17

NIGHT VISION GOGGLES

YUMA, ARIZONA ■ AUGUST 1978

To learn tactics and advanced tactics is complicated and requires an extended period of flying with experienced pilots. Once the officer has advanced completely through the syllabus in the squadron, and has shown promise as an instructor, he may be sent to Weapons Tactics Instructor (WTI) School, the most prestigious flying course I ever attended—and the most fun…

The second Marine Aviation Weapons and tactics Instructor class at Marine Weapons and tactics Squadron-1 (mAWtS-1), conducted at Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, Arizona in the fall of 1978, was going very well indeed. All the students were very experienced aviators, and aviation support personnel from all portions of Marine Corps air wing had been hand selected for their skill and were to be the future trainers of the Marine Corps tactical pilots and air controllers. As the instructors always told us when they had something particularly difficult in mind for us to do: “we were the cream of the crop—never again would we be as technically and tactically proficient in our aircraft, as Marines, as we would be when we graduated from this course.”

But even the cream of the crop can make mistakes.

On the first day of class, the major who was the lead helicopter instructor walked in flanked by two of his assistant instructors. One assistant was ceremoniously carrying a frozen chicken and the other was carrying a feather pillow held out reverently before him in both hands.

“Gentlemen,” the chief instructor began, “You will shortly all be issued one of these chickens and a pillow. If by chance, you should happen to hit a saguaro cactus while flying in this course, you will land your helicopter immediately, stuff the chicken in the hole, and cut open the pillow with your survival knife, sprinkle feathers all around, and swear you had a bird strike. Are there any questions about this procedure?”

It seems a student in the last class had hit an endangered cactus, thereby damaging his CH-53 and coincidentally giving away the fact that he was flying lower than allowed, “flat hatting,” as it is called in Naval aviation. It has been a problem since the first aircraft got off the ground. It often leads to a situation where the pilot “ties the record for low flying.” You can’t break the record but when you impact the surface you do tie it, adding your name to the way-too-long list of pilots who died doing something they knew they shouldn’t.

Mid-way through the four-week course we went into the main classroom for instruction on “Night Vision Goggles” (NVG). None of us students had ever heard of “Night Vision Goggles” until we got to Yuma, but if they would help us see better for night missions, we were all for them. Every aviator has scary stories about night flight or “night fright,” as it was often called, as witnessed by the night firebase resupply and flare drop missions I had flown. One saying went that only bats and twats flew at night, leaving which we were open for discussion. MAWTS-1 had every single pair of NVGs the Marine Corps owned at that time, 20 sets in all.

One rule every soldier must know is that tracers work both ways; that is, you can see where your bullets are going but the enemy can see where they are coming from. The same is true for light sources like flares or search-lights. You may be able to see the enemy using them, but they can see you too. NVGs allowed us to see the enemy, but because they are passive, the enemy could not see the source of what was providing us with vision.

The goggles are passive because they work by amplifying ambient light. The first generation NVGs really needed moonlight, the more the better. Starlight worked somewhat if it was a very clear night, but not very well to see clearly through the lenses. NVGs were not originally developed for flying. The original units were monocular “Starlight” scopes developed for use by snipers in Vietnam. Other original uses included vehicle drivers, sentries, etc., who used the goggles instead of artificial light. The ones we would use were developed for vehicle drivers and had not been modified for us in aircraft.

After a lecture on light frequencies, emergency removal procedures, and how to mount the NVGs on our helmets, the WTI cadre passed out the goggles. They were very heavy, so much so that they had to be counterbalanced to keep you from injuring your neck by just wearing them. The twenty-eight ounces of dead weight hanging on the front of your flight helmet had to be balanced by lead plates hung on the back of your helmet using Velcro attachments. We had to have our helmets modified so that we could strap the goggles on and then snap them down so they wouldn’t fall off in flight. The staff stressed how important it was to take good care of them because they were very expensive and delicate; never mind, as they reminded us over and over again, that the few sets they handed out to us were every pair the Marine Corps owned.

As mentioned, the NVGs work by taking existing light and amplifying it. The pilot sees two round images, one for each eye, on what is, in effect, a miniature monochrome green-tinted television screen. The NVGs could be adjusted for diopter and focus. Actually, they had to be adjusted for focus when you wanted to look from outside the aircraft to inside the cockpit. This first generation NVG was “full face,” meaning that when they were attached to your helmet you could not see around them, the pilot could only see through them in two circles of green light that provided only 40 degrees of vision. The NVGs also were designed to protect themselves by momentarily shutting down when exposed to too much light, thus preventing tube burnout. More on this later…

Our instructors were confident, even though they had barely more experience with NVGs than we did. At least they did what all military aviators always do, and acted cool in the face of a very new procedure, as in “death before embarrassment.” As the head of the Helicopter Branch explained, “this is going to be a little harder than usual, but you guys can hack it.” We agreed because we were all “hackers” or we wouldn’t be there—and because, being aviators ourselves, we too were acting cool.

At the preflight mission briefing, a light should have come on or alarm bells gone off inside our heads when the instructor said, “Normally, you wouldn’t want to do this unless the moon was a little higher and brighter.” In the Marine Corps, a statement like that almost guarantees something bad is going to happen. It is almost like Marines aren’t happy unless there is some pain, physical or psychological, in all events. But the briefing officer again stressed that we were the cream of the crop and could handle it.

That was the theory anyway…

My instructor and I had grown to be friends during the time I had been at mAWtS-1. Like me, he had flown in Vietnam, Marine 46s instead of Army 47s, in I Corps, the northern-most part of the country, just like me. He too had lots of total flight time and was very relaxed about the whole WTI thing, be it going one-on-one with fighters, nap-of-the-earth flying, evading missiles, flying on NVGs, whatever. He also had a slight tendency to stutter occasionally, but it was never a problem, since it mostly happened when he was drinking and no matter what, he did not drink and fly.

After going through the normal crew briefing, preflight, and start up, we taxied our CH-46F out to the runway and took off for Laguna Army Airfield, to the northeast of Yuma. I can’t say the crew chief and first Mec (mechanic, a crew chief in training) were very happy about it because anything new made them uncomfortable, and the NVGs were definitely new, but they trusted us enough to get in the back of the helicopter and go flying. Or perhaps I should say that they were Marines and did as ordered. In either case, it was full darkness when we landed at Laguna to “goggle up” and get that training “X” in the box. Only the pilots would be on NVGs, since we did not have enough for the crew to wear them too, meaning that even though we might be able to see, the crew had only blackness to look at, yet another thing that made them less than happy. The sky was clear but the moon, forecast to be small and low, was nowhere to be seen as we started our training evolution.

After landing in the sand next to the runway at Laguna, I held the flight controls while the instructor rigged our aircraft. As they told us in ground school training, these early NVGs were very sensitive to certain portions of the light spectrum, particularly the red portion. Unfortunately it was the same red commonly used in aircraft to preserve pilot’s night vision, so the red of our normal cockpit lighting would cause the lenses to shut down to protect themselves from overload and burnout. In fact, any bright light in the visual spectrum would shut them down. They warned us in class that if the NVGs were getting too much light, they would show what looked like a test pattern and shut themselves down. When the light source was removed or you looked away from it, the NVGs would come back on in about five seconds.

Five seconds is a very long time when you are close to the ground in a helicopter and cannot see outside the cockpit.

After completing the taping over of all our cockpit lights (a pin hole was left in some of the taped over lights, e.g. The fire warning lights, the master caution lights, etc., so that we would know when they came on and we had an emergency), the instructor put his goggles on. As I watched him, I noticed that it was a moderately “dark” night. Yes, there was finally a moon but it was only a thin sliver, just above the mountains. I hoped this wouldn’t be too bad, but had a lot of confidence in my own ability and after all, I had one of those “God-like” instructors in the other seat. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us.

The instructor took the controls and told me to put my own goggles on. It took me a lot longer than it took him, since I was doing it only for the second time. I finally got them on and was looking out the right cockpit window, trying to adjust them when I saw another CH-46 go past us, just outside our rotors at about what seemed like 40 or 50 knots, flying backwards.

The instructor saw it too and was on the radio immediately, “46 on Luguna, you’re drifting backwards. YOU ARE DRIFTING BACKWARDS! You damn near ran us over!” he yelled into the mic. No stutter in his voice that time.

The pilot of the other helo “rogered” our call with only a minor shake in his voice to betray his fear at not knowing where his helicopter was going, and although we could no longer see them, he assured us that they were stabilized. It was another warning we did not pay attention to. If he can’t see, what made us think we could? Ah, we’re hackers and he isn’t. That must be it.

Our crew chief had been listening to the radios and called from the back, “Got them in sight. They’re well clear.” that helped, but it was not a good start and promised that this would not be an easy flight.

I now had my goggles on and mostly adjusted, and while I could see a green, snowy picture of the world outside the cockpit of the 46, I could not see very much else. I also could not see my hands or the instruments. The green toilet paper tube-like, circular view through the twin lenses of the NVGs was only 40 degrees, not the 180 plus pilots normally have.

The instructor had me get on the controls with him as he pulled the aircraft up into a hover. I felt slightly disoriented as we lifted but followed him through as he moved the cyclic stick and collective. It was strange not being able to see the stick with my peripheral vision as he maneuvered the aircraft. I felt disconnected from normal reality and disoriented. No problem though, I was with an instructor…

He did a few hovering turns and then sat the aircraft back down, only bouncing slightly. I could not see well enough to tell if we wobbled or not when we were in a hover. I had adjusted one eye to focus inside the cockpit and one eye to focus out, like they told us in class. Since the man flying had to adjust both eyes out of the cockpit to see where he was going, he could not see any of the instruments to tell how high he was, how fast he was going, how much power he had pulled in, what course he was on, or anything else. The other pilot watched all those with his one eye and called them out to the man at the controls. With the other eye, he would look out the window to make sure they weren’t about to fly into another aircraft or a mountain.

That was the theory anyway…

The instructor lifted the helicopter into a hover again and when I told him “all green” he nosed the aircraft forward for takeoff. As we climbed out, I called altitudes and airspeeds. In that trip around the traffic pattern, both altitude and airspeed varied to the point where it was like the first time a new flight student tried it in flight school, even though an experienced helicopter aircraft commander (HAC) was flying. After a shaky landing, he passed me the controls and it was my turn. I felt the seat cushion start up my rear end as the pucker factor kicked in.

I was apprehensive, but, by God if he could do it, so could I. After adjusting my goggles so that both eyes were focused outside the aircraft, I took the controls and pulling power, wobbled into hover. I couldn’t see my hands or the stick position indicator to see how far back the stick was as I added collective. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that pilots, or at least helicopter pilots, actually see the position of the flight controls with their peripheral vision and use that as a reference of where they should be for the maneuver.

As we lifted up, I could not tell how high we were, I had no idea if we were in the prescribed 10-foot hover or were at 50 feet or 2 feet. I knew we were drifting in our hover, even though I was using all the experience and skill gained over nine years of helicopter flying to try to keep us steady. I was trying to crush the cyclic grip and my legs were ridged on the pedals. Taking a deep breath and slowly blowing it out, I tried to relax some.

I finally was more or less stabilized in a hover when a car on the outskirts of the airfield turned toward us and his headlights hit the cockpit. As advertised in class, my goggles went blank. No, not really blank, blank. Just as the instructors told us, all I could see was what looked like a green fuzzy test pattern of the sort TV stations used to show when they weren’t on the air.

“You’ve got it. I can’t see anything!” I said to the instructor as calmly as I could over the intercom. Death before loss of cool!

The instructor must have been looking away when the car lights hit us because he answered, “I can see. I’ve got it,” and I felt his hands come on the controls. Still looking away from the car, he pedal-turned the helicopter to the left—directly toward the lights of a hanger. My goggles, which had been coming back to normal after being off for five seconds, went blank again.

“Can you see?” he yelled through the intercom. No attempt at cool this time.

“No,” I replied immediately.

“Shit,” was all he said.

Having no further ideas about what to do, the instructor just put the collective down, removing all power from the aircraft. We hit hard but level, and apparently we had landed on a clear spot, because the helicopter stayed upright. Marine Corps helicopters are designed to land hard on the decks of ships and we tested the design on that landing. From the back, we could hear the crew chief give a sort of primal scream. We could hear him over the aircraft noise. He had no goggles and the night was dark enough for him not to be able to see outside the aircraft, but he could hear us talking on the ICS.

We stayed on the ground, still in goggles, while the crew chief checked the aircraft for damage. We all decided the landing was not as hard as other landings we’d done on pitching ships, because the “crash lights”—passenger compartment emergency lights that automatically come on at 3.5 G (G-force or gravitational force)—had not illuminated. The fact that we were off the runway and in the dirt helped, too; dirt is much softer than cement or steel deck plating. Fortunately, as noted earlier, it was level dirt and did not have a tree growing out of it. No damage, this time…

When our hearts were under control, we lifted off to a hover again, still on the NVGs. I managed to takeoff and get it around the pattern, at least as well as the instructor had done. Not much to be proud of, but at least it was something. For much of the time while we were in the air, we could not really tell how high we were, or our course, and we relied instead on the flight engineer to vector us back to the runway as he looked out into the darkness without the “benefit” of goggles. “Come right. Roll out. Left, steady.” Our hearts weren’t in it though, so after 15 more minutes, we landed, and one at a time, pulled the goggles off. We went home without them, much to everyone’s relief.

The next time we went NVG flying the conditions were better, with more moonlight and a darker airfield. Even the “cream of the crop” needed a moon with the first generation of goggles, especially when the goggles were full face, and not the “cut aways” that soon were developed and fielded.

Those first generation NVGs were the very same ones that the pilots were using at Desert One when the mH-53 hit the C-130 in the Iranian desert on 24 April 1980.

Sometimes it seems like luck and superstition does not always work, but for me they did on my first NVG flight. Luck and superstition were still with me on my last NVG flight in 1988 too, but that is another story.