Snake Pilot: Flying the Cobra Attack Helicopter in Vietnam

Chapter 4 “You Want to Kill Yourself?”

19 Primary flight training was broken into two phases, Primary One and Primary Two. Primary One was a basic introduction to the helicopter. It lasted for eight weeks and included fifty hours of actual flight time. During these fifty hours we were expected to learn how to hover, fly a traffic pattern, and learn all of the basic maneuvers and emergency procedures. I was assigned to a TH-55A flight. The Aircraft Division of Hughes Tool Company designed the TH-55. Known as the Hughes 269 in the civilian market, it was a small, almost tiny aircraft powered by a 180-hp Lycoming piston engine. The cockpit sat two, side by side, and occupied most of the fuselage. The tail boom looked like a broomstick sticking out the back. The rotors were powered by seven fan belts, big rubber bands instead of the traditional transmission. It was small and sleek with a twenty-five-foot rotor diameter and a maximum speed of eighty-six miles per hour at sea level. It sounded like an angry hornet and those of us who flew this great little machine affectionately dubbed it the “Mattel Messerschmitt .” Our instructors were civilian contract employees who worked for Southern Airways. We were to be flying out of Downing Army Heliport. As we approached the heliport for the first time, a certain amount of anxiety and excitement was evident in the bus. Each flight-training period began with a briefing in the classroom. During the briefing, our flight commander, Don Walgammott, would brief us on the weather, assign us aircraft, and tell which stagefield we would be operating from. The area around Fort Wolters was dotted with stagefields with Vietnamese names: An Khe, Chu Lai, Phu Loi. The stagefields consisted of three parallel runways or lanes, a parking area, and a control tower. Each runway had three helispots, and depending upon which maneuver or procedure you were practicing, the tower would assign a lane to you and a spot to land on. It was quite common to have twenty helicopters or more operating out of a stagefield at any given time. The pace of Primary One was fast and furious, and we soon found out that the stress training carried over into the cockpit. I wish I had a dime for every time I got smacked over the helmet with a pointer. Chapter 4 “You Want to Kill Yourself?” Flying a helicopter is no easy task. It takes a lot of time and even more coordination to master. The helicopter has three basic controls. The cyclic stick, which sits between the pilot’s legs, controls the rotor disc through three hundred and sixty degrees of travel. It is most often referred to as the control that allows movement fore and aft or right and left. The collective pitch is a lever to the left of the pilot, and this is raised or lowered to either increase or decrease the pitch in the rotor blades. In other words, it controls the rate of climb or descent. There are also two foot pedals, which control the anti-torque tail rotor at the rear of the helicopter. Sir Isaac Newton deduced that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; hence, without the tail rotor, while the rotor blades are turning in a counterclockwise direction, the fuselage would spin beneath them equally as fast in the opposite, or clockwise direction. To complicate matters, whenever the collective is raised, the blades tend to slow down due to the increased drag placed upon them by the increased pitch. To combat this, a twist grip–type throttle is placed on the end of the collective to compensate by adding or decreasing engine power, once again depending upon whether the pilot wishes to climb or descend. When power is added or the rotor RPM increased, the pedals must be moved in a coordinated fashion to keep the fuselage in line with the path of flight. At the end of the collective, forward of the throttle, is a small control box, which, depending upon the type of aircraft, has several buttons, switches, or Chinese hats used to control the searchlight and its direction. On the top of the cyclic is a grip that has one button for the intercom, another for the radio. It may have several other buttons for external cargo hooks or trim releases. It is quite conceivable that while the feet are controlling the...