To Tempt Fate By Capt. Ian T. Brown, USMC
ike all the pilots whose stories have graced the pages of this magazine, I never thought the day would come when I’d describe a mission where we tempted fate just a little too much. Still, I’d much rather write about our close call, than have someone else talk about us in a mishap report. Our squadron had been flying CH-53E missions out of Al Asad Air Base for the last four months, and our task this day was no different from the countless other general-support missions we’ve flown. The helicopter-aircraft commanders (HACs) for our section were among the most experienced in the unit: Our section lead had 3,500 hours, and my HAC in Dash-2 had 2,100 hours. I was a new HAC with 720 hours, taking my turn in the copilot’s seat, and lead’s copilot only had 560 hours. Everyone had deployed to Iraq multiple times, but this time was the first pump to this part of Iraq for all four pilots. Our flight was divided into two parts: a quick hop to a couple of zones just to our north, along the Euphrates, followed by a long leg southwest out to Korean Village (KV) and back. Our forecast had a TEMPO line calling for rain, blowing dust, and reduced visibility throughout the day, so we didn’t expect to accomplish much tasking. However, the first leg went without a hitch. A little rain continued in the area, but we had good cloud ceilings and visibility. We were well ahead of time, so we got lunch and checked the weather. The outlook for the next 72 hours called for poor weather throughout the AO, but the morning hadn’t been as bad as predicted. So, we launched with the intention of turning back if we ran into significant weather. At about the halfway point, we saw a line of rain showers stretching across the horizon. Our altitude 18
was 2,000-feet MSL, and the clouds were level with us, but by dropping down about 300 feet, we got below the layer. We had better than three miles of visibility around us, and had no problem seeing the ground. We could pick out the individual shower cells ahead of us, so we decided to work our way around them, as the cloud line was only a few miles deep. Heavy rain started hitting our windshield, and we could see flashes of lightning in the distance. This weather quickly cleared up on the other side. The fun wasn’t over yet, though. A collapsing storm cell had stirred up a wall of dust to the west, so we skirted south a few miles before turning back on course. We made it to KV without any more weather games. After landing, I ran into my fellow copilot while we got refueled. I joked that the return trip would be “interesting” (I figured we just had flown through the worst of it). I mistakenly thought the conditions were all blowing away from us. We took off, and almost right away, things got difficult. About 10 miles northeast of KV, we ran into blowing dust that was picked up by strong gusting winds from our tail. We tightened up our formation and flew lower and slower. We kept the local eastwest, main supply route in sight, to maintain good reference with the ground. The dust cleared after a few minutes, and we trucked on. At the halfway point, we switched off from KV approach to the direct-air-support center (DASC). However, that Approach
