The Love Of An H-21
During my short stint on the H-21 at Andrews, I was assigned to operations and never did very much actual maintenance on them, so I don't have any tales to tell about maintaining them.
If I remember correctly, we didn't have a hoist installed on them either. Our primary mission was to evacuate VIP's out of the D.C. area in the event of an attack, but what we really did was shuttle high ranking officers back and forth from Andrews and the Pentagon.
One of the things that added to my dislike of the H-21 occurred one day when we were shuttling and Army officer (I think he was a one star) to the Pentagon for a medical retirement hearing, or something like that. Seems like at the time you had to be a two star or above to get to ride on the Huey, anyway, we had to cross Washington National Airport at 1,000 feet or above and then just about do an autorotation down to the Pentagon helipad (the Pentagon being located right next to the airport). So here we were, just chugging along at about 1,000 feet, right over the runways at the airport, when the damn engine seized up. Oh...sh__ ! Now we were in a real autorotation, trying to call an emergency into to Washington National on our way down, to a pretty nice landing, between the runway and the taxiway. The tricky part of this was that there were airliners taking off, landing and taxiing all over the place. We did make it to the ground without hitting or getting hit by anything, and after we were on the ground we finally got in contact with the tower .... of course they wanted to know just what the hell we thought we were doing ... but after they realized we didn't have much choice, they were then o.k. with our un-announced and un-authorized landing.
The real funny part was that the one star passenger had dove under the seats on the way down and was really shaken up about the whole deal. I told him not to worry, everything was o.k. and we had already contacted squadron operations and they were sending one of our Huey's (that was nearby on a training mission) in to pick him up and take him on to the Pentagon. He immediately said to me.... "like hell you say...you get me a f--king, car. I was shot down twice in Vietnam while riding in a f--king chopper... and now this....I'm never getting in another f--king helicopter as long as I live"!
Boy I thought, this guy is really down on helicopters. Turned out that the medical board he was going to meet was because of injuries he had received in the last crash he was in while in Vietnam. We called back to operations and they got someone to send a car over from the Pentagon and hauled him away.
Just another reason I never cared for the H-21! (Jim Burns)
If I remember correctly, we didn't have a hoist installed on them either. Our primary mission was to evacuate VIP's out of the D.C. area in the event of an attack, but what we really did was shuttle high ranking officers back and forth from Andrews and the Pentagon.
One of the things that added to my dislike of the H-21 occurred one day when we were shuttling and Army officer (I think he was a one star) to the Pentagon for a medical retirement hearing, or something like that. Seems like at the time you had to be a two star or above to get to ride on the Huey, anyway, we had to cross Washington National Airport at 1,000 feet or above and then just about do an autorotation down to the Pentagon helipad (the Pentagon being located right next to the airport). So here we were, just chugging along at about 1,000 feet, right over the runways at the airport, when the damn engine seized up. Oh...sh__ ! Now we were in a real autorotation, trying to call an emergency into to Washington National on our way down, to a pretty nice landing, between the runway and the taxiway. The tricky part of this was that there were airliners taking off, landing and taxiing all over the place. We did make it to the ground without hitting or getting hit by anything, and after we were on the ground we finally got in contact with the tower .... of course they wanted to know just what the hell we thought we were doing ... but after they realized we didn't have much choice, they were then o.k. with our un-announced and un-authorized landing.
The real funny part was that the one star passenger had dove under the seats on the way down and was really shaken up about the whole deal. I told him not to worry, everything was o.k. and we had already contacted squadron operations and they were sending one of our Huey's (that was nearby on a training mission) in to pick him up and take him on to the Pentagon. He immediately said to me.... "like hell you say...you get me a f--king, car. I was shot down twice in Vietnam while riding in a f--king chopper... and now this....I'm never getting in another f--king helicopter as long as I live"!
Boy I thought, this guy is really down on helicopters. Turned out that the medical board he was going to meet was because of injuries he had received in the last crash he was in while in Vietnam. We called back to operations and they got someone to send a car over from the Pentagon and hauled him away.
Just another reason I never cared for the H-21! (Jim Burns)
posted by Jim Moore at 1:05 PM
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