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Bucket List

Bucket List

COMPILED BY KNOWLEDGE STAFF

Not long after I completed readiness level progression at my National Guard unit I received a call to join another Black Hawk crew on a state active-duty mission fighting fires near the Canadian border. My experience with the Bambi Bucket consisted of maybe a half-dozen dips and drops during my initial qualification, so I was relieved to hear I would be flying with a maintenance test pilot who was one of our most experienced senior warrant officers.

The long flight to the fire was largely uneventful. We met our sister aircraft at the civilian staging airfield to get briefed by the ground firefighters and aerial controller before setting up the buckets and starting the operation. The winds were exceptionally strong that day on the Northern Plains, making the grass fire spread too quickly for ground crews to contain. Before we had arrived, a civilian contract helicopter had been working the fire, but the pilot decided to park it after determining the wind gusts were too strong for his light aircraft. Still well within our aircraft limits, we decided to work the fire until either the winds picked up, we ran out of daylight or we reached our duty-day limits.

Under the direction of the aerial controller who was circling overhead in an airplane, we were directed to several bodies of water surrounding the fire and selected a downwind dip site that was clear of smoke. It was at this point, as the crew began discussing how cool what we were about to do really was, we discovered the only person in the aircraft to have previously worked an actual fire was one of the crew chiefs.

As a newly minted pilot, I had not considered complacency to be something I needed to worry about until years later in my career. In that moment, however, I quickly realized my trust in the experience of my PC had let me take the attitude of just being along for the ride. With the exception of our first pass on the fire, where our flight path was a bit too low and brought us through thick smoke, the first day was a success. We honed our approach angles, dipping sites and dropping techniques, leading to a positive debrief with the firefighters that evening.

The next morning was similarly windy and brought more of the same. With the fire so close to good dipping sites, we were able to go from dip to drop in the matter of minutes. After several bags of gas and miles of grass fire extinguished, the second day was coming to a close. Our sister ship had just returned to the staging airfield for the night, and we were being directed by the aerial controller to mop up hotspots which had flared up in the already-extinguished area.

For most of the afternoon, we had been using a great dip site downwind of the fire. It was deep, had great references for a solid hover and was free of trees, letting us stay above effective translational lift throughout the dip. That day, we had made about 80 dips at this site, always departing with a full bucket in the direction of the wind and returning light with the wind to our backs. All day we had tightened up our downwind-to-base and base-to-final turns due to the 30-plus-knot winds pushing our patterns farther from the dip site. Tightening our turns made our patterns more efficient, and due to light aircraft going into the dip and strong headwinds on final, our approaches were safe and stable.

All of this changed when our aerial controller asked us to hit a hotspot on the downwind side of our dip site. This drop was on our way back to the stage airfield and would be our last of the day. As we took off out of the dip site, everything was normal. We departed into the wind and proceeded to make our crosswind and downwind turns after we had gained airspeed. What happened next took the whole crew by surprise, yet it should not have.

As we passed the hotspot out our left door, we began slowing down to make the base turn as we had done countless times into the dip site. But something felt different this time. It felt like the bottom began to drop out and we started sinking — fast! We had not taken into account that we now had a full bucket of water hanging below us. Due to the sustained winds and our dip/drop locations, this was the first time all day we were at an out-of-ground-effect hover with a full bucket of water.

As we pulled in power to arrest our descent, it became clear we did not have enough power margin to overcome the rate of descent before hitting the ground. As I reached for the hook release button, I heard our seasoned crew chief say these precious words seconds before impact, “Dumping, dumping, dumping.” Immediately, our crisis was over. We credit that crew chief with saving our bacon that day. If I had released the water bucket, not only would it have been stuck in a muddy marsh miles from the nearest city, it likely would have been destroyed from the impact.

The list of factors that led to our adventure that day is long and distinguished, but all of them were avoidable. During the mission brief, crew mix could have considered more than pairing a low-hour pilot with a high-hour pilot; recency of experience and expertise on the specific mission task is vitally important as well. Including a candid discussion of inexperience at this task in the crew brief could have heightened crew coordination and pointed out specific things to note such as the wind conditions in relation to OGE hover and the necessity to rely on the airspeed indicator instead of visual cues to determine when we would transition through ETL. On the problematic downwind to base leg that day, we went through ETL at about 50 knots groundspeed. We learned a lot about crew mix that day, along with proficiency with the task at hand and how aviation always has a few surprises to share with you.

  • 1 September 2015
  • Author: Army Safety
  • Number of views: 10042
  • Comments: 0
Categories: On-DutyAviation
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