An Update from the Big Easy

It has been a while since i have pushed out an update and if you are old school you will remember the journal entries.  Well I have sort of become lazy in my old age and stopped writting in my journal... However this is partially because my laptop is having issues.. i must upgrade if I ma to continue..additionally I have been quite busy the past ten day... go figure.

 

Anyhow on this adventure i am the operations officer so I get to go to all the fun meetings and write the flight schedule, I do however like being in the mix of things and knowing what the hell is going on.  Ever since we got abour the mighty IWO things have been constantly changing.

 

Monday as the storm was just finishing off the gulf coast we recieved a warning order that we might be heading out to the Gulf...  an on again off again type thing.. The navy unlike the army does not use operations orders..  With that being said tuesday we finally got the "go" word and we fevorishly started packing our gear to head out to the ship... another point of contention with the way my squadron operates.  We dont set ourselves up for success by training like we fight..  anyhow not the forum for my opinion.. well actually it is.. We flew out to the boat and "mom" as we call our new home the IWO started haulling some serious ass to get to the gulf coast to provide assistance.   

 

We arrived on station off the coast of Biloxi and did a days worth of work.. mostly a few helicopter flights to the beach.. biloxi pensacola and even new orleans.  We even sent our hover craft over the beach with a bunch of seabees and some food/water to assist where we could..  That night the captain came back to the ship with new marching orders, to get the ship underway and steam up the Mississippi and provide assistance to people in NOLA.. so that is exactly what we did.. at dawn the following day the ship met the pilot at the mouth of the mississippi delta and inland we went, a voyage of about 70 miles and highly unusual for a ship of this class..  At the end of the day the ship was tied up at the Riverwalk in downtown new orleans just up the river from rue carrie and the french quarter..   

 

The very next day we (I use "we" in general, could be the ship as a whole or the squadron or the helo and crew) started doing things not necessarily standard operating procedure, flying helicopters off the ship while tied up in port.  Along with that, the obsticles at the riverwalk makes the flying even more hazardous.  I was one of the first helicopters off the deck to begin searching the city... of course after a VIP run to the Emergency operations Center in Baton Rouge, our first intersting landing zone of the day, a baseball diamond.   These places get pretty small when you have a big helicopter to bring in... After the pax pick up we zipped back across lake Pontichtrain to the ship to drop off our passengers and begin our first search

 

A very intersting experiance.. basically the whole north side of the city was underwater.  We cruised the around at extremly low level, about 150ft over the house, avoiding powerlines, towers and the plethora of other helicopters operating in the area.  I am talking a ton of helicopters.. you could look around and count about 25 that you could see and maybe a about a half dozen more you could not see because of thier color and proximity to the urban terrain below.    To give you an idea of how busy the airspace was, i was flying around a fire and out from the smoke plume came a civilian 60 with a water bucket on a collision course.  We turned hard to avoid the collision only to come in very close proximity to another helo which inturn required more evasive maneuvering on the part of your highly skilled pilot.  

 

We were luck and did not have a mid air and we continued to seach the city.. Late in the morning we found some people on a roof top, we circled around to lower our swimmer for the rescue and it was a success.  However the people did not want to come out of the city.  There loss, we pulled the swimmer out, reported thier position and continued the seach to the north east of the superdome.  In this area, canal street was in fact a canal and we saw a few bodies and reported those as well.  We continued searching and came across a woman in the water very near the cite of the first civilian helicopter crash.  We actually landed not to far from the crash to let our swimmers lend a hand with some local officials who were trying to get the woman who was supposedly a nut case into a boat and out of the city...

 

Later in the afternoon we were tasked to pick up some refugees as we are calling the stranded civilians from a small landing zone (LZ) that was set up by the locals and fly them to the international airport.  After the drop at the airport we picked up some relief workers and flew them to an LZ that was set up at the convention center, once again another interesting landing. 

 

We finished off our day on the east side of the city near the amusement park and not finding anyone.  Sam another pilot buddy of mine did come across a sinking rescue boat and pulled two people out with his swimmer..  a good day for him and an even better day for the people in the boat...

 

My day ended after 11 hours in the cockpit at about midnight.   Of course we had the required evening meetings paperwork dinner and of course a shower..

 

More tomorrow.. if you are lucky

NUTZ