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CHASING BUZZARDS

FORT WOLTERS, TEXAS ■ FEBRUARY 1969

The OH-23 Raven was a three-man bubble helicopter designed by one of the pioneers of vertical flight, Stanley Hiller. The first ones came out in the early 1950’s and the final versions lasted long enough to see service as scouts in Vietnam. Even in 2013, a few OH-23’s soldier on as crop dusters or toys for people with the money to keep an old helicopter operational. The 23 was a typical bubble helicopter, i.e., slow, with a manual throttle that works opposite of a motorcycle (the grip was black rubber and read “Harley-Davidson”), and was a very rugged machine, as I discovered when I bounced one about 20 feet into the air after screwing up a simulated engine failure, with no damage to the machine.

Seventeen flight hours into my aviation career, I couldn’t say I really had much of an understanding of the process of flying in general, and the process of flying helicopters in particular. All us warrant officer candidates (WOCs) struggling to get through Primary Flight training at Fort Wolters were in about the same position; that is, scared and confused, but never admitting anything, even to each other. To admit any fear meant running the risk of having the staff wash you out of flight school, or maybe having one of your classmates write you up in a peer review that would accomplish the same thing, whereupon the Army would hand you a rifle and send you wading into the Vietnamese rice paddies. This, of course, is exactly what they did do in 1968 when you washed out of flight school. You still owed Uncle Sam a year and a half—plenty of time for a Vietnam tour.

I had soloed in the OH-23D helicopter the week before. After six-and-a-half hours of dual flight, my instructor looked over at me, smiled, and said, “Take it around the pattern three times, then come back and pick me up.” As he opened the door to climb out of the little helicopter, he started laughing, laughing so loud that I could hear him over the engine noise. I watched him walk to the ready shack where we waited between flights without even looking back, still laughing.

My first solo flight was uneventful, despite the pounding of my heart. After the three wobbly landings and takeoffs, with shaky hovering in between, my instructor came back to the aircraft, no longer laughing but smiling broadly.

“Congratulations! Looks like you won’t get washed out after all, well, not yet anyway. Let’s take it home now, while we’re on a roll,” he said.

He let me hover back out to the runway and make the takeoff. I remembered where our home field was, more or less, and after more or less leveling off (plus or minus 100 feet or so, i.e., the height of a ten-story building) I turned the aircraft toward it. Feeling very pleased with myself, I actually felt like I was in control of the aircraft, for once. Five miles from the outlying field we had just left, the instructor said, “I’ve got it” and as we had been taught, I immediately let go of the controls.

Looking over at the instructor, I wondered what I had done wrong, since they did not normally take the flight controls without a reason. He was still smiling as he took the controls. With his left hand he pointed out to the front of the bubble.

“See that buzzard at one o’clock, just a little high,” he asked? “

“Yes, sir. I saw it and was going to avoid it,” I replied, thinking he thought I was going to get too close to the bird and have it hit the bubble of our aircraft.

“Watch this,” he said and turned directly for the bird.

The vulture saw us, or had been watching us already, and turned to escape from the larger “bird” attacking him. As the vulture turned, we turned with him. As he dove, we dove, always staying far enough away to ensure we did not hit him. For what seemed to be three or four minutes, we followed him through the sky, turning, twisting, climbing, diving, and then, laughing, my instructor turned the H-23 back toward the base, resumed level flight, and gave me back the controls.

It was the first time I had ever been in a maneuvering helicopter. We were not just taking off, climbing out and flying level around the traffic pattern—we were actually twisting and turning through the sky! With the assurance of a god-like flight instructor sitting next to me, I knew there was no danger to us and it was fun! After the grind of basic training, the terror of preflight training and the pressure to solo, it was the first time that “90 days between you and the sky” seemed real, the first feeling of freedom, of real flying, like the old war movies.

Now, another week and another five hours of flight time later, I was being entrusted with flying an aircraft the fifteen miles from the stage field back to Fort Wolters, all by myself. I was sure it would be no problem. I felt good, having had a good flight earlier in the day. So I pulled up on the collective, and not wobbling too much, took off to head for home. I leveled off at 500 feet, plus or minus only 50, instead of the 100 feet of last week; this time it was a five-story building instead of a ten-story. At about the same place as the week before, a vulture was circling.

“That was fun, chasing the buzzard last week,” I thought as I turned toward the bird. The only problem was that this buzzard was either the same one or one that had been chased once too often. Instead of turning way, the buzzard, or maybe it was a hawk, turned toward the helicopter, intending to fight.

For a moment I panicked. A good-sized bird, or even a small one for that matter, will do a lot of damage to an aircraft, if it hits the right parts, like the bubble and/or the pilot. To avoid the buzzard, I turned hard right, pulled a lot of power while rolling on as much throttle as I could. The bird passed beneath the H-23, clear and gone. My heart pounding, I rolled the aircraft level and started to lower the collective to descend to the mandated 500 feet. I was already passing through 800 feet, climbing rapidly, and knew I would get in trouble (thoughts of rice paddies passed through my mind) if I went higher. But as I tried to lower the collective pitch lever, I found it would not go down. The collective was stuck up and I was climbing faster than I ever had.

Climbing into the Texas sky, I was passing through 1,200 feet when the thought occurred to me that I had no idea how high this aircraft could go or what happened if you tried to go higher than that. Unable to think of anything else except getting the helicopter started on its way back down, I loosened my seat belt and half stood in the cockpit, all the while keeping my feet on the rudders. Holding the cyclic stick with my right hand, I put all my weight on the collective stick with my left and it came down. All the way down, leaving me almost floating in the air as the aircraft entered mild negative “G,” like when you almost leave the ground in your car taking a rise in the road too fast. I was now mostly a passenger, instead of the pilot. The aircraft wobbled around the sky, upright as it fell but not really under control.

As the slight negative G faded, I managed to regain control, more or less, and after stopping the descent, did the first thing all men do when they have done something stupid or clumsy or something they know they shouldn’t have done. I looked around to see if anyone had seen me. There were no other helicopters in sight, so no one had.

It took a few minutes for me to get my heart under control, get to more or less the right altitude, and to figure out exactly where I was, and to head back toward the base. The bird was nowhere to be seen. In the following 24 years I spent as an aviator, I never chased a bird again, although I did hit a duck at about 160 MPH once, but that’s another story.