Grampaw Pettibone Moments

I wish some other folks would contribute. Nobody is making any money from this page. It's only for sharing sea stories and entertaining anecdotes.

This page is open for others to share their own flying stories. Please feel welcome to do so.

If you haven't had a close call while flying, you're not doing it right.

I just watched a submarine World War II era movie, made in 1958, which features several air attacks by "Japanese" aircraft.

The good, old, T-28 Trojan played that role in the movie.

I loved flying that airplane at VT-6 in 1974. There are a couple of T-28 stories already posted on this page.

How many times did you have, or see, an engine fire on start? I was counting it up yesterday, and I can recall seeing it once (T-28 stack fire) as well as experiencing it twice, personally, in an H-46.

I remember a Saturday afternoon solo hop at VT-6, where I flew up to Brewton, Alabama to do touch and goes, and then climbed back up to 10k to do aerobatics. I did my clearing turn, lined up on a road, accelerated to aerobatic cruise speed, and pulled 5.5 G's to enter a loop. As I passed over the top, upside down, looking down at the road I was using for a landmark, another T-28 flew through the circle described by my loop, 90 degrees to my direction of flight.

As I recovered from the loop, I did another clearing turn, and said, "That's enough for today," and headed back to NAS Whiting field, having lived to fly another day.

Then there was the story about the P-3 pilot who landed with the gear up, and explained that, "The warning horn distracted me."

I once took off in an H-46, at NAS Pensacola, to fly "special VFR" to Chocktaw Field with two jet instructors as passengers. We knew we could fly 500 MSL/AGL along the coast, just offshore, all the way there and back. Chocktaw was an outlying field, and two students in T-2C jet trainers were stranded there by the unexpected IFR conditions that had blown in. Chocktaw did not have a control tower, or an approved instrument approach. The plan was that the two jet instructors would climb into the the T-2's with the students, take off, and come back to NAS Pensacola IFR. (The students were not yet instrument rated).

As we headed East along the beach, at 500 AGL, we suddenly went inadvertent IFR. At exactly the same time, my crew chief called on the ICS that we had an aft transmission filter button popped "yellow." That can mean nothing, or it can mean that the transmission is grinding itself into tiny bits of metal.

So, I immediately called Pensacola Approach Control, declared a "land immediately" emergency, and got vectors back around to a ground-controlled approach (PAR), to minimums, and a 70 knot running (on the wheels) landing at Forest Sherman Field. The rule with a suspected bad transmission is to minimize power changes until you get on the ground. We taxied on the wheels (rather than air taxi) back to our line. When we shut down, and explained to the two hapless instructors in the back, who had not been on the ICS, what happened, they both got out, white-faced, and muttered, "Fu***ng helicopters," as they walked away toward the VT-4 (jet training squadron) flightline.

So, what did we learn from this experience?

Never take off into a "sucker hole." (A clear sky over the airfield, surrounded by clouds or fog.)

Weather guessers are often wrong.

And, there's Murphy's aviation correllary, "If anything can go wrong, it will, but only when it's absolutely essential for everything to go right."

(posted by me as a response on another page)

I would do it again, too.

There was not much thinking to do for a junior officer. Others wrote the flight schedule, others gave the orders, and all I had to do was follow them.

Climbing the escalator from the main deck, which had not worked since some time in the 1950s, probably, where our ready room was located, to the 01 level (flight deck) through the island and stepping out onto the deck where the pilots who defeated the Japanese Navy had taken off, never to return, was like going to church.

The helicopter I was going to fly was sitting on deck, rotors turning, receiving fuel (crew switch and a hot pump) as we mounted up, plugged in to the radio, and prepared to launch out into the night to rescue any hapless soul who found himself (men only, in those days) in the water.

Outbound on the 045 relative radial, 3 miles, then turn 135 degrees to starboard, arc around the 135 relative radial, and then back inbound to 1/2 mile before repeating the "delta" pattern.

Outbound on the 045, the needle starts to spin, and we say, "Aw, that TACAN is out again," and we time out before turning back, and . . . "Where the # # # # is the ship?" A-7's overhead, HH-46A in the starboard delta, and no ship in sight.

Twilight zone?

NPA (NAS Forest Sherman Field, Pensacola) Tacan is 90 nautical miles north. That's our Bingo field. Foxtrot Corpen (ship's course) is 270 Magnetic. The Moon is clearly visible to the South, and as we continue on, headed West, the ship shows up in the reflection of the Moon on the water. No lights to be seen, at all. The section of A-7's overhead is holding on the NPA Tacan, waiting for their Bingo fuel state to go home.

We decide, "We'll stay out here until we get some signal from the ship (a green light from the tower, or a red light telling us, "you can't land here,") or until we've got 1500 pounds of fuel remaining (1.5 hours) and then we'll head for Pensacola."

Then, a weak call on the UHF. It's the Air Boss, on the battery powered backup UHF radio. "99 Alpha Sevens, Bingo. Angel 401, remain on station and we'll bring you aboard."

"401 Roger, Boss," and we wait. Nobody talks. It's dark out there. Obviously, the ship, built for World War II in 1941 and 42, has "dropped the load," losing all power. It's 1977. Do the math.

45 minutes of flying in a big circle at 500 feet on the RADAR altimeter above the sea, and finally, the headphones crackle, "Angel 401, Signal Charlie," and the TACAN needle stopped spinning. We turn toward the head of the needle, and there's the masthead light, nice, bright, white a mile or so away.

We get aboard without a hitch (even landing a helicopter on a carrier at night is twitchy, because you never know what's sitting just outside the foul lines on the angle deck, and those two main rotors span 50 feet), shut down, and that's it. Flight operations secured.

Another skirmish in the Cold War has been won. Nobody got killed tonight. We'll all try it again, in the morning, about six hours from now when the Sun comes up.

How hard can it be to land a helicopter on a ship? Harder than you think, but nowhere near as hard as landing a stiff-winger. What's the big deal about doing it at night? Try it. King Neptune is out there, ready to snag you if you let your mind wander for even a few seconds. That's why helicopters have two pilots . . . you NEED two pilots.

Sure, nobody was shooting at us. Nobody was shooting at any of the seven friends who died in crashes during my 12 years of active duty. The Naval Air Systems command killed a few of them, and poor judgment killed one or two, but sometimes it's hard to fly when you hear Grampaw Pettibone shouting, "You're going to DIE!" in your ear.

Day one of flight training, they sat us all down in a big room, and told us, "In a 20 year career, the chances are almost certain that you, the man on your left, or the man on your right, will be involved in an incident that will result in the loss of an aircraft, if not a life." 1 out of 3.

I was the "one."

Would I do it again?

Absolutely.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the Florida love bugs look like little H46's flying around?

We were deployed on the USNS Harkness with one of only two HH-2D helicopters left in the Navy.

We had dropped off the ship's captain, a civilian mariner, and the Oceanographic Unit (OCUNIT) commanding officer near a Haitian village to meet the local authorities before beginning our survey work in that area. The ship's captain had completed training as a "helicopter director" and he stood in the town square, which was an empty courtyard area, surrounded by low, ramshackle buildings, waving us in to a landing in the square, from which he and the OCUNIT CO would mount the helicopter, and then fly away into the sky, in a scene which, I'm sure he hoped, would seem like the Ascension of Christ into the Heavens.

Taking our best guess at the wind direction, we passed over at 500 feet, and saw the captain below, waving us down, and pointing to where he wanted us to land. I buttonhooked around and set up for a landing approach to the courtyard. As we came in low over the houses, a large piece of corrugated sheet metal blew off the roof of one of the houses, and, luckily, it did not get caught in the rotor wash and sucked into the rotor system. (I've had nightmares, dreaming about the OPREP PINNACLE report which would have to be drafted to describe our crash, had it occurred).

So, the ground party came aboard, and I performed a "TV takeoff," rising quickly, vertically, until well clear of the buildings, and then dropped the nose to pick up speed and head back to the ship.

"Great hovering Hoovers!" Gramps might have written, if that sheet of metal had shared space with our main rotor blades. "These two aviators might have a great career ahead of them in the demolitions business, but they don't belong in Gramps' Navy!"