Aircraft Commander

 

I don’t know if it was a unit policy or a local regulation, but a pilot was required to have 300 hundred hours of flight time in country before he could be considered for aircraft commander. That meant a pilot would have over 500 hours of total time when the flight school hours were considered.

At midday we had been released into the company area to stand by on the aircraft. We were told to head to the mess hall for lunch, but to return to the aircraft when we were finished eating. I walked to the helicopter and the aircraft commander, one of the senior pilots in the company which meant he’d been there for six or seven months, told me to grab my helmet and move to the left seat.

I will note here, and again I don’t know how wide spread it was or if it was something unique to our battalion, but the aircraft commander typically flew the left seat, though the helicopter was set up for the AC to be in the right seat. This was the opposite of the way airplanes were arranged. The AC took the left seat because the view from the left side was better than that on the right.

I wasn’t sure what was going on, but did as I was told. The AC, and I don’t remember who it was, told me to climb into the cockpit. He took the right seat and began to explain that the situation in the left seat was slightly different than what I was used to.

Notice the white cord around
my neck? This holds the SOI.
It became a status symbol for
some because the ACs were
the ones who normally wore
them.

In flight school, we switched seats depending on the training and who was with us, so I had experience flying in the left seat. But that was flight school and I had already learned that some of the truths we learned in flight school were not truths in country. This puzzled me because all the instructors were combat veterans who had recently returned from their tours in Vietnam.

As we sat there, he quizzed me on the various frequencies for the evac hospitals, for artillery clearances, where the hospitals were, and all sorts of things that I’d picked up flying around Vietnam for the last couple of months. He told me where we’d need to go for certain wounds, depending are where we happened to be. And then we went through some of the emergency procedures.

When we took off, I was the one who had to take care of everything. He just sat there, watching everything I did. Periodically, he would reach up and pull a circuit breaker that would cause an instrument to fail. He was making sure that I kept an eye on the instruments. Once I saw him reach up to do it and said, “Push in the circuit breaker.”

It was different sitting in the left seat. In flight school, our introduction to formation flying had been quite a bit looser than it was in country. Now the formations were tighter so that we would have better suppressive fire from the door guns. But the angles I had learned to watch for were different and it took a while to get used to that. It was almost as if I had just arrived in country and was learning formation flying all over again.

The learning curve was gentler and I picked it up quickly. I held our place in the formation, though I was a little bit farther back than I would have been in the right seat. The AC just sat there, watching everything, making a comment or two, or asking a question but mostly just along for the ride.

This went on for several days, until I had flown with each of the ACs at least once. They were all evaluating my abilities so they could determine if I was ready to be an aircraft commander. I figured they discussed it at the AC’s meetings that were held now and then.

Finally, I was told that I was ready for my AC check ride. First, in a single ship, we flew around the local area. I was responsible for all the radio calls… to Hornet Operations to let them know we were taking off, to the tower for clearance and to Cu Chi Arty to be sure we were clear of the gun target lines. We were making the round robin flight that required us to visit several outlying bases in what was known as Combat Support.

Along the way, the AC chopped the throttle to simulate an engine failure. I entered autorotation and said that if the engine failure was real that I would be making a mayday call, giving my location. As I flared out for touch down, he rolled the throttle back on was we ended that exercise at a hover. I began a climb, back to 1500 feet which was out of effective small arms range.

All that was only part one of the check ride. The next day was part two, which was in the flight. Same deal, the AC just watching everything but saying very little about how I was doing. Looking back on it, I know that had I screwed anything up, he would have taken control and let me know what I had done wrong.

When the flight was released for the day, the AC didn’t say much. Just told me to fill out the book and take the SOI (signal operation instruction which held the codes and frequencies for everything, which made it a classified document and required it by turned into operations at the end of the day) back to operations.

I didn’t ask how I’d done because, at the moment, even if I had failed, I wouldn’t know it. The chance was still alive that I had passed.

In the officer’s club, someone asked how I had done. I said that I hadn’t asked, and he couldn’t believe it. He didn’t subscribe to my philosophy. Of course, the determination hadn’t been made yet because the ACs had to get together to decide my fate.

I learned the answer after dinner that night, at the briefing in the club. The company commander said (more or less), “Randle has to buy the bar.”

For an instant I didn’t know what he meant, but then it became clear. I had been elevated to aircraft commander and because of that, I owed everyone a drink. One of the other ACs whispered to me, “Just give the bartender twenty bucks and let it go at that.”

As I did that, I realized something else. Suddenly, there was no one else to blame if there was a mistake in the aircraft. I was now the senior officer on board, and everything was my responsibility, from dealing with the emergencies, from ensuring that everyone on board was safe and to get to the proper place, if I was flying the round robin. I would have to navigate and I would have to make all the decisions.

Of course, it wasn’t all that bad. Because I was the junior AC, I was assigned to a position in the center of the flight. I wouldn’t be given the round robin or any single ship missions until I had a little more experience. Everything would be a learning situation.

Oddly, one of those first lessons came from a friend. He said that my voice sounded too high on the radio. He suggested that I take a breath before making a radio call. It would make me sound calmer.

But here I was, just 19. I still had friends in high school, and others were freshmen in college. While they were still kids in the eyes of many, having fun, I was in a combat environment with the lives of those on my aircraft my responsibility. Of course, I didn’t have such deep thoughts at the time. I was just annoyed that becoming an AC had cost me twenty bucks.