AP News, February 15th, 2007
Barely a minute into flight, after a smooth liftoff from a landing zone outside Baghdad, our Black Hawk helicopter suddenly dropped like a rock _ briefly _ and so did my stomach.
Our pilot was not evading a missile or dodging ground fire. He was ducking a formation of white birds.
The dangers of helicopter flight can be mundane or dramatic, routine or random. Either way, it's a high-risk business for U.S. aviators who fly combat and support missions daily across Iraq. Over the past month at least six U.S. helicopters have gone down, and five of the crashes are blamed on hostile ground fire. The deadliest was a Black Hawk hit by small arms fire on Jan. 20, killing all 12 soldiers aboard.
Military officials, while concerned about the possibility that insurgents are more intensively targeting helicopters amid the buildup of U.S. troops in Baghdad, say that fewer than 100 have been lost during more than 1.2 million hours of flight time since the war began in March 2003.
This week I was a passenger on six mostly uneventful Black Hawk flights _ four in the Baghdad area, including two at night _ plus a round trip from the American military headquarters just west of the capital to Camp Speicher, a major U.S. base near the northern city of Tikrit, about a one-hour flight each way.
Flying about 100 feet off the ground, you get a bird's eye view of a landscape that can look both serene and scary. In some stretches you cross mile after mile of barren brown earth devoid of any sign of human activity _ hostile or otherwise. Then you see vast areas of farmland, a ramshackle house here and there, a cattle pen here, a sheep ranch there _ a peaceful-looking land as flat as a table top.
It's different over Baghdad. From this vantage point it's hard to shake the mental image of someone popping up on a rooftop or the rear of a pickup truck or Lord knows where else and taking aim as you zip by. A lucky shot could be enough to ruin your day. You wonder if a Black Hawk gunner could fire first.
We were not on combat missions, but we were outfitted in the Army's latest armor-plated vests and helmets, and our pilots took nothing for granted. They intentionally did not fly a direct route from point A to point B. Instead they zigzagged, hoping to foil any plan the insurgents may have set for an ambush.
At irregular intervals we banked a few degrees left, then rolled back to the right, varying altitudes here and there.
On Tuesday we headed north from Baghdad to Taji, a major military base during Saddam Hussein's regime. The area is considered relatively dangerous; an Apache was shot down north of Taji on Feb. 2, killing the two pilots aboard. But we had no trouble on our flight, other than the encounter with birds.
I was seated in the rear row of the Black Hawk, which was configured to take 10 passengers, plus the two pilots and two gunners who sat facing outward, pointing their 7.62mm machine guns out hatches just behind the cockpit. They scanned the ground below for signs of threats. None emerged.
On Wednesday I flew with Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, to Camp Speicher to visit commanders and soldiers at the 25th Infantry Division headquarters. It was a normal flight, except that twice one of the Black Hawks in our formation of three launched flares, the bright-burning devices designed to create enough of a heat signature _ directed away from the helicopter _ to fool any heat-seeking missile that might be headed your way.
In these two cases I never learned whether the defensive system aboard the Black Hawk launched the flares in response to a real threat or, as sometimes happens, in reaction to some type of glare from the ground.
The Army learned a hard lesson about the vulnerability of their premiere attack helicopter, the Apache, in the first days of the initial invasion. In the early hours of March 24, 2003, the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment flew a spectacularly unsuccessful deep-strike mission against Iraqi armor and artillery south of Baghdad. Of the 30 Apaches that took part, 29 returned with small arms or anti-aircraft artillery damage; one Apache was forced to land due to ground fire, and the two pilots were captured.
In its official history of the invasion, the Army acknowledged that after years of training on benign ranges and in computer simulations, "no one really understood that small arms ... could be showstoppers."
That lesson is still being learned.
