“Yeah, I Fly The Shiny One”

After months of nervous anticipation, re-tread flight training, and all of the hassles associated with moving overseas, (which are regrettably still ongoing), I’ve finally made it out to the ship to join up with the “Blackbeards” of Det-11 – my new home.

I caught a Japan Airlines flight out of Narita last Saturday for an uneventful 5 hour hop down to Manila, P.I. …Embarrassingly, despite all of the time I’ve spent in the Pacific, I’ve never actually been to the Philippines before. That has largely to do with the current batch of Islamo-militants who’ve been trying to takeover the central and southern end of the Sulu archipelago for the last 50-odd years under the banner of whatever “cause-du-jour” it is this week. OEFP (Operation Enduring Freedom Philippines) – which has been going on since shortly after the September 11 attacks – is probably the biggest on-going counter-insurgency conflict you’ve never heard of. …And the way the US and international media have handled Afghanistan & Iraq, I wouldn’t blame the Pentagon at all for keeping journalists away from this one. …But they really don’t have to: no one in the US media (or anywhere else on the planet for that matter) really seems to give a damn about what’s gone on the in the P.I. as far back as anyone can remember. …Oh well. As long as the media at large maintain their current level of interest in the situation, we shouldn’t have any problems. Gorilla resistance here is pretty pathetic and disorganized at best, so it’s just a matter of “smoking them out” of the jungles down South. …But that’s almost a world away from here…

Manila, itself, is relatively safe, but it’s always nice to keep your guard up, as it’s not unheard of for someone to kidnap an American citizen or soldier on occasion and demand a ransom of some sort. LT Max Oliver, one of the Det Pilots, met me at the Manila terminal as I stepped out into the heat & humidity of the southern Pacific air. The P.I. maintains a strong trade relationship with Mexico, and from the look and feel of it, you’d swear that you had just stepped into Acapulco. After paying a taxi driver more than two times what Max had paid to get to the airport to meet me, we were at the pier. And I set about to getting my gear stowed on board. As evening rolled around a good meal and a couple of cold San Miguel’s (the local brew) really hit the spot. I was exhausted.

Underway on Tuesday, I had my first intro to flying “The Big Shiny One” – Blackbeard 702. They don’t let those things get dirty for the Admiral. After giving it a good once over, I suggested that our maintainers should get overtime for all of the hours they spend polishing that thing. The attached photo doesn’t lie: In 19 years of flying, I’ve never seen such a clean aircraft!

The Blue Ridge (in the photo background) puts out quite a wind burble on short final to the flight deck, so as big and fat as she is, she ain’t exactly easy to land on! I haven’t put a helo down onboard a US ship in over 5 years, so it was nice to spend some quality time in the DLQ pattern. (My last flight in the German Navy was doing deck landings on a Belgian cruiser – “Daddy’s from Bruges”). The Blue Ridge is somewhat of a museum piece herself: She was the last ship to pull out of Saigon in 1975. Many of the film clips you may have seen of helicopters being pushed over the deck edges to make room for Vietnamese refugees were shot onboard the Blue Ridge. She had a much bigger flight deck back then; big enough to take multiple Hueys or larger helos. They've since erected the Helicopter Control Tower on the aft portion of the ship, effectively cutting the flight deck down to one third of it's original size. ...Still plenty of room for big, shiny 702.

Low & behold, our services here at Det-11 cannot go maligned for long: we had MEDVAC flight on Wednesday for an acute appendicitis into Kadena air base on the island of Okinawa. As ‘candy’ a deal as this job is, it’s nice to know that we are, in-fact, needed by someone other than the Admiral on occasion. 702 did super job. We had 35 knot tail wind into the island, so we were kicking along with smoking groundspeed of 168, turning the 200 mile flight into just over an hours’ work. The base commander was down at the ramp to meet us as the ambulance arrived. I figured that he was probably more interested in weird-assed, shiny green helicopter sitting on his tarmac than he was worried about the medical emergency. 702 tends to turn heads. I can’t wait till we get 701 out of the shop and back out here on the boat. …If you think that one of ‘em looks good coming at you, how ‘bout a pair of twins?