Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

We flew some interesting sorties to kick off with. There was one we flew with German as my wingman in a two-ship where we were delivering multiple HICHS (Helicopter Internal Cargo Handling System) loads. Basically, the cabin floor is fitted with rollers and all the loads are secured to special pallets, so they just roll straight off the ramp when it’s lowered. We flew all over the north-east of Kandahar Province to myriad bases, but the icing on the cake was taking one of the drops to a mountain peak where a US sniper team was located. It was a prime location, giving them commanding views down the valley, but it meant there was nowhere for the helicopter to land. So German did the only thing you can do at a time like that – he landed the rear wheels onto the ridge.

It’s a tough manoeuvre because you have one rotor head that’s on the ground and the other rotor head is still trying to fly – we’re entirely reliant on the rear to keep us informed, flying that particular manoeuvre. Bear in mind we’re sixty feet or so forward of the ramp and below us, through the clear glass under our feet, all we can see is a 3,000 ft drop. The back wheels are on the ridgeline, so the loadmaster is in the back hanging off the ramp and screaming in our ear to keep the wheels down, ‘Nag, nag, nag!’ It’s the longest thirty seconds you can spend at the controls. German’s rear crew threw the load out on what looked like an empty ridge line and then suddenly, all these superbly well-camouflaged snipers appeared from out of nowhere. It was incredible to see – one minute I could have sworn there was nobody on the ridge, and then these guys just stood up and there they were. That was pretty awesome – not just the snipers, but watching German hovering on the edge of that peak. It’s one thing flying the actual manoeuvre, but it was the first time I’d actually watched another cab doing it.

We also had a run of non-standard underslung loads to deal with. Properly set up, underslung loads present no problem to any Chinook crew – they’re the bread and butter of what we do, after all. But all it takes is for someone to get their figures wrong, or for us to pick up a load at the extreme end of the weight parameters, and suddenly life gets very interesting. Sweating the metal was never fun.

A run that really stands out came about when we had to take a Warrior engine pack to FOB Edinburgh. I hated doing that because the underslung load weighs four tonnes and it bends the cab. You’ve got no speed, it takes forever and a day to get anywhere and twice as long to slow down – you have to start slowing almost before you’ve taken off! Basically, the Warrior engine pack acted as a pendulum suspended from the belly of the cab and took on a momentum of its own. The load pulled on the aircraft and caused a phugoid motion, where the aircraft started to oscillate, intermittently diving and climbing. It gained speed during the dive portion until the added speed caused it to climb, and then lost speed until the cycle was repeated. It made me feel nauseous, and it was a complete pain in the ass. We also have the rotor blades spinning round at 225rpm, so we had all these gyros going around. Putting a load underneath it meant we had the aircraft gyroscoping around the weight. It was no fun at all, so we were all pleased when we finally dropped that load.

By then the light was fading so I thought it would be a good opportunity to finish off Alex’s TQ with some night flying. When we fly at night, conditions are green, red or black illume. Green is normal – that is, there is sufficient ambient light for the NVGs to deliver a good picture. Red illume is the opposite – on a night with full cloud cover, no moon and no cultural or reflected light, you’re as good as blind, even with the NVGs, because they have no light to amplify. Flying under those conditions is nigh on impossible because you have no references; it’s frightening, dangerous and extraordinarily draining. Consequently, the only flying we usually do under red illume is on the IRT and training sorties – you have to know what to expect.

When it starts to get dark, we’ll put down what we call a desert box to practise night landings – four cyalume light sticks are placed on the ground to form a rectangle big enough to land a Chinook in. The aim is to land on with the cockpit by the rearmost two cyalumes so that when you run on, you stop by the two at the front of the box. That way, you have markers in view throughout. People often make the mistake of landing in the middle of the box, but if you do that, the two markers at the back are about as useful as tits on a fish! What you want is to see the rear cyalumes at your 11 o’clock and 2 o’clock when your wheels touch ground, so that by the time you get engulfed in dust, with a bit of run on, you’ll move forward, the dust will clear and the front two should now be in your 11 and 2 o’clock.

I found us a nice empty patch of desert just as the light was going down and landed on.

‘Okay Bob, can you do us a box outside please?’

‘No worries Frenchie, one box coming up,’ Bob said and got busy doing the necessary. He took four one-litre bottles of water from the cool box, broke four cyalume sticks to activate them and placed one in each bottle of water before resealing the bottles. The benefits are twofold; the weight of the water anchors the bottle and the water magnifies the glow from the sticks. Like all the best ideas, it’s simple and effective. Job done, he ran off the ramp, placed the bottles then jumped back in.

‘All done, Frenchie. Clear above and behind,’ he said, so I pulled power and pulled back on the stick, doing a nice aggressive J-turn, or over-the-shoulder departure, to take us out into the empty desert. There was no reason for it; I just felt like it.

Bear in mind it was very dark now and there was no moon. Although it was a cloudless night, there’s very little cultural lighting in Afghanistan, even in populated areas. Over the desert, it’s non-existent, so we were in red illume conditions.

‘Okay Alex, you just follow me through on the controls with this one. I’ll do a demo and then you have a go,’ I told him and he came back with an ‘Okay.’

I flew around the corner and turned back to make my approach, but as I became visual with the cyalumes, I noticed there was something wrong with the box.

‘Bob, that is the shittiest box I’ve ever seen, mate! It’s like a fucking triangle. What did you do?!’ I asked.

‘Frenchie,’ he said, ‘I know the difference between a box and a fucking triangle, and I made a box! Maybe one of them blew away when you lifted?’

It might sound like I was giving him a hard time, but it was just the normal sort of banter and piss-taking that characterises every sortie. Well, there was little we could do about it now so I told him, ‘Don’t worry, mate. I’ll just work with what we’ve got.’

I looked ahead and we were downwind so I did the pre-landing checks – all good. I came around the corner again crosswind and then Bob came over the radio again, ‘For fuck’s sake, what’s going on? You saw it – it was a box – then we had a triangle and now the fucking thing has changed shape.’

And as we watched, one of the other cyalumes started moving. I thought, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ and then the moving cyalume disappeared. We were trying to take it in when a third one disappeared. And then I got it.

‘I bet some fucker down on the ground is nicking them!’ As I said it, I hit the IR lights on the underside of the cab. Caught full-on in its glare was an Afghan male doing the rabbit-caught-in-headlights dance. He’d seen Bob putting the box out and after we took off, ran out from his compound about 200 metres away and started nicking them!

I flew over him at about 50ft and I could see him looking up at me; because I had the IR on, it was reflecting off the back of his retinas – through the NVGs he looked like a cat or dog when the light catches its eyes. He stood resolutely on the spot, frozen in time. I was coming in low with all the dirt, grit, corruption and destruction that the downforce gives birth to and he just stood there with our four cyalumes, ready to take them home. Fuck knows what he was doing with them – they’re no use to man or beast – but there you go.