Going up the Hill.

Going up the Hill is a phrase that was used to describe Day 1 of actual flight school. When the student pilots graduate and the Warrant Officer Candidates leave, they call the reception station and deliver the order to send the next class "Up the Hill".

We left the reception station and proceeded toward the main heliport because the 5th WOC Company area was located near there. Compared to Ft. Polk, where I was housed in World War II barracks, 5th WOC was more like a college dormitory building minus the single rooms. There were 30 Candidates living in a 2 bunk cubical plus 1 Tactical Officer who had a private room at the end of the hall.

As we passed the PX, I noticed a Huey sitting on the helipad. It looked huge to me and even though I didn't know the rotor blades were 48' in diameter, I could see the turbine engine exhaust and thoughts of fixed wing school immediately left me. It was huge and much larger than the "Mash" type helicopter I'd seen at the State Fair. Little did I know that I would end up taking my instrument course in the Bell 47G, a duplicate of the helicopter that we all saw in the opening scenes of Mash, the tv series.

In any event, as we entered the parking lot of 5th WOC, another Drill Sargent showed up. He was a stout black man who had fought in Korea and related everything to the Korean War. Initially, I thought he was suffering from shell shock or combat fatigue but as it turned out, he was well educated in a discipline that I knew nothing about.

As we were standing in formation awaiting further instructions, I noticed a brand new Lincoln Town Car. I wondered how anyone in the Army could afford such a car but I was soon to find out. When my name was called and told to report to Flight A 1, the building in front of me, I grabbed my tote bag and walked through the front door of the barracks and proceeded down the hall way to a cubical that already had my name on it. That's when I met Chief Warrant Officer Machen, the trust fund baby and the owner of the Lincoln.

As things turned out, even though he was a Huey pilot who had finished a tour in Vietnam, he was more interested in reading his recently inherited stock portfolio than he was preparing us for fighting a war with helicopters. He didn't last very long and his new replacement, CW2 Bernard T. Diable, from Parma, Ohio, arrived to take his place. I wasn't sure if he was Audie Murphy or General George Patton's clone but in either event, he ended up being a God send to all of us. That was a good thing as training became a very serious thing that made my previous college courses look like a kindergarten class.

Diable helped me more than anyone had thus far in my Army training. He had already flown a tour of duty in Vietnam and was quite anxious to influence our thought processes in a way that he knew would save our asses. His main scope and focus targeted "Attention to detail". I could write a book about him but in the interest of saving some time, I'll point out two very important lessons he taught us.

After ground school ended and we actually started going to the heliport and began flying the Hiller OH 23, we began learning engine out procedures. They were called "auto rotations" and initially, they were hard as hell to master. We were already accustomed to hearing that, during engine failures, the helicopter had a glide ratio of a rock so we weren't really freaked out when the instructor pilot closed the throttle and effectively shut off the engine. What we weren't ready for was the effect the torque had on the airframe.

It caused the aircraft to yaw excessively and we had to immediately input right pedal to counter the turning of the aircraft. If the engine failed while you were in a hover, if you didn't add right pedal immediately, you would simply auger into the ground and crash in a matter of seconds. Initially, it would really get your attention and we learned what Diable meant when he said:  "pay attention to detail".

When we would return from the flight line, Diable would ask us to relate our experiences. When questions arose about mastering the auto rotations, he grabbed a chair that had small steel toes on the bottom of each leg and set it in the middle of the hallway which was concrete. The chair would slide easily there and he made one of us sit in the chair and act as if we were sitting in the pilot seat. He made us go through the motions of moving the collective downward to take all the pitch out of the rotor blades and putting in as much right pedal as we could. When we did that, he would move the chair in the appropriate direction of our control inputs and after a while, we got it. I bet I flew that chair down the hall way 100 times. Nobody in our flight washed out over auto rotations and I was the 2nd student pilot out of 30 to reach that goal of first solo.

My instructor pilot was Mr. A.B. Chapman. He had flown helicopters in Korea but was a civilian by then and decided to end his flying career teaching Warrant Officer Candidates how to fly helicopters. He was either very near or already passed his time to retire but he was a wonderful old guy and a really good instructor. Between him and Diable I had an insight that was rare in situations like that.

In any event, I soled on August 18, 1969 and I'll never forget that experience. Even though Chapman would compliment me on the successful completion of a lesson, on that day, he told me to stop the helicopter on the runway and let him out. He said: "You're too dangerous to fly with so go ahead and fly a pattern by yourself".

We both laughed and when he got out of the Hiller, I brought it up to a hover, took off, made my circuit and landed. There was a custom at that time, and every student pilot that soled was taken by bus to the Holiday Inn located in Mineral Wells where he was escorted through a pair of rotor blades and promptly thrown into the swimming pool by his classmates. It was wonderful because we were allowed to sew a set of wings on our baseball caps to show all that we had flown without an instructor and were actually, real, live helicopter pilots.

I have more to say about my experiences in Primary Flight School, especially an emergency landing I had to make on a cross country flight to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma but I'll have to make that Part 2. Y'all stand by and I'll get on that later this evening. Thanks for reading.