Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

Doing this basic maneuver in the OH-6, I learned something right away about this ship—left pedal pressure. On the OH-6, there is so much torque in the tail rotor that the left pedal had built-in pressure applied to it. You could actually feel that pressure in your feet.

In the Huey I was used to the foot pedals being somewhat unresponsive, almost mushy. If you took your feet off the pedals, there was no telling which pedal might gain movement over the other. In the OH-6, you knew what would happen. When you took your feet off the pedals, the left pedal jumped right back at you, invariably causing the nose to spin to the right. To turn the Loach left, I pushed the left pedal; to turn right, all I had to do was let off the left pedal.

After I got used to the ground handling characteristics, Hayes told me to take the OH-6 up in the pattern where I could get a feel for the bird’s general control touch and how the ship flew and responded. By that time, I was beginning to fall in love with that machine. I tried not to display all the excitement I was feeling to Hayes. He just sat there in the left seat, very relaxed, watching my moves.

Hayes was known in the troop as one of those guys with absolutely great PT (pilot technique). The old heads in the platoon had their own methods of rating their pilots. They would say, “He’s a good stick man,” or, “He’s a good stick and rudder guy,” or possibly, worse, “He’s mechanical… he’s behind the aircraft.” But Hayes had overall pilot finesse that was rivaled by very few other flyers in the unit. Though he looked like a fullback in the pros, he flew a Loach the way Mikhail Baryshnikov danced. I felt fortunate that he was the guy teaching me to fly the OH-6.

I notified the tower, then took off and climbed straight out the runway heading to about eight hundred feet, then turned right into the cross-wind, gaining altitude as I headed for fifteen hundred feet. Hayes would occasionally say something to me about a system or procedure, but he was generally quiet, carefully watching how I was reacting to the helicopter.

A good instructor pilot, such as Hayes, usually had his hands on the controls, lightly following the collective and cyclic sticks as the student flew the airplane. The smart transitioning pilot, which I hoped I was, always tried to watch the IP’s left hand on the collective. With just a quick flick of his wrist, Hayes could suddenly twist off the throttle and shut down engine power, throwing me into an autorotation mode. I was then faced with getting the aircraft to a safe landing on the ground without the help of engine power.

If you were cruising along at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, you’d have time to execute a standard autorotation procedure. But if you were at ninety knots and only twenty to thirty feet off the ground, you had to initiate a low-level, high-speed autorotation procedure designed to give you some more altitude before heading back down for a powerless landing. Either way, fast pilot reaction was necessary to get to the ground in one piece. Down collective, immediately, took the pitch out of the main rotor blades and set up air resistance against the flattened blades to keep you from falling out of the sky like a rock. At the same time, you pulled the cyclic stick back into your gut. This action tilted back the rotor head, keeping the bird’s nose up when what it really wanted to do was drop down to the ground.

Hayes warned me, however, about an imprudent move of the cyclic when in a low-level, high-speed situation. Such a movement held the potential of abnormally flexing the OH-6’s main rotor blades and cutting off the tail boom of the helicopter.

The more I flew the Loach, and the more Hayes tested me, the more I fell in love with the OH-6. It handled beautifully. It was lively, responsive, and as light to the touch and maneuverable as any hot sports car. I logged 12.6 hours transitioning into the OH-6, most of that time with Hayes in the left seat, the rest with me alone in the ship.

Before Hayes signed off on my check ride slip, fully qualifying me in the OH-6, he took me on one more ride—down to the Saigon River to shoot the Loach minigun. Since our scout ships were ordinarily not armed with miniguns, Hayes had had an XM27E1 system especially mounted on one of the OH-6s just for transitioning pilots. He wanted me to fire the minigun to get a feel for aiming and to see what it was like to pull the trigger to the first indent, letting go with two thousand rounds per minute, then to the second indent, letting four thousand rounds a minute blaze into the target.

The armament system consisted of several components but was basically a 7.62mm, six-barreled machine-gun assembly, an electric gun drive assembly and ammunition feed and eject mechanisms, and a reflex sight. The sight, I learned, was never used or even carried. It wasn’t too accurate and, worse than that, was totally in the way of the pilot in the cockpit.

Flying out and back from the firing site gave me a chance to talk to Hayes about my feeling that the scout ships should be armed with miniguns. I still felt strongly that aeroscouts should have the ability to shoot back at an enemy.

Hayes didn’t agree. He, like John Herchert, Jim Morrison, and Bill Jones, felt that having guns routinely mounted on OH-6s could get scouts into trouble. It could cause them to think so much about shooting that they’d forget that their real mission was scouting.

I finished transitioning with Hayes on 3 April, and for the next couple of days went back to flying copilot-observer with Bill Jones. He was a master at spotting anything that contrasted with the natural environment. He might catch a slightly different color in the vegetation, maybe the glint of something shiny. Or possibly a movement would grab his attention, or an angular shape that appeared out of place in an otherwise shapeless jungle.

Bill continued to give me tips. He advised me to focus my eyes farther away from the ship, which would slow down the movement of the terrain and give me the chance to see individual objects instead of just a sickening blur. He told me, also, to “penetrate” my vision as the ship came in low and slow, to look through the top layer of jungle and concentrate on seeing right down to the ground.

One day Jones swooped down extra low. “Did you see those VC down there?” he asked me over the intercom.

All I saw were treetops. He brought the ship around again, decelerated, and told me to look down. Focusing my eyes past the tops of the trees, I looked through the foliage and there they were! Five angry-looking, brown VC faces staring up at us from the ground. Maybe I was beginning to get the hang of this.

In addition to being able to spot things on the ground, the scout pilot had to know how to coordinate with his Cobra orbiting above him. Being down on the deck most of the time, there were limits to what a scout could do. Flying the aircraft and having his eyes almost constantly focused on the ground, a scout seldom had time to glance at his instrument panel, let alone look at maps or talk on the radio. Therefore, his Cobra crew did all that for him. The gunship orbited a good distance above, watching every move the scout made. The copilot-gunner in the Cobra read the map, marked coordinates, and transmitted radio messages. He also aimed and fired the turret ordnance when the scout dropped smoke and called for a strike on a ground target. The pilot, the back-seater in this tandem crew AH-1 aircraft, flew the aircraft, always circling in the opposite direction of the OH-6, so that the Loach was always inside the gunship. The pilot kept a constant eye on the scout, so he’d know immediately if his little brother was getting into any trouble.

This was the hunter-killer team concept. The teamwork between these two elements grew to the point where the Cobra and scout actually anticipated each other’s actions. Just a voice inflection over the radio could tell exactly what was happening, or about to happen.