EW HOP

When I first knew I was reporting to a helicopter squadron something hit me: I'd never actually been in a helicopter. Strange feeling when you're going to work for a group of people that go fly in these things every day, and you don't even have a clue what it is they do, or what its even like to be in one. During my check-in process I spoke with the CO and XO, and expressed interest in going up on a ride with the pilots to see what it was like - they wholeheartedly agreed, all I had to do was schedule it.

Over the next few months I kept mentioning it to the Operations room, the ones who schedule the flights, and eventually I managed to get on a flight. I was told that it was going to be an EW 'hop' - in other words it was an Electronic Warfare flight that we were going on. First let me explain the different kinds of flights the squadron may do on any given day:

EW: I'll start here, since this is the flight that I went on, and I have at least an idea of what they do here. The purpose of an EW hop is to practice evading radar, once it is locked on to you. In order to do this you have to get low and fast, banking and rolling - basically like a roller coaster. There are radar sites with different kinds of radar (can't say which exact types!) that try to lock you on, then once you're locked on a simulated fire message is issued - basically they just shot a surface to air guided missle at you (for pretend). At this point the helicopter tries to get as low to the earth and evade the missles and/or radar system that is tracking it.

GUNEX: This is one of the training exercises I really want to go on - its where they mount up a GAU and a 240, and go to the range and shoot thousands of rounds. Think of it this way - a GAO can shoot up to 4,000 rounds or so per minute!

SAR JUMPS: SAR stands for Search and Recovery - so this is when someone is downed, either on land or at sea and they send a helicopter out to rescue that person. If the mission is at sea then swimmers must jump from about 10 - 15 feet in the air, and then swim to the rescue of whoever needs it. There will be more on this in another post - I'm trying to get permission to do the jumps myself :)

NSW Training: Yeah - I can't really say much about these. Let's just say that our squadron has Special Forces swing by every once and a while, and they go out and play. Unfortunately these are training missions that I'll never be able to join on - but as I've said before, I'm glad there are people who do what they do.

So I got to do an EW hop, and I'm glad I did. Essentially during this training exercise were going to be locked on by different kinds of radar, and then do evasion of that radar capability. Our hard deck for this mission was 35 feet - meaning that aircraft shouldn't be flown below 35 feet. Why? Well there are trees that were 30 feet tall in the area.

The flight out was pretty cool - it was different being in a helicopter, its not like being in an airplane. Obviously the take off is a little different since you go almost straight up, and there's no massive acceleration. There's also that great big difference that the windows are all open, and the door is open! That's more than necessary as on a summer day the cabin can get really hot, and the air that rushes in cools you down nicely.

We traveled down from Norfolk into North Carolina where the radar training sites were located. The flight down was pretty simple, we flew along the coast, just barely over the water - a lot of people on the ground waived to us. We did a quick stop, where the helicopter rocks back in the air and slows its forward progress quickly which was fun.

When we arrived at the site we did a few practice passes through it, so familiarize one of the pilots with the layout of the area since he had not been there before. I heard the call that we had been locked on, and then the fun began. Immediately upon hearing that the radar had lock, and I think they said fire - we dove down, hit the accelerator and started banking and rolling. Here's a video of it I made from my camera...


If you can see it, you'll see that the horizon is going up and down, meaning we're banking and rolling all over the place. It became apparent to me why some of the pilots had said to eat a light lunch earlier in the day.

Overall it was a lot of fun, and quite an experience. As I said before I'm going to try and get into a GUNEX and SAR JUMPS. These kinds of experiences are not the main reason, but definitely one of the reasons, that I joined the Navy to begin with. It really is amazing when you see some of the opportunities to do things that others will never get to see or do. I'm grateful that I'm going to get to do them!

UPDATE: I've gotten confirmation - I'll be heading to Iraq sometime in the last week of October, only for a few weeks...