Something on the rear of the aircraft contacted a tree, causing much concern inside the Black Hawk. The pilot had never crashed or contacted a solid object, so when the tree reached out and touched his aircraft, he momentarily panicked, but caught himself, knowing his calm-under-fire demeanor was what would save everyone’s lives. He regained control of the helicopter, went a little longer in his approach than he wanted to, but was able to set the shuddering aircraft down without any additional excitement. He immediately initiated his shutdown procedures as Josh came nearly all the way into the cockpit.
“What are you doing?” Josh screamed over the whine of the decelerating engines. “Let’s get these Navy boys on and get the fuck out of here.”
“No can do. We hit something. I have some pretty bad vibrations in the pedals. We take off and we might just fall out of the sky. I want to check it out and see how bad it is,” the pilot hollered back, continuing his shutdown of the aircraft’s systems.
“We gotta go, man,” Josh pressed with a little less conviction of his own.
The pilot shook his head as the engine slowed even further. “Can’t, man. Gotta make sure we can fly. There is no place to make an emergency landing once we get up in the mountains.”
Just then the first SEAL poked his head in the side of the downed Black Hawk. Josh heaved a sigh, turned, and moved to the man. “Hey, can you guys set up a perimeter, and I’ll augment with my guys in a second. Fucking pilot hit a tree or something on the way in.”
The SEAL smiled broadly. “No shit, bro.”
Josh was embarrassed and jealous all at the same time. At least this guy was working with all his mates and not a bunch of second- and third-rate weekend warriors.
The pilot and copilot shut the helicopter down, then tried inspecting it, but in the darkness, they weren’t able to tell if the helicopter had sustained any real damage. The two pilots and their crew chief staged the tools they thought might be needed for an inspection once the sun came up, while Josh and the SEALs worked a perimeter around the temporarily decommissioned bird.
The following morning as the sun peeked over the top of the coastal range of mountains, the two pilots along with their crew chief got to work pulling panels off the aircraft in search of what was causing the vibrations in the helicopter’s foot pedals. Within an hour they solved the problem. Although the tail rotor had contacted some part of a tree, it was designed to endure significant impacts without disintegrating. The rear wing had contacted a branch of medium thickness, which caused a moderate amount of damage to the leading edge of the right-side wing. The impact had completely torn off both static discharge wicks along with deforming the wing itself. The impact had driven the branch down and across the top of the aircraft’s dorsal spine fairing that covered the driveshaft for the tail rotor.
The damage to the fairing concerned the air crew the most since if the tail rotor driveshaft were to come apart or stop working, the aircraft would lose its antitorque capability and spin out of control unless the pilot were able to arrest the situation quickly. This fairing damage delayed the crew even longer, causing them to remove portions of it in order to inspect the drive shaft and its bearings.
The SEALs, Josh and his team waited impatiently as the flyboys worked at getting the helicopter airworthy. In days gone by, Josh would have called for an additional helicopter to come with more troops to secure the downed aircraft. A recovery operation would have been undertaken to either haul the downed helicopter back to base, or the machine would have been destroyed in place, depending on the situation.
Josh was more than a little concerned by the amount of noise the air crew made as they worked on the Black Hawk. The crew chief used a hammer to bash the rear wing into some semblance of its old shape. He would swing away and then holler for the pilot to test the controls; then he would repeat the process, making one hell of a racket. All the SEALs and Josh’s team were on edge by the time the fairing was replaced and the pilot declared the aircraft absolutely fifty percent safe for flight.
Smiling at Josh, the pilot wiped his greasy hands on the legs of his flight suit. “That’s about all we can do for it out here. Hope that shaft holds together. She took a beating on the way in.”
Josh didn’t smile. “Stay away from the trees, man.”
“You wanna fly us home?” the pilot shot back, his smile vanishing in an instant.
Josh let it go, realizing a pissing contest wasn’t going to help their situation. The air crew performed a cursory preflight, then cleared the area around the helicopter and began their startup procedures. Within a couple of minutes, the crew chief waved at the men on the perimeter to get on board. The inside of the helicopter was cramped, only being designed to hold eleven troops, placing the aircraft well past any safe weight and balance restrictions.
Josh felt the helicopter shudder as the pilot pulled the collective up, changing the pitch of the main rotor blades. Slowly they became airborne, hovered
