat. They generally do this only once in the summer season when we have the cargo windows out for ventilation. Among the crews this is referred to as "the hurricane seat."

The hurricane seat

For reasons known only to Sikorsky, more wind blows into the helicopter on the right side than the left. Our pilots swear they're flying in trim, but whatever... the hurricane seat is pretty much like sitting outside in a 150 mph wind. If you've ever seen the films of Col. John Stapp riding the rocket sled with his face flapping in the wind you'll have a pretty good idea of what these guys look like. They don't usually fight to get in that seat again.

Model on a morale visit. The band member in the hurricane seat behind her moved to another seat the next leg.

Once in a while we get a break though, like last week when the band "Brokedown Cadillac" and several of the Hooters restaurant calender girls paid visits to several of the smaller FOBs in the area. The helicopter smelled nice for a change.

A view from angels one

Flying in the central Iraq region what we see most is irrigation, farming and cattle in the form of sheep. A little further south in the marshlands (bet you didn't know there's a large swamp here) water buffalo seem to be the main livestock, although camels are in evidence in the southern desert.

I see electric light over most of the country, provided by local generators in isolated areas, but by a decent grid in the more populated areas. Flying at night I've only noticed a couple of power outages - the most recent due to a lightning strike taking out a transformer. Pretty impressive when you're wearing night vision goggles, by the way. The local power authority seems to be able to get the lights back on in an hour or so on the average.

The roads are open and while military convoys are still in evidence, commercial and local traffic seems to be most prevalent. On religious holidays you see lots of people congregating around the local mosques.

The kids wave at us when we fly by.

There's quite a bit of building going on, although the signs are a little different than in the states. The brick factories seem to be going all the time, and I can see new houses being laid out in the outskirts of Bagdad.

We didn't provide security for the recent elections here - we supported the Iraqi police and Army in case they needed us. They didn't, and did a fine job on their own. Our MP unit here has been providing backup for the local Iraqi forces who have been running the show on their own.

The Iraqi soldiers here smile and wave at us as well.

Is Iraq going to become a democracy in the sense that Americans experience? I seriously doubt it, but I think the have the tools in place now to be able to deal with the different factions in the country with a minimum of violence. Whether they choose to continue to use these tools will be up to the Iraqi people.
I don't think we (the United States) are in Iraq for oil.
I don't thing we needed to prove Saddam had a chemical weapons program - he had already used them. We knew he had the capability.
I don't think he had the ability to cause us much more trouble than the likes of Khadafi of Libya. After all, when we know your address, you have to be careful how far you twist the dragon's tail.
But Saddam had demonstrated the will and ability to war on his neighbors twice. Eight years worth of the Iranian war and the 1991 invasion of Kuwait.
I suspect removing him from power is the price we had to pay for Arab support as we deal with the Taliban. (My opinion only - reflects no unofficial or official opinions of anyone else...)
Once we did that, we couldn't leave with the country's infrastructure destroyed, we had to stay and help put a system in place to make it possible for Iraq to stand on its own. I think we've succeeded in that, but it will be up to the Iraqis to finish it.

Emergency Leave

Julie L. (Rossi) Ryan

Julie L. (Rossi) Ryan went to her final rest into the loving arms of her Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ on this the 24th day of February. Her parents Carmine and Pasquale Rossi, brother Mario Rossi, and sisters Judy Mauro, Teresa Peris and Bertha Williams predeceased her.

Her loving husband Edward John Ryan, Jr., precious son and daughter-in-law Philip and Karen Ryan, sisters Mary O’Malley, Anita Ciacelli and brother-in-law Armand Ciacelli, brother Dominic Rossi and sister-in-law Anne Rossi survive her. She also leaves her loving godmother Helen Banko, special nieces and nephew Diane Peris, Sharon Jacobs, Carol and Tom Fuller, Godsons Christian Peris, Patrick Jacobs and Justin Groats. Her special cousins Aldo and Libra Ferraccoli and family also survive her. Julie leaves many longtime friends including Fr. Edward Hays, Lucy Lovertich, Ricky Bentley, Ruth Loecher, Joyce Wurth and Chuck Schoenberger.

Julie was born in Endicott February 22, 1934 and graduated from Vestal High School in 1952. She enlisted in the US Air Force during the Korean Conflict and qualified as an airborne navigation repairman at Keesler AFB, Mississippi. She then transferred to Chanute AFB, Illinois where she maintained and repaired airborne navigation systems on TB-25 bombers. In December 1954 Julie married fellow Air Force member Ed. Their son Philip was born a year later in the base hospital. The trio traveled together until 1974 when Phil enlisted in the US Navy and Ed retired from the Air Force. During the early 1970’s she was licensed in cosmetology at the operator, manager, and owner levels in three different States. However, teaching motivated her most and she worked with Walter Starr for several years at his academies in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia. During the 1980s and 1990s Julie was a leader in the Women’s Cursillo Movement in Kansas City, Kansas and Jackson, Mississippi.

***

The Red Cross notification arrived 0315 Bagdad time on Thursday the 18th, my company commander was waking me up by 0330. While I called home and tried to figure out what to do next, S1 was working on the emergency leave packet and the Company was adding a leg to the morning mission to get me to Tallil. By 0930 we were airborne with paperwork in hand. At the Tallil pax terminal, our sister company First Sergeant and one of our admin guys met me with some updated paperwork to make sure I would be able to catch the next Air Force C-130 to Kuwait. An hour later, I did. In Kuwait my travel arrangements were made and I was bussed to Kuwait International Airport for a KLM flight to Amsterdam, connecting to a Delta flight to Detroit and finally on to Binghamton, New York where I arrived at 1530 Friday. Crossing 8 timezones made Friday a 32 hour day. I don't recommend it.

I didn't expect Mom to still be with us when I got there, as the prognosis was hours, maybe a day. She was still with us, and while she spent most of her time semi conscious, she did recognize me. She stayed with us till around 7:30 pm the 24th. We didn't get to talk, but I did sit with her, along with my dad and wife.

She was diagnosed with kidney cancer eight years ago. After having a kidney removed and receiving radiation and chemotherapy she recovered, and moved with my dad to her hometown of Endicott, NY. She stayed active with family and church and enjoyed being back home. Last year after suffering from chronic back pain she was diagnosed with cancer again, this time type 4 bone cancer. After a successful back surgery to remove the tumor attached to her spine she again receive radiation treatments but elected to forgo the chemo. Her final illness was mercifully short, and she fought it till the very end.

Rest well, Mom. You're in my heart.

Maintenance

Warning: This post contains boring technical helicopter stuff. Lots of it...

A view in the tent. The helicopter in the background is the one we rigged.

Flying is a big part of being a crew chief and a lot of fun, but we also work on the helicopters. Here in Al Kut we have both a flight company and a maintenance company. The flight company takes care of much of the routine day to day repairs and inspections while more involved work generally goes to the maintenance guys. On occasion we also get involve is some of the more in depth stuff. Earlier this month I got to work with a couple other repairers on what's called a complete rig. This is the process where all of the flight controls are set up so they operate correctly and have the right amount of travel. It's not something that gets done frequently, only after major work has been done on the aircraft or after flight control components are replaced.

A helicopter has three basic controls - the cyclic, which tilts the main rotor disk in the direction you want to fly, a collective that controls how much of a bite into the air the main rotor has, and the pedals which control the tail rotor to keep the helicopter pointing in the direction you want it to point. These controls transmit the pilots wishes to the main and tail rotor through an impressive number of push-pull tubes, fancy hinges called bellcranks and cables. Because a Blackhawk is a fairly heavy helicopter that requires a lot of force to control it there are also hydraulic systems that provide the muscle to actually move everything.

When rigging the controls the first step is called a "dry rig." This is done with all power off and consists of setting all the various adjustments to a position that will allow you to adjust them in either direction as necessary. Starting from the front the pilot and copilot controls are pinned into reference positions set up by the factory. The connections to the top of the helicopter are adjusted and connected to the first set of hydraulic servos. This first set does much the same thing as power steering in a car - they make it easier to move the controls and reduce some of the feedback to the pilot. Like power steering if these servos fail or are turned off it makes flying the helicopter more work, but doesn't really interfere with flying. The output of these servos connect to the "mechanical mixing unit." This is a nifty little collection of levers and cams that the good people at Sikorsky put into the Blackhawk to make it easier to fly by taking a single input the pilot puts in and coordinating all of the controls to achive the desired result. Yeah, it's magic. The mixer is then connected to the "primary servos" which are the muscle I referred to earlier.

The hydraulic deck where most of the linkages we adjust are. The control rods come up through the deck near the top of the photo, back through the "power steering", into the mixer under the diagonal striped work platform to the primary servos at the bottom. The three gold things are hydraulic pumps, the white thing at lower left is one of the generators and the plumbing at the top right it the cabin heater ducting.

Once all of this is connected and adjusted to neutral settings the primary servos are hooked up to the rotor and hydraulic power is turned on. This is the start of the next part of the process, called the "wet rig." By using certain combinations of the alignment pins and measuring the angle of the rotor blades at different positions we make adjustments to get the right blade setting for a specific control input. This requires taking a lot of measurements and rotating the blades by hand to the correct position for each measurement. It took most of a day with three of us working on it to get this part done.

Adjusting the tension on the cables to the tail rotor

When the main rotor adjustments are completed all of the the controls and linkages up to that point are pinned in the proper test positions and the cables and linkages to the tail rotor are adjusted using the same techniques. Finally all of the adjustment points are safety wired or cotter pinned to make sure nothing changes over time. The entire process took us about three days, which is actually a little on the fast side since we had very few difficulties along the way. Depending on the particular helicopter this is not always the case.

Adjusting one of the push pull tubes on the tail rotor gearbox. The reflection on the tail rotor is just reflective tape for the camera we install to balance the tail rotor.

We then started on the track and balance of the rotor systems. The main and tail rotors are balanced just like the wheels on a car, but rather than using lead weights special washers are bolted on to the hub at certain locations. There is a test set that measure the vibrations at the rotors and computes how much weight needs to be added to each location. Once these are within limits the main rotor is "tracked," which means adjusted so the blades rotate in the same plane rather than flapping all over the place. For this we start with ground runs, then move on to test flights. In our case it took 4 test flights and adjustments to go from a rather bone rattling gallop to nice smooth flight at various airspeeds. OK, as smooth as helicopters get, anyways...

On Station

FOB Delta

It's been an eventful few weeks since the last update, so first of all I hope everyone had a nice Christmas and are looking forward to a happy and safe New Years. We had a relatively trouble free trip over, staying in Kuwait only long enough to recover from the trip over, go to the range to test fire all the weapons and take our in briefing.

The C-17 ride

So after three days we loaded onto a C-17 and flew into FOB Delta, in Al Kut, southeast of Bagdad on the Tigris River.

The birthplace of Abraham

We immediately got started on our environmental training and orientation flights. The environmental training is intended to be an exposure to dust conditions which can cause visibility problems when landing or taking off, but since this is the rainy season the dust at the training site was pretty meager. Since we normally train in the Arizona desert our company routinely operates in high blowing dust areas so we're in pretty good shape. Our local area orientation flights started as soon as we finished the environmental, and consist of flying along with the crews we're relieving to become familiar with our routes and the local procedures. Once these were completed we started flying regular missions, normally with one crew member from the old unit until we completely take over responsibility for the missions which will probably happen before you read this. We've been paying special attention to the way the outgoing unit does things since they've had a year to work the bugs out of their operation. We're planning on implementing much of what they've been doing in our procedures. Why reinvent the wheel?

Inside the CHU

FOB Delta is a relatively small FOB that is pretty well provisioned. The Army has gone with Containerized Housing Units (CHUs) to put people in, and since there are relatively few people here we're in one person CHU's. Kind of like a college dorm in a shipping container. Showers and facilities are in separate trailers nearby, and each "Pod" is surrounded by T- walls - concrete barriers designed to protect against shrapnel from rocket and mortar attacks. Right outside the door is a concrete and sandbag bunker should the need arise. The locals seem to like lobbing in an occasional rocket, although nothing has come close to anything valuable. Since a rocket or mortar draws a forceful response within minutes (sometime seconds) they're more interested in lighting the fuse and getting away than they are in accuracy.

CHUs from the outside - Note the bunkers

The CHU's have 220v power and air conditioning and are almost embarrassingly comfortable. Other facilities include a tiny PX and some fast food places, barber shop, internet cafe, gym and chow hall and a free laundry service, nothing further than about 3/4 of a mile away. There is an infrequently running bus around the FOB, but I generally walk anywhere I need to go. Some people have bought bicycles for a faster trip.

Our work area is about half a mile away and consists of trailers with their own bunkers and T-walls and huge "clam shell" tents used as aircraft hangers. There are a couple of Sadaam era bunkers here as well.

The office

The work day varies with mission requirements. Right now I'm assigned to the reserve mission which puts my shift from 3:00 am to 3:00 pm. We cover the early flights and act as an alert crew for any short notice morning missions. I'll be on this schedule likely for a couple weeks and then rotate on to days. My normal day consists of getting up at 2:00 to shower, shave, etc, walk down to the flight line and check the schedule to see which crew I'll be flying with and what aircraft is assigned. I'll check the logbook to make sure all of the inspections are in order and to see what outstanding problems exist, then go out and prep the helicopter - removing tie downs and covers, preflighting and getting my gear set up.

The line

By this time the gunner has brought the weapons out so we mount those and stow all the gear that gets signed out before each flight. I'll hang around with the pilots to run up the APU (auxiliary power generator) and we'll make sure the proper codes are loaded in the radios, as well as doing the preflight and control checks up to the point where we start engines. At that point the aircraft is "cocked" and we go into the operations center for our mission brief. Normally we have two aircraft assigned per mission. Once the mission brief is complete we have a crew brief, then generally go to breakfast. We'll usually man the helicopter a half hour before scheduled launch so we have plenty of time in case there are any last minute delays. It's always easier to wait for your time hack than it is to try to catch up. A typical mission will have us fly a ring route to several different FOBs acting as kind of an airborne bus route. We'll pick up passengers and cargo that needs to move around southern Iraq and usually stop for lunch at one of the locations, not to mention two to three refueling stops. These flights usually last somewhere between 3 and 5 hours.

Typical flight conditions - lots of smoke and haze

Once we're back we refuel and I'll do the daily inspection while the gunner returns the weapons and gear and the pilots debrief. If there are no new issues on the helicopter it usually takes about two hours to complete the inspections and logbook entries so the aircraft is ready to fly the next day. A daily inspection is good for 14 days if the aircraft doesn't fly, so we always make sure to do a daily after the last flight of the day. That way we find any problems that may come up, and the helicopter is ready to go for the next day's flight. At that point it's usually the end of the work day so it's time to go eat dinner and hit the internet cafe or PX for a bit. On days that I'm not scheduled to fly I'll do maintenance. We have Delta Company which is the maintenance company for the battalion located here, but their job is to handle major maintenance and phase inspections, much of the normal work the crew chiefs handle ourselves.

Soon...

We're close to finishing up at the mobilization station now. In November we completed our Mission Readiness Evaluation which involved a battalion air assault mission, more scenario training and briefings, a personnel recovery exercise and more gunnery (for those who had not yet completed all of the required exercises). The air assault mission was at night using night vision goggles where we put 10 helicopters into a relatively small LZ and inserted 90 troops in a simulated hostile area. This requires some coordination between flight companies to make sure the timing is right, but mostly the emphasis is on safety. Of the 90 troops most had never done an air assault, and many had never flown in a helicopter before. We spent some time with them before the flight to make sure they were familiar with what they needed to know and do, and mostly telling them to take their time. The exercise went flawlessly, even though the evaluators simulated a downed aircraft on the landing zone. This involved setting up security using some of the ground troops and sending our downed aircraft recovery team in who rigged the Blackhawk so it could be airlifted out by a CH-47 Chinook.



We didn't actually airlift it - once every thing was rigged and verified correct it was unrigged and flown back under its own power. Meanwhile we went in and recovered the troops we inserted, again all under NVG's and with no incidents. A good time was had by all. An aside to this mission was learning that a skunk has a three Blackhawk reaction time. As we were lining up to start the air assault we noticed a rather startled skunk trying to get out from under our rotor wash. As we passed over him the Chalk 2 (the second ship in line) saw him and applied a little power to mess with him a little. This caused the now annoyed skunk to do a face plant as he was blown over. Skunks being what they are this guy had enough and sprayed Chalk 3. Everyone (except Chalk 3) was pretty amused by this. We've since noticed a skunk hanging around the barracks, so we've decided it's the same one stalking the pilot of Chalk 2.


In the Personnel Recovery exercise each crew started in a helicopter out in the field and were given a scenario where they had been forced down and needed to move cross country to a pick up point. This exercise had us operating our survival radios, navigating, moving cross country in rough terrain occasionally encountering bad guys. This was quite frankly one of the best training exercises I've ever been in - the scenario was realistic and very little was simulated - we were even able to communicate with the real search and rescue people who monitor some of the high tech equipment we have. This is unusual since it involves using the real assets we would be dealing with in the middle east. While is was some what physical it managed to cover everything from combat operations to land navigation, communications, reacting to IED's, etc. It was also a nice workout.


Finally there were additional gunnery exercises for the people who had not yet qualified in all the required areas. Normally this is a timing issue more than anything else - while day firing can be done while in the training progression, you have to be fully qualified with NVG's before you can shoot with them, so we still had a couple of crew chiefs and gunners that needed the night portion.
The other big training push right now is "environmental" training, meaning desert operations and particularly dust landings and take offs. Our company was largely signed off on these already since we normally train in the Sunoran Desert. Some of the newer crewmwmbers in the company as well as the other two flight companies have been sending crews to New Mexico to get some practice in on the techniques.
With Thanksgiving we were allowed a short break to travel home and spend the weekend with family. A four day weekend followed that was all too short. It was great to spend some time with Her Accuracy. I also managed to get over to Quantum and get a flight in the R-22. It had been three months since I'd flown as a pilot so it was nice to see that while I was a little rusty, I hadn't forgotten anything. I plan to get flying in at every opportunity, the next of which will probably be during my R&R break sometime next year.



We flew back to Ft Sill that Sunday, and on arrival eight of us hopped in a van for the drive down to Ft Hood in Texas to attend a unit armorers school. This was a week long course covering maintenance and repair of small arms for the unit level. The course was pleasant and informative, and I was very impressed with Ft Hood. That's a proud installation and it shows, especially after all the exposure to training commands I've had lately.
We arrived back at Ft Sill after the course with very little left to do - some final work on the aircraft, a little currency flying, and final packing is all we have left to do.