The Crash in Germany, Part One

(I Hope the Saddest Chapter of My Life That I Ever Write)

If you have not read “Three Days In a Raft In FRG” you should read that before this story. That story sets the stage for this story. Following this story will be “The Collateral Board Investigation”.

When we arrived home after three days of rowing our raft on the Rhine River, we were told that on Saturday there was going to be a company picnic back down at the field site. All military personnel had to attend and their families were strongly encouraged to attend. If military personnel brought their families to the picnic they could take them home after the picnic on Saturday and not have to be back to the field site until Monday morning. If military personnel did not bring their families they would have to return to the field site for the picnic and remain there until the unit came home from the field later in the week.

The field site was close to a hundred miles from home but early Saturday morning my wife, three small children and I headed out for the picnic. Everything went pretty normal for a military picnic. The food was okay. After the picnic the commander spoke and told how proud he was of the unit and what great things we were doing. Then at the end of his speech he announced that there were going to be four Cobra helicopters giving rides to wives and children.

There are only very rare times that civilians ever get to ride in Army helicopters. Those times must be in life or death situations such as natural disasters or very special authorized special events. Those special events must be authorized by the Department of Defense. They rarely happen and they don’t happen in Cobras. There may have been a few times that some reporters rode in Cobras but any approval for that came right from the very top. Wives and children were never permitted to fly in a pilot’s or co-pilot’s station such as in the Cobras.

If the commander thought the little secret would not soon be known he must have not understood people. Some kid was going to go to school and brag about flying in a Cobra or some wife was going to tell another soldier’s wife how scared she was flying in a Cobra. It was a crazy idea that should never have happened.

Soon four cobra helicopters were running and wives and children were going for rides in them. They were not given proper briefings; they did not wear fire retardant clothing or any of the other things that were required by regulation. There were even some mothers that carried small children on their laps while they went for rides.

I told my wife this was not the place to be. What was happening was against Army regulations and sooner or later there was going to be big trouble because of it. We walked to the car and started our trip home.

Sunday I spent at home with my family. Early Monday morning I caught a ride with another pilot who was headed back down to the field site. We had to be there for morning formation so it was an early start to the day. The trip was uneventful. Soon after arriving back at the field site we learned that this day, Monday June 10, 1973 was a German holiday and again there would be no flying. So it was going to be another day of nothing for the pilots to do.

Even though there was a no fly restriction in place for the Americans it did not apply to the Germans. At the former US Air Force base where we were camped, a German glider club was flying that day. My brother, who was also stationed in Germany, was a glider pilot and belonged to a glider club. I had been up in a glider one time with my brother while in the states.

After the formation was over the pilots were told to go do something. The fellow I had ridden with that morning and I asked if we could go over and see the gliders. The platoon leader said that was fine. So we started walking over to see the gliders.

Matt, the fellow that I rode with that morning and was walking with, was an interesting fellow. He had been in the same unit in Vietnam and was a Cobra instructor pilot. He had more Cobra flight time than I did and had quite a bit more Cobra Instructor Pilot time than I did even though I had more total flight time. He was not being used as an instructor pilot in the unit and wasn’t in the click of the ruling instructors of the unit. For me, this was the first time since flight school that I was not being used as an instructor pilot. I had recently completed an aircraft armament officer’s course and was serving as the company ammunition control officer. I had plenty to do.

Matt was what was often called a naturally good pilot. Flying seemed to come easily to him. But Matt was also what would be called a hotdog pilot. He was always right on the border of doing things that pilots were not supposed to do. He was cocky and arrogant, but most of the pilots in that unit were.

When we arrived at the place where the gliders were we visited with the glider pilots. They even offered to let us ride in a two-seater glider. We each took a turn at riding in the gliders. Some of the other pilots started drifting over to see if they could get a ride in the gliders.

After a little while two of the youngest pilots in the unit hovered a Cobra over to show the Germans. They had received permission to hover over even though it was a “no fly” day. When arriving near the gliders they shut the Cobra down and let the Germans look the aircraft over carefully. It was a pleasant get together with pilots and their aircraft.

Soon it was time to take the cobra back to the company area. The Cobra pilots had been told to be gone with it for only a short period of time. These two young pilots had not had a chance to have a ride in one of the gliders and so did not want to go back with the Cobra. They asked if someone else would take the Cobra back.

While I was visiting with some of the Germans, Matt had agreed to take the aircraft back. A second pilot was required to be in the aircraft when it was flown. Even though I wanted to stay a bit longer the other pilots asked if I would go back with Matt so they could stay and see if they could get a ride in one of the gliders. I could understand their desire to get a ride in the glider and the need to return the Cobra as directed so I agreed to return with him.

Matt was in the back seat of the Cobra with it running when I climbed into the copilot’s seat in the front. I put the other pilot’s helmet on and strapped in. Matt picked the aircraft up to a hover and started hovering away. Then he turned the aircraft around and raced back towards the glider people on the ground.

I asked Matt what he was doing. He said he was just going to go by the group a couple of times and then take the aircraft back to parking. Twice more he passed by the group and then returned to fly by again at ten to fifteen feet above the ground. Again I said, “We are just supposed to hover the aircraft back over to the company area. This is a no fly day.” He responded with, “Okay, I’m just going to swing by one more time and then we’ll park the aircraft.”

This time Matt went a bit farther from the group before he turned around. He then pulled all the power the engine could muster and went charging towards the group at about ten feet above the ground. Just after passing the group we had reached about one hundred and twenty knots of airspeed. At this point Matt pulled back hard on the cyclic (the control that determines the direction of flight of the aircraft) and we shot skyward. The aircraft was pointed almost straight up towards the sky.

One of the maneuvers that some of the Cobra pilots did in Vietnam was called “a return to target”. They would dive at a target and then over-fly the target and then pull up hard and then turn the aircraft around and dive at the target again. At a couple thousand feet above the ground that works okay. Near the ground a pilot can easily misjudge the altitude required to pull out of the dive. Sometimes in Vietnam Cobra pilots would return from missions where they had killed some enemy soldiers and do this at their airbase to show off. There was even a film shot by a soldier of two Cobras doing this and not pulling out in time. They crashed in a big fireball! I had seen the film.

There was a second risk in the maneuver Matt was pulling. If he abruptly pushed forward on the cyclic at the top of the maneuver the rotor system would be unloaded and the aircraft would roll right in an “unacceptable rate of role”. At this point it was a critical situation.

At three hundred feet above the ground and the top of the maneuver, Matt slammed full right pedal. Now the aircraft was pointed straight down and was falling like a rock. The knife sharp nose of the aircraft was slicing through the air and plunging towards the earth. The rotor system was not producing any lift; it needed to get going forward before it could produce any lift. As Sir Isaac Newton stated, “a body in motion tends to stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force”. It was now a race to see if the outside force would be the rotor system providing lift or, the earth.

As airspeed increased the rotor system did start to produce lift but it was not sufficient to stop our descent. The nose of the aircraft did come up before the crash and we had some forward speed before hitting the ground. But, we still hit with a tremendous force. Normally when a Cobra helicopter hits the ground with a hard vertical force the rotor blades droop and as they come around they decapitate the copilot in the front seat. For some reason that did not happen to me.

We hit the ground hard with forward speed and went skidding forward. Parts and pieces of the helicopter flew as we went through the crowd of people. Then we smashed through a parked car and dragged it across the field. Behind us we left death and destruction among those we had just befriended.

Behind us lay four dead and numerous injured people. The four dead were a ten-year old little girl, a lady and two men. All were innocent by standers. They were not enemy soldiers or combatants. They were just people that were standing there watching gliders and a Cobra fly.

At this point in my life I had flown 1,991 hours of combat and had seen and done many things. Some of those things had been pretty hard. Many times I had looked through the sights at enemy soldiers and pulled the trigger. While flying Scout helicopters I had sometimes been close enough to see the faces of enemy soldiers as they shot at me. And I had seen their faces when I shot them. I honestly do not know how many times or how many people I looked through the sights at and pulled the trigger on. I can only say that I honestly believe that I was following orders and those were all enemy soldiers just trying to do their job and I was trying to do mine. This was totally different!

In the crash I had sustained some injuries. I had compression fractures of the spine at L1 and L2 vertebra and was generally beat up all over my body. My ribs, arms, legs and feet were black and blue and sore. When my head went down on the impact the right side of the helmet had been torn off from the weapons sight that was stowed in the front seat.

Pilots from the company area saw the crash and came running to the crash. I was dragged from the front seat. Matt was able to get out of the remains of the aircraft on his own. He had a sprained ankle. There was a small fire on board the aircraft but it was quickly extinguished.

A medical evacuation helicopter flew the injured to hospitals. I remember the flight and the pain in my back. Because of concerns of internal bleeding I was given only limited pain medications. At that point I did not know that we had gone through the group on the ground and that there were deaths.

The next day my wife came to see me in the hospital. After a few minutes she was asked to leave the room and an investigator from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Army came in to talk to me. He read me my rights and said he needed to ask me some questions. After a few questions he told me that four people had been killed. I remembered things leading up to the flight crash and things after the crash but not much during the crash. Probably the hard impact had stunned me and with my head forced down I had not seen the people or car that we crashed through. I shared what I recalled.

When the CID guy left I wasn’t certain, which hurt the most, my back or my heart. How could I have been involved in such a stupid crash? I had always been a careful and cautious pilot. People who had known me in other units would later say that they would have believed it of anyone else but not of me. How had this happened to me? How had I let this other pilot do things that I would never do? How had I let things get so out of hand that four innocent people were killed? And one of them was a ten-year-old girl!

There is a saying that goes something like this, “All that has to happen for evil to win is to have good people do nothing.” I had not done what I knew was right. I had accepted the idea that I was the “copilot” and that the pilot was responsible for what happened. While there is some truth in that there was also a great deal of shirking of duty. I knew what was right and what was wrong. I had not spoken up forcefully and said “no” to doing crazy things. Like many other people in many situations I had decided to quietly voice my opinion and then let the other person do just one more pass by. I had made a fatal decision for four innocent people. The accident will always be a black mark on my flight record and the loss of four innocent lives will always remain a painful scar on my heart and soul!