26

ROYAL NAVY NIGHT FLIGHT—THE DIFFICULT VALLEY

NEAR BARDUFOSS, NORWAY ■ JANUARY 1984

Flying in Norway in winter presents constant challenges; night flying in mountains and the occasional heavy snow are two of the obvious ones. Because night in northern Norway lasts a really long time, all “day” in fact, in winter the pilot must learn to deal with it and be able to always operate normally. One of the skills to do so requires that he know “difficult valley” flying techniques. Like the early days of NVG flying, night difficult valley flying is particularly difficult, in some ways even more so than the night flight described in earlier chapters.

The “difficult valley” Clockwork uses for training is aptly named. The first difficulty in all flying is finding where you are supposed to go, but in this case that was not the difficult part since finding this particular valley at night is easy enough. Fly down a fjord northeast of Bardufoss until the fjord turns east and look for a tall, lighted smoke stack along the shore. Turn east to climb up the hillside to the north of the stack. If you can’t see it from a distance, start looking in earnest for the valley entrance as you clear the tree line. At that point it’s not hard to find because the valley itself is a glaciated “U” that is located above the tree line, at about two thousand feet where you enter and climbs to about 3,000 feet above sea level at the highest point of the valley floor.

As the altitude increases, the valley narrows until you can’t do a coordinated turn at 90 knots out of it. It envds in a “T” with another glaciated “U” valley that runs north to south. This valley has sheer rock walls on both sides reaching up about 1,000 feet higher than the floor, high enough that you cannot “cyclic climb” out of it, meaning trading airspeed for altitude by bringing the helicopter’s nose up. Helicopters just don’t have that much energy to trade; if you try it you will shortly find yourself out of air speed, altitude, and ideas all at the same time. Once you are above the tree line, there is really nothing to look at except the rock wall and featureless snow, particularly featureless in the dark Norwegian night.

Syllabus flight or no, I would never have gone into that valley on a moonless night except that my instructor, fresh from the Falkland’s War, was acting bored and said, “Oh, if you think it’s too hard we can go around it,” which got my Irish (American?) up to the point where we were going up it even if it meant becoming a greasy black spot on the valley wall.

As I was expecting, once we cleared the tree line there was nothing left to see, with the sky, valley floor, and walls a more or less uniform black. Out to the starboard side of the aircraft, my side, parts of the blackness were blacker than other parts—rocks sticking out the side of the cliff, I think, but all was just black on all sides with a black rock wall in front of us.

After we cleared the tree line and were into the valley proper, my aircrewman, who had navigated us blind to this point, began counting down, “Three, two, one, turn right to 180 degrees NOW.”

Looking to the right to where I was to turn, all I saw was just more blackness. Turn early into a rock wall or turn late and fly straight ahead into another one? I trusted my aircrewman and his work was perfect, as you have probably surmised since I’m writing this many years after the fact. About 30 seconds after I steadied on the new heading he had given me, we started to see lights of a village down on the fjord. It took half an hour to get that seat cushion out of my rear end when we finally landed.

Talking to my fellow “students” over beer a few days later I found out I had been the only one that night to fly through the “difficult valley.” All the rest had flown around it and were of the considered opinion that I was insane. In retrospect, I agree.

Luck and superstition indeed …