CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER 3 PETER P. LEONE III
U.S. Army Reserve
St. Augustine, Florida

As a young warrant officer on my first assignment out of flight school, I was chomping at the bit to go out and do great things. I considered myself fortunate to be assigned to Joint Tactical Force Bravo at Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras, a unit with an active peacetime mission.

For the first several months, I flew hundreds of hours under the mentorship of many great pilots, some Vietnam-era aviators near the end of their careers. With only one dot on my bar and about four months left on my tour, I received pilot in command orders and was told to make the commander proud.

My first assignment as a new PC was a five-day mission to deliver Air Force medical personnel to several small villages to conduct immunizations of Honduran nationals. My UH-1 was old, but she cleaned up nice. I was looking forward to the challenges of pre-global positioning system navigation using only charts and time/distance/heading to navigate to settlements that, in many cases, were nothing more than a cluster of huts in the middle of nowhere.

The initial leg of the flight was a long one. The first hour or so was filled with the happy chatter of a crew with good morale and glad to be in the air doing their job. The crew chief pinned open the doors and, after about an hour, boredom settled in. The warm breeze and the steady whine of the T-53 engine overhead threatened to put everybody asleep in the back.

The door gunner came on the intercom and suggested we spice up the flight by dropping down and doing some terrain flight along a narrow, winding river below. His suggestion was met with a chorus of approval from the rest of the crew. I could see the passengers were excited over the possibility.

During our mission-planning brief, we discussed low-level modes for this type mission. The rule was low-level modes were to be used “as necessary,” and the unit standing operating procedures left this up to the PC’s discretion. My first thought was that low-level flight really wasn’t “necessary” at this point in the mission, but the temptation was there to have a little fun and treat the troops to some turn-and-burn excitement.

After months of doing what other PCs wanted to do, the decision was now up to me. Since I hadn’t yet given a flat “no” to the idea, the crew sensed I might be on the fence. Now the pressure came from all sides. The intercom was jammed with, “Come on, sir!” and, “Let’s do it!” The Air Force colonel in charge of the medical detail borrowed the door gunner’s headset and challenged me to, “Show the Air Force how it’s done.” Even my co-pilot, a captain, joined in.

I had learned long ago to trust my gut, and an unplanned deviation for a joyride just didn’t pass the gut check. They weren’t going to leave it alone, so a go/no-go was required. There was universal disappointment when I rendered my decision of “negative.”

We continued the mission, visiting more than a dozen villages over the next two days. On the third day, I noted the next village on the list was located on the same river where I had previously declined to fly low level. I conducted a recon of the landing and pickup zones prior to landing. The first thing I noticed was the village actually straddled the river — half the village on one side, half on the other.

On short final, I detected a steel cable strung across the river between the two settlements. I inspected the cable after landing and estimated it to be about 2 inches in diameter. The cable was used to slide messages and packages from one side of the river to the other. Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. If I had chosen to run the river at low level, my helicopter would’ve likely collided with that cable! At 90 knots, the wire strike protection system wouldn’t have been effective against a cable that large and the collision would’ve been catastrophic. In short, my aircraft, crew and all aboard would have been dead at the bottom of the river.

I called the crew over and showed them the cable. Asking the group if they remembered their request to fly low-level, I let the significance of what I was showing them sink in. Our crew chief just shook his head and said, “Good call, sir.” Several times over the next few days, he stopped whenever he saw me and repeated, “Good call, sir.”

This incident drove home many lessons for my crew and me. I made the right call on this occasion, despite heavy pressure from my entire crew and some senior officers. However, I fault myself for even considering it. In this case, wrong would have meant dead. As aviators and Soldiers, we are risk takers by nature and necessity, but we don’t have to be risk seekers.