CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER 2 JASON SHARP
It was a beautiful and sunny late October morning in Kandahar, Afghanistan, during my deployment in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. We were a scout weapons team conducting routine reconnaissance in the Arghandab River Valley. This was the last flight before going home on mid-tour leave and everything was going well.
Things had finally settled down after a long, drawn out fighting season. The “Green Zone,” where most of the action took place throughout the summer, was quieter, which made it easier for us to find some of the unused weapon caches left behind by Taliban fighters. As we conducted our checks with the owning ground units, they passed information on several grids they wanted us to investigate. After we loaded the data into our system, we would systematically check the areas and report back to the ground unit if we saw anything out of the norm. This is where I should have realized something was up.
Normally, the lead aircraft conducts the reconnaissance, while the trail aircraft sets up in a position to cover lead in case they take fire. While checking out these grids, I noticed my trail aircraft was farther away than normal and not in the greatest position to cover me. Since the action had died down in the area of operations, I wasn’t too worried about it. As we continued checking our last named area of interest, we informed trail that we didn’t see anything. He called back and said he had something at our last NAI and wanted me to come back around to cover him. So, as we came back around, I noticed he was several kilometers away again. This should have been the second hint that something was up.
We had been flying this area of operations for the last seven months and were very familiar with it. We didn’t need our moving maps to navigate through it and only really used them to enter grids to get to an exact point. As trail finished his reconnaissance, I assumed lead again.
About this time, we received a blue force tracker message from the tactical operations center ordering us to return to Kandahar Air Field immediately due to bad weather. We thought it was funny because it was beautiful in the Arghandab River Valley, but we weren’t going to argue against a shortened mission.
As we made our way back through Wild Turkey Pass into Kandahar City, we could see a huge dust cloud developing in the Red Desert and increased speed to get back into KAF. As we crossed the saddle at No Drugs Pass, approximately three miles from Mustang Ramp, KAF disappeared. Within seconds, visibility was close to zero, and KAF announced the field was under instrument flight rules.
I called trail and said I was slowing and maintaining a heading toward Mustang Ramp. I had my pilot put us up direct to Mustang Ramp to ensure I was still traveling straight at it. My PI told me to come left and Mustang Ramp was three and a half kilometers to our nine o’clock position. At that moment, I realized my global positioning system/inertial navigation system was degraded and had been all day, which meant trail had been looking at the correct NAIs while we were nowhere near them.
Thankfully, we were only a short distant from the airfield and knew there were no hazards to avoid between us and the ramp. We made it in safely, but not without a major butt pucker factor for the last minute or two.
This incident could have turned out badly had we been farther from KAF. Finding out your GPS/INS system is not working properly at the moment you might have to declare IIMC is not the way you want to begin an emergency procedure.
There were several hints throughout the flight that something was up. We were consistently confirming between cockpits that we didn’t see anything at each NAI. The problem was caused by the fact we weren’t looking at the same ones. I just didn’t put two and two together. I had become so familiar with the AO over the first seven months that I didn’t rely on the navigation system, at least not until I couldn’t see anymore and really needed it.
Anyone who has flown in Regional Command South knows the weather can change very rapidly and you need to be prepared to execute procedures for IIMC. Luckily, my complacency didn’t injure my co-pilot, team or myself.