TopCat... Huey stories ...
Anyway, here's the last one I worked with. A UH-1N that my team at the Naval Air Warfare Center (Pax River) used as an avionics test bed and development tool. It was a littlemore advanced than an H ... but not much... Different radios a multi-function display (or three ...) the BriteStar FLIR system... and a bunch of racks in the back for mounting whatever needed to go fly. Like most of the rest of that team, we had come out of the H-1 Program Office so we had been bringing the AH-1Z and the UH-1Y online and sundowning the AH-1W's and the UH-1N's. This N was one of the last N's in service. Most of the USMC N's were given to the Air Force. This particular N was assigned to us. When we retired it, it went to the National Museum of the Marine Corps where it is now on display in the Desert Storm section. Chris (HAC in the pictures) and I hatched a plan to fly it to Quantico (about a 15-20 minute hop from Pax) but like a lot of cool ideas, it got squashed -- The Fleet needed to harvest some things off of it that made it non-flyable. So it got trucked instead.
But I did get to host "America's Huey," the UH-1H that got flown to the Smithsonian. We had that on our flightline at the test squadron (HX-21) for the weekend. We were one of the last stops before the National Mall. I got some nice shots of the three Hueys together -- the H, N and Y models. I'll look for those.
My cousin is a psychopath -- his idea of "fun" is backing into a tree line.
Back to the R/W story ...
So during Vietnam, the Navy was experiencing a very high loss rate among CH-46 and F-4 pilots. Some admiral cooked up an idea where they would cross train the pilots. My friend Mark was the CH-46 pilot selected for the test project. The goal was to see how difficult it would be to train a helo guy to carrier qual (daylight) in an F-4 and for a fighter jock to essentially do the same thing in a '46. Mark day qualed no problem. Said the F-4 was a handful but kinda fun. The F-4 pilot couldn't even master a stable hover in a wide open field so they never took him anywhere near a ship. They scrapped the whole idea. Mark got to take that same admiral (a fighter guy, btw) up in the '46 one day. The admiral had the controls and remarked on the IC that it was pretty easy. After he said that, Mark nonchalantly reached down and turned the SCAS off (auto stabilization) while the Admiral was flying. The '46 immediately swapped ends (did a 360). Mark took the controls back and straitened the aircraft out. The admiral pretty much shut up after that.
Semper Fi,
John
