Helo Bubbas

Yesterday (Saturday 17 Sept) was one of those days! Sam, my buddy, roomate and fellow pilot woke up early for our 6am brief. Our mission today was to cart a two star admiral around the county side. Well not quite that but just transport her and her entourage from Gulfport to the New Orleans Naval Support Activity and then Back to Gulfport. A pretty simple mission and one that we are good at.

With a mission plan in hand, a good weather brief, a solid aircraft we boarded our steed and headed out, a bit early by the way, into the wild blue yonder to pick up our charge.

We zipped along the coast, specifically the intercoastal waterway from New Orleans to the Gulfport area. It was amazing to witness the fury of Mother Nature first hand. All along the coast the destruction was awesome. The water was the main culprit. Absolutely amazing! Imaging yourself walking down the each where there is a tide. The high water line is where all the crud from the water collects. Sea grass, cigarette butts, soda cans, sticks. Well this is what the coast looked like from the air. Everything minus trees was washed to the high water line and just strewn about. We would fly over just foundations with nothing else there. Lots with only an in ground pool remaining. One of the most impressive sites I saw was a school about a half mile from the coast an on the roof of the school was the high water line.

We finally made it to the landing zone at the CB base, essentially a big parking lot. There was large group of people there so everything seemed ok. We kicked our crewman out to find our passengers. It was pretty obvious what we were doing, kind of hard to hide a helicopter. Our crewman found some navy chiefs who told them that the Admiral decided to drive to New Orleans. So with this new information in hand and a C2 (command and control) aircraft over head we called back to “mother” to ask for guidance. Mom told us to return to base, so that is exactly what we did. Of course we took our time gawking at all the damage along the coast.

Upon returning to the ship, we shut down and proceeded to do our engine wash, assuming we were complete for the day. Not bad for an hours worth of work. Here it is 9am and we were done for the day!

Well almost, Sam had gone in to the ship to start the paperwork process and while he was inside he received a call telling him to get back in his rotating, vibrating steed and go back to Gulfport and retrieve our wayward admiral. So that is what we did. After some confusion on the flight deck, which has been the case ever sense we have been in New Orleans..

Side bar comment: Confusion on the flight deck. The way the ship is docked provides for only 4 landing zones. When traffic is busy like it usually is, this causes a great deal of heart ache for the deck guys. Aircraft will come in have to shut down and fold in a short amount of time to make room for the aircraft coming in behind us. After the bird is folded, it is “boned” or put into its parking spot out of the way for landing aircraft. A painful process and the only reason it is painful is because the deck crew bless their hearts are extremely slow when it comes to maneuvering aircraft around the flight deck. Not entirely their fault however they should be getting better. Our deck crew has been busting their collective asses to make this mission a success. In reality, they should get a ton of credit.

Back to the story at hand, Sam and I launched our bird, of course after it was put back together, we were also doing a 60-hour engine wash on the aircraft as well. Ok so the bird is back together and off we went charging into the morning sky back to Gulfport to pick up our way ward admiral.

We landed back at the Sea Bee Base and loaded our VIP then headed back to the Naval Support Activity to drop her off. After a quick drink of fuel on the USS Shreveport, we headed down the Mississippi River for a little sight seeing. This area is pretty badly beaten up. Still lots of flooding and towns for the most part wiped off the map. The oil refineries in this area seemed to have made out alright, not a lot of structural damage however some of the facilities along the river were damaged. We flew all the way down to Venice, and yep in lots of areas it looked like Venice Italy minus the gondolas and spaghetti. The summer stench of Venice and the trash was there along with lots of seagulls. I don’t think pigeons like the Mississippi delta heat and humidity.

Or time and fuel was up so we had to head back to the city to pick up the VIP and take her to the Joint Reserve Base, (JRB) for a while. While here we shut down and chatted with some air force reserve pilots for a while. Learned a little about the reserves and found out that there is a lot of money to be made flying helicopters if you are willing to travel and be out of the county for a while. We also learned that the air force really spoils its aircrews. When their aircraft breaks, they go Houston or some other far off point, sleep in hotels, drink beer and have a good old time.

After our short break we were once again on our way back to Gulfport to drop off our VIP. The weather was looking ominous to the north as we headed there and hoped the weather would hold until we were back aboard mother.

Another side bar comment: After all was said and done, it turned out that the admiral we had originally launched to pick up in Gulfport was actually at the LZ when we landed there the very first time. She however did not realize that at that time, our scheduled pick up time that we were there in fact o pick her up… Can you hear the music?

Ok, so we dropped off our passengers and we were cruising on home along the canal I was at the controls and Sam goes, “Dude that guy in that boat is waving at us like he needs some help!” So I slow us down and bring the helo around to see what the story is. Obviously communications by hand signals sucks at best and at worst futile when speaking with foreign hand signals we made the quick decision to land on the bank of the canal and kick out our crewman to see what the story was.

This was another one of those interesting landings. The canal bank was sandy near the water and had very tall marsh grass way from the water. We found the best clearing that we could and gently eased the aircraft on to the surface hoping that we would not sink into some goo and get stuck or FOD out the engines. This could have been bad. Anyhow we landed just fine and the marsh grass came up to the top of our cockpit windows. Kind of cool, I am slapping myself for not having the crewman take a quick pick of our LZ.

Come to find out, it was some divers who were working on a pipeline or something and their motor had broken down and the other group of boats in their party was no where around. So we decided to take on the two with us to their base camp to start the recovery process. One of the divers did not want to leave the boat. Understandable. Well the gentleman we took with us was the older of the two. We strapped him in and took off for the base camp which was supposedly just up one of the many rivers in the area. Well as soon as we got this guy into the air, it seemed as thought he lost all sense of direction. Apparently he is a better mariner of the deep then that of the air. We tried every option we knew to help him find his home, even giving him our map to point out where he needed to go. However he failed to bring his reading glasses and was unable to accurately mark the position on the map. The guy was from out of town and did not even know the name of the town where the base camp was located. Additionally all the placed we flew over (as far as Slidell to the north) that he directed us to we could not find the correct location. With our fuel level low and frustration level high, we took our passenger to the ship to refuel and have him call his wife who had the number of the place he was working out of and in turn called the company to A. Find out where in the hell they were located and B. to tell them they had a boat that was broken. What a fiasco! Anyhow with help on the way, we elected to return this gentleman back to his buddy on the side of the canal. So we did. It was a little bit of a challenge trying to explain exactly what had transpired to the airboss however like all the craziness around here, he took it in stride.

Our planned 1 hour day of flying actually turned into a 7.5 hour day. Not to shabby and a typical day in the life here with JTF Katrina!