Fly to Oklahoma and DON'T screw it up.

It didn't take long for us to make it through primary flight instruction, emergency procedures, hovering, auto rotations and confined area landings before we soloed. Despite that, within 90 days or so,  we started to get into some serious navigation exercises.

Some were local flights but even though we hardly ever flew much further than 30 miles away from the base, some of us just HAD to do a little flying our own way. I think it was Bob Bandusky who started the trouble but one of the students flew over a swimming pool that had a boat load of girls that were...........well, you know, it was another one of those bikini things.

One day, news came out about a long distance flight from Ft. Wolters, Texas all the way to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I was diggin' it because my room mate was going to be the other student pilot with me and he was one hell of a navigator. It was still nice weather and winter was no where near so we didn't have to worry about weather, carburetor heat or anything like that.

We did our flight planning and submitted our plans to Mr. Chapman for double checking. With all things in place, they gave us a run down on how our entire, Flight A1, could make a trip like that without trouble. They explained to us that a chase ship would fly with us and a mechanic was on board to address any problems that might cause us to make an emergency landing or a precautionary landing. There's a lot of difference between those two kinds of landings.

It was a fine day and the flight was going very well until we lost our rotor tachometer. Even though the engine tachometer was synchronized with the rotor tachometer and we could effectively know that we were still operating "in the green", one of the rules required us to land if we lost that instrument. I reported the failure to the chase ship and the mechanic told us to fly to a small strip at a town that I recall as Bowie, Texas. It was on our VFR chart and was only a couple of minutes away from our location when the tachometer failed.

I was flying that part of the leg and was in sight of the strip in no time at all. As I announced my intentions to land and began my descent, I noticed an odd sight on the west side of the strip. From our altitude I couldn't tell that it was a huge turkey farm but I was about to discover that they didn't like helicopters. Maybe they had become accustomed to the crop dusters there but helicopters totally freaked them out. I made my approach and landed without incident with the chase ship right behind us. The turkeys went nuts and I was glad that they had a huge fence around the farm that prevented them from getting off their property and attacking us when we landed.

As if the pissed off turkeys weren't enough, the farmer showed up and he was pissed off too. While the mechanic was replacing the tachometer, the farmer was raising hell about the amount of weight his birds would loose this close to Thanksgiving. By that time, other locals showed up to find out what in the hell was going on at their little crop dusting strip. I was real glad to here the mechanic say: 'We're done boys, let's get the hell out of here before they lynch us". With that, we cranked up the OH 23 Hiller and continued our flight to Ft. Sill without further incident.

Mike and I were the last flight to arrive but we landed with the chase ship and were really happy that the first leg of our cross country trip was finished safely. Little did I know then that being forced to make a precautionary landing would serve me well in Vietnam a year later when we had a compressor stall in the turbine powered Huey Wayne Morvent and I were flying with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.

In any event, we were safe and sound on the ground at Ft. Sill and our tour of the artillery base began. We attended a "Live Fire Exercise" of the famous 125 mm howitzers. I had never witnessed anything like that before but a year later, I was really glad that I had. My first night in Xuan Loc with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade began with a 125 going off right outside the bunker where I had just laid down to go to sleep. In any event, we watched the artillery exhibition, were told that we would have to learn how to adjust artillery from the air when we took our tactics course at Ft. Rucker and that ended the lesson.

I'll end this with a note about my previous statement describing flight school as a course that made college look like kindergarten. It was nothing for us to wake up at 4 a.m. and work all day long and long into the night. There were many 16 hour days. That included physical training. We were always tired.

On the return trip from Ft. Sill, Oklahoma to Ft. Wolters, Texas, Mike and I had a hard time staying awake. I was concerned that we might be experiencing a leak in the exhaust system but that turned out to be false. We were just wore out. I fell asleep while Mike was flying and he fell asleep while I was. At one point during the flight I noticed that both of us were "nodding off". Despite that, we had an uneventful return flight and felt really good over the fact that we'd managed to make a flight that long without any instructor pilots telling us what to do and which way to go. To us, a 300 mile round trip was huge and from that day forward, I knew we could fly anywhere using the same skills that it took to make the flight to and from Ft. Sill. More on flight school later.