AH-1G s/n ukn
3/5th Cav. D Troop
Pilots: not recorded
Call sign; the Crusaders
March, 1970
Vinh Long Army AF
APO 96352 SF

AO: The Cambodian border area near Muc Hoa, RVN.

    The 3/5th Cav's Light Fire Team were flying a night mission out of Muc Hoa near the Cambodian border. AC-47 Goonie Birds were being used to drop flares on coordinates of reported possible enemy movement venturing out their Cambodian sanctuaries. Observers on board the Command and Control Huey, directed the Cobra fire team to go after selected targets. After expending on the first sortie the fire team landed at Muc Hoa to rearm and refuel.

    The Vietnamese farmers in the area were in the process of burning off their paddy fields prior to flooding and replanting. Much the same way that farmers in middle Georgia burn their wheat and hay fields in the fall. A light wind caused this dense cloud of smoke to drift across the Muc Hoa airstrip.

    After the team had topped off with ammo and fuel the Cobras lifted off to return to their A.O. The Lead was off first and the Trail followed keeping the Lead's red rotating beacon in sight as he lifted off. The Fire Team used a total instrument climb out hoping to break out in the clear at about 3000 feet.

    The Trail Cobra was naturally afraid that he would overtake the Lead aircraft and as a result the pilot had been unconsciously backing off. The smoke and the rotating beacon on the lead aircraft always looking closer than it really was.

    The Trail pilot had lost all altitude and airspeed references. He told me later that he was at 2500 feet and 80 kts IAS (indicated airspeed) when his rate of climb indicator went minus 10. He tried everything to pull enough pitch to stop loosing altitude and nothing worked.. The Cobra hit the dried rice paddy so hard that pilot was momentarily stunned. The landing skids spread straight out. The rotor blade flexed to an extreme droop, dug into the paddy and snatched out the rotor head and transmission. The transmission lay beside the aircraft with the rotor-head resting across the front cockpit.

    When the pilot came to he was able to make out the rotor head where the front seat had been. His first thought was, I've killed my gunner". He pulled the emergency pins on his canopy and he climbed out. However, he did think enough to set up the crash beacon on top of the Cobra. Then he walked around the aircraft, he was almost hesitant to check the front seat. With the little flashlight that he had, he forced himself to move toward the front cockpit. He could see a hand sticking out from under the rotor head. It was moving. The pilot jumped to the side of the front seat and called out "are you alive Mac?" (I don't know how Mac would have answered if he'd been dead) He received a feeble "yes, but I'm really hurt".

    The pilot of the Lead Cobra had missed the Trail after he had broke out of the smoke cloud, and then had circled around to see the crash beacon flashing though the haze. When the smoke cleared for a moment, the Lead was able to land off to the rear of the downed ship.

    The crew from the Lead aircraft and the Trail pilot checked to see that none of the gunner's body parts were hanging out someplace that could get pinched off. They found that he was hunched over almost with his head between his legs. Then the three pilots rolled the rotor-head off the frontseat.

    There was some good luck involved, but, also following procedure, the gunner's gunsight had been stowed out of the way during the takeoff. When the aircraft impacted with Mother Earth, the gunner's upper body must have been forced over somehow to give him his only chance to have survive the rotor head crashing into his cockpit.

    The reason for the Cobra's crash was probably due to the pilots fear of collision he had held back to the point that he no longer had any forward air speed.., which was caused by lack of proper IFR training. The US Army was weak on that, however many of our chopper pilots learned it on their own.

    As the Trail pilot, he had set up a phenomena known as "settling on a column of air". It is produced by the rotor blades when the helicopter has no forward movement and out the ground effect situation, meaning that a helicopter can hover in still air for an unlimited time as long as the aircraft is below the altitude at which the rotor down wash is no longer efective upon either the ground or a heli-pad. There is no lift in a column of air, so the Cobra had settled in from 2500 feet, not exactly a free fall, but still bad enough.
 

    A new found friend on the Internet and former UH-1H "Longknives" crew chief with D troop 3/5th Air Cav, Mike McGuire writes;

    Tony, Now I am going to give you a little more to add on to your chapter about the Cobra that flew or fell out of the sky. It was due to vertigo on the pilots part. That happened in the Three Sisters Mountain Area down by the tip of the Vietnam-Cambodian boarder. I was flying crewchief with the CO who was flying the Command and Control ship that night.

    We landed next to the downed Cobra as soon as we found a hole in the smoke. The CO, man!, he was UPSET. This was because "D" troop, 3/5th Air Cav, had been having `too' many pilot error accidents in the last few months. It just looked like another bad day for the Crusaders. Not too long before, two of our Cobras had gotten together at the rearm and refuel point at the base camp there for the ARVNS. (Blade strikes)

    The Lead Cobra of the Fire Team had landed was to the rear and left of the crashed bird. My CnC ship had landed to the right behind Trail Cobra. It was all flat, dry rice paddy and the only problem with landing, was being able to see the ground.

    The CO arranged Med-evac for the Crusader front-seat (gunner/pilot), then logged the details of the accident. With this taken care of, we all got back in the CnC Slick. The CO as the AC pilot made our lift off.

    The Lead Cobra and crew remained with the crashed bird waiting for the "Hook".

    Crew chief McGuire remarked, "I saw another Cobra land like that and when I saw this one, I was surprised that the fuel cells hadn't ruptured and it not been on fire. [The other Cobra I saw that had made a landing like this, was the one that flew into `VC Island' in the river outside of Dong Tam. It was a night action against a mortar attack on the base. It had been an attempt in counter battery fire using a Cobra gun ship. They believed that the pilot unknowingly come to a hover while trying to spot mortar tube flashes. So it was almost the same story.

    I was riding in the first Slick on the scene that night. When we got there it was still burning. It had landed that way, the pilot had lost all sense of movement and had fell out of a high hover.

    (Probable reason for this Cobra's fuel tanks NOT rupturing The fuel cells were full as they had just topped them off Fuel cells that are half full are the dangerous ones because the fuel has room to slosh it's weight back and forth.)

[I had given up on bonding with any newbies, because some door gunners didn't last very long. The stress was already getting to me. I was smart enough to know that it was a result of getting too close to men that I worked with and then losing them. My life with people came down to using nick names. I didn't want to KNOW about them.]

    As a result of this kind of relationship, I got no backup support from my gunner when I complained about the CO's heading.

    Relating to your story Tony, you were right, the visiblity sucked. By now the smoke had mixed with the morning fog, all of which was below us. No visable landmarks at all.

    We continued to fly the CO's heading. After a certain amount of time, I knew that we should have hit the river by now and that hadn't happened. I complained once again, but my alarm fell on a deaf ego and definately on deaf ears.

    A little later, I knew we were in trouble when I compared the fuel quantity with time flown. I could see that we had used more fuel than it should have taken to get back to Vinh Long. I got out of the door gunner's position and into the cargo area and made sure everthing was strapped down, then over to my gunner and told him to get ready to land in the bush. I went back to my gun seat and tried looking over the side to see where we were, when all of a sudden we broke out of enough cloud cover so I could see the ground. The big problem was all I saw was water with massive waves, this was not the River.

    I asked the CO if he had ever lived by the Ocean as I had in California. Because if he haden't, then this was his chance as now he could look down and see what waves looked like about a mile out in the Pacific. (That was the Gulf of Siam down there.)

    The next thing I know we are talking to Can Tho and we are finally useing our "Ident" (we did not have during my 68 tour) My pilot began making a very drastic course change. We just made a small air strip at the coast where we landed right at the POL. I do not remember ever haveing to put that much fuel into the #405 Huey before. (Although I had one time in Huey #938, after a long drawn out a fire fight we had been in.)

    It looked as though our safety conscious CO had almost contributed to another "D troop pilot error" accident. He would have gotten us all, because we had no raft or life vests.