A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

An often used line for a good adventure story goes…”It was a dark and stormy night!” And so does this story about such a night.

After too many years I was recently reunited with a pilot that shared that “dark and stormy night” forty eight years ago. Our bond was built around that harrowing night in Viet Nam.

Turning back the pages of time our story begins in the late afternoon hours when our entire helicopter company was called out to support an emergency situation, the details of which have escaped me. The flight, some twenty plus helicopters, “slicks” (transports) and their “guns” (armed support) escort launched into gathering storm clouds and headed north. 
 

It quickly became apparent that we were headed directly into a wall of thunderstorms!

I will have to stop the story here for a little background information. First, few helicopter pilots at that time were instrument rated (able to fly on instruments only in bad weather). Second our helicopters were not really equipped to fly “instruments”.

Fortunately CWO Driggers, our company training pilot, diligently worked on preparing his young pilots, many of us in our late teens or early twenties, for “inadvertent flight into IMC” (Instrument Meteorological Conditions). This training was conducted “under the hood” or a shield fitted over our helmets that only allowed a view of our “instruments”.

Ok now the stage has been set. On this evening, as we approached the line of thunderstorms we blindly followed our leader into the storm. Almost instantly the “dark and stormy night” wrapped around us and hurled us into its churning cauldron of heavy rain, buffeting winds and intense lightening. What we thought we were doing has puzzled me for all these years. However, we took the training Mr. Driggers had given us a plowed ahead.

The radio was a cacophony of urgent messages from the other helicopter as they realized their predicament and elected to divert to a number of different alternates. Darkness rapidly enveloped the entire flight. Our door gunner and crew chief gunner silently closed the doors and prepared for the worst and were surely praying the two young pilots up front knew what they were doing.

The helicopter pitched and rolled as we fought the weather and an even worse enemy, vertigo. With the interior lights reflecting off the windscreen and the outside flashes of lightening we quickly became disorientated and wracked by vertigo. Vertigo is like being sea sick, a stomach churning off balance situation. Fortunately I had a bout of vertigo on one of Mr. Driggers training flights and remembered him quietly saying….”believe your instruments and not your brain trying to tell you what’s up and down”. Each of us were overcome as we flew onward. Each spelling the other until caught up in their vertigo.

How much time went by I have no idea…we just dialed up the nearest Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) radio beacon and plunged onward until we passed over the beacon then made successive turns back to the beacon and started descending until we broke out over the airfield. Did we call for permission? I don’t remember…I do remember the tower telling us to stay where we had landed until the monsoonal rains let up enough for further instructions…this we did!

Thanks to our training from Mr. Driggers, our own practice when returning from flights and confidence in each other we survived. Others were not so fortunate on that “dark and stormy night”.