How not to impress a Navy Commodore

This post is personal, history for future generations.

In 1969 I got my Navy wings and was assigned to a Navy helicopter squadron deployed aboard USS Wasp, an antisubmarine aircraft carrier. I spent the first half of the year learning to hunt submarines and fly the SH-3 helicopter. In September we went to NAS Quonset Point where we would be until 1972. In October I went to sea for the first time.

I was very new to shipboard life but the most enjoyable part was flying. One day early in the cruise I was flying in the right seat (the aircraft commander seat) when a call came to pick up a Navy Captain, the commodore of the destroyer squadron accompanying us, from a destroyer and take him to the Wasp. I had never trained in this maneuver but you don’t switch seats in flight in a helicopter so my aircraft commander, LCDR Zahn Hausmann, said he’d talk me through it.

The Commodore’s destroyer had only a small helicopter deck, not big enough to land an H-3 so we had to pick him up with the rescue hoist. This involved hovering over the aft deck of the destroyer and lowering the rescue hoist attached to a personnel sling. The Captain would get into the sling, we would hoist him up and bring him inside, then heard for the Wasp. Piece of cake.

The only problem is,  when hovering you can’t see the deck, only the side of the destroyer, from the pilot’s seat. The copilot can’t see much of anything but ocean. Zahn told me to just watch the ocean and just glance occasionally at the ship, which was wallowing at a very slow speed in the swell.  For a while it went well, but at one point I fixated for a moment on the ship just as it took a vicious roll to the left, toward the helicopter.  I instinctively pulled away from the ship, taking the cyclic stick with me.  Immediately the helicopter began to move back and away, not far but enough.

During this maneuver the crewman in the back who ran the hoist was talking me through staying on the right spot with statements like “easy back” or “easy left”.  At this point he said “easy right”, then his voice rose and he said “forward” followed by “Altitude!”  Unbeknownst to me, as the moment I lost focus the Commodore was being lifted from the deck and his feet were just barely touching it.  I moved back and he was then forward of the hoist.  When his feet left the deck he began to swing back toward the centerpoint of the hoist, just as I moved the helicopter forward.  After the backswing, he began swinging forward (a bit faster) toward the hangar on the deck.  In response to my crewman’s command for altitude I pulled in quite a bit of power and he was unceremoniously jerked off the deck and just missed hitting the hangar with his foot.  Well, not exactly unceremoniously.  As he was lifted into the air the destroyer’s bosun was piping him overboard and everyone on the deck was saluting.

I, meanwhile, was terrified.  I could see my career going up in smoke.  I asked the crewman how the Commodore looked when they got him inside.  He said the Commodore looked kind of gray and wasn’t saying anything.  We deposited him on the carrier and heard no more about the incident, although he did ask that someone else take him back to the destroyer.  In the course of the next couple of years I got better at the job.  My last retrieval was from the deck of a surfaced submarine, which was completely invisible from my position.  I had to rely entirely on the hoist crewman, and it went just fine.  Not a bad end for such an inauspicious start.