Declan Daly - Borderline - An Oral History of the Brexit Wars 2020-2022

Of the main part of the wreckage, there was one section that looked vaguely like the front of a helicopter in a fold in the earth, still burning and she couldn’t see any other major components. She looked into the front section where the pilot should be, as close as she could get anyway, staying up wind of the fire – she could already see bits of burning fibres hanging in the air and didn’t fancy breathing them in – one glance was enough, her brain gave an involuntary ‘nope’ warning that she knew meant it would wrap that memory in a ball and bury it deep and she turned back to her team. Lt Quinlan was already calling everyone back, telling them what they already knew now, that the pilot was dead, but also that they didn’t know what weapons were on board or if there was any ammo to cook off in the fire. There wasn’t as it turned out, apart from the pilots pistol, which was found still on him, but you don’t take chances with that kind of thing. They fanned out and secured the area as much as they could, the wreckage was spread across a few hundred metres, vertically down the hill on the northern side as well as horizontally, and they had to try to stay in sight of each other. There wasn’t a sniff of the enemy all day that day.

A number of realisations took place early in the Black Winter. One was that airborne ISR was going to be critical to fill in the gaps that could not only not be plugged by the available number of troops but also to maintain a bit of a degree of surprise, the ability to turn up anywhere at any time. The available drone technology worked reasonably well at a small unit tactical level, but better and bigger results were being achieved by the manned assets of the Air Corps. While the perceived gold standard for a patrol out along the border was one of the PC 12 Spectre fixed wing aircraft, these became increasingly unavailable due to being tasked for higher priority surveillance missions – this would change as more airframes were purchased. The fixed wing assets also lacked the flexibility of helicopters to get in beneath the frequent poor weather and still achieve the task.

The helicopters also provided a great degree of flexibiliy to Bn commanders to do everything from moving smaller patrols by air to resupplying Starforts to medevac and more. It didn’t hurt that the helis of No 3 Ops Wing and the Army had worked together for years and mostly spoke the same language, or at very least were seperated by a common tongue to a lesser degree than with the fixed wing crews. The result was that No 3 Ops Wing was tasked with providing two helicopters on the border, one based in Dundalk and the other in Finner. This stretched an already under pressure unit to man these rosters and maintain training.

By the start of 2020, cadets were being sent overseas to conduct part of their heli training in order to accelerate the rate at which numbers of pilots were being produced. To provide aircraft for these new tasks, the existing two EC 135s in Air Corps service were supplemented by four leased airframes, while discussion commenced on how best to deal with the deployment long term. This did not however convey crucial flight experience on the pilots who, no matter how well trained, were being thrown raw into a demanding operational environment. Comdt Brian Rafferty, visibly upset during this portion of his interview, explains:

‘An accident like that, look, the lads name was Dennis Ratigan – lets get that in for starts and stop just calling him ‘the pilot’ – an accident like that we call CFIT. That's controlled flight into terrain. Basically, what that means is that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft and that for whatever reason someone crashes. What happened in this case is called Inadvertent IMC. This means that the pilot, or Denny in this case, – I didn't know the chap well by any means I only met him a couple of times, that was just the nature of how things were going by that stage – he entered cloud without planning to and the result of that was that he lost control of the aircraft and crashed. This is actually a pretty common way for helicopter pilots in bad weather to go out. And regardless of your experience level, it's an extremely difficult scenario to get yourself out of safely, especially if you made the wrong moves early in the sequence.

What happened? Eh, what happened appears to be that he made the right decision early on, at the start of the morning and that was when he said he couldn't go because the weather was too bad in the area. He could, you could see it straight after you took off from Dundalk. But as sometimes happens you know, operational pressures come in. In this case from the Battalion HQ and, well, it's a brave 2 Lt who decides he's not going to fly then, even though that's what we drill into them repeatedly at home. He trained overseas so I’m not as sure how much emphasis is on it elsewhere? In this case, he departed on his own, because we had a shortage of crewmen at the time too, presumably with the intention that he would go up, have a look at the area: if it could be worked he'd work it, if not, just turn around. It was clear air in Dundalk, he had no reason to think he won't be able to do so.

As he approached the southern side of the Cooley Mountains the weather was down, we know from the flight data recorder that he was already below the level of the patrol that he was meant to be overhead and supporting, you know? He slowed down, got low in close to the mountain, nearly in a hover and tried to work his way up towards the patrol. For whatever reason, whether he was distracted by something or I dunno what else, he entered cloud at that stage.

Had he broken away to the South immediately, you know, he would have come out of the cloud and he would have been fine but he simply pulled in all the power, and at low airspeed in a helicopter all that's going to happen there, without countering that power, is you're going to spin in circles and that's what happened. He was pretty much in the hover, that's what happened, and he went straight up in the air spinning.

To listen to the flight data recorder, as I had to do as part of the accident investigation, is pretty horrifying. He climbed straight up as I said, the aircraft was spinning, and from his perspective you know the dials and the airspeed and altitude tapes, you know, they would have been just going all over the place because by now he was rolling and pitching all over the place as well. Really swift rates of movement which would just totally throw your ears off balance, not an unusual thing in cloud in itself if you move too aggressively without looking at your instruments, but we were talking 90 degrees nose down, 60 degrees angle a bank and,you know, even going over past 90 degrees at some stages, um.

It appears, you know, you can hear him shouting on the flight data recorder, as well trying to understand what's going on in front of him and it's clearly, clearly overwhelmed him. Maybe; I hope that he was just confused all the way to the ground, that he didn't realize what was happening. Um, the end result was that he impacted the mountain. The crumple zones of the helicopter pretty much couldn’t do their job because he came down sideways, the aircraft wrapped itself up, it impacted on a slope and the aircraft exploded and came apart. The cockpit section didn't actually move too far, but the engine's spread out along the hill, the main gearbox we found actually 200 meters down the hill, significantly far away, and the recording stopped, obviously, on impact That was a grim day in the unit, no getting around saying something like that. This was a young guy who hadn't had a chance yet to really make an impact, you know a lot of us, like I said, we didn't actually know him much, hadn't met him socially really, just kind of passed him in the halls. We'd be on our way to our job and he was going to Dundalk or Finner. But, it had a massive impact obviously on his classmates in particular.