A navy pilot probably would not have.
Posted on 11/13/2009 7:05:26 AM PST by Danae
Ok, I got up this morning and got one of the biggest shocks of my life. I checked my School work, and I am taking a History class right now from a professor that I have been angling to get for about 6 months at American Military University. He has a Bio that is amazing, a real Military hero and a serious scholar as well. Anyway, I had a short essay topic that I did regarding the Middle East Iran Iraq and touched on the Hostage crisis, and the rescue attempt that failed to rescue the hostages. It was sort of personal to me because it was the first time I can remember being aware of something Political, and international. I was abotu 10 at the time. My dad was SOOOO pissed off at the government for setting up this mission impossible, and even madder that 8 guys died doing it, he felt they had been let down my their leadership etc.
So my professor asked me to research deeper into Operation Eagle Claw, and what happened operationally, which I did. This morning he gets back to me (As I had said that it was a really interesting question, it really was a pivotal event for me in that it woke me up to the world and reality in a lot of ways)and says this.
The reason I asked you to research the operation is because I was there.
WOW
I am taking a History class from a real live "Balls of Steel" hero. Talk about HUMBLED.... man.... and I called the operation an abject failure! ROFL... Which it was, but not because of they guys who were there doing the job, but because the Leadership that put them there didn't plan it to succeed! It really was mission impossible I think, and my 30 year old memories of the event say the same. How could those guys have possibly succeeded at flying right into Tehran and snatching the Hostages......AMAZING, and here is one of the guys who was there.
I had an A in the class.... LOL HAD being the operative word lol And if I loose it, it will be 100% worth it to have had the chance to sincerely thank a real live American Hero! I am seriously just totally floored this morning.
I have no idea..... I just feel like a frog in the headlights now though.... Dang, I know how to pick some good Profs though!
Whats absolutely to totally utterly freaking AWESOME is that I got to personally THANK of of those guy who put their lives on the line in Iran. How damn freakin cool is THAT??!!! That alone is a privilege!
Hey, any of you folks who want me to, I will pass on any messages you want to reach the Professor.
Send me a FR mail and I will get it done!
D
A bludgeon is a club in essence. Son Tay was an Army Operation, it was not multi-Service. If Iran had been run solely as say an Army Special op will support from the AF, then it would have been different, but the whole thing was micro managed by the Nuc in the Oval Office.
I get you now, by the way make sure that you look into “the guts to try” by Colonel Kyle USAF and if you are interested in Delta Force of that time and the raid, check out “Delta Force” by Charlie Beckwith.
A navy pilot probably would not have.
yes exactly,,you want to ask questions but at the same time you don’t want to act like a pain in the ass.
Its a serious balancing act.
He could not have been, when in the army he was not involved with combat arms or elite units and he left the army years before colonel Beckwith started Delta force.
His Special Operations experience is Air Force, not army.
What you conviently ignore is:
YOU WEREN’T THERE!
The pilots were. And they chose to save their lives vs take a chance on killing themselves
and you have NO PROOF that a Navy pilot would have continued on the flight, because even though there WERE Navy pilots on the mission that went to Desert One (Didn’t know that, did you smarty pants?), there weren’t any int hat aircraft.
Marines are trained to do the right job, and they did. They WERE NEVER TOLD of the indication you copied and pasted. Not Once, until AFTER the mission.
The Marines did their job.
Now, tell me brave one, where the hell were YOU on April 24 1980?
I dont think you are readng too much on this thread.
My information comes from people actually on the mission, from their lips to my ears.
The Marines INSISTED they were to go on. They were told NO.
Col Kyle told his side, most likely as he was told
I heard it from crew chiefs on the mission, the people who were actualy in the aircraft in question.
So, time for you to listen.
I get it from the Marine Commander, Col Sieffert and other Marines who were on the mission.
While HM-16 was chosen for the aircraft, the original selection of peole YOU speak of was on paper ONLY.
It was only at Yuma when Pilot selection came down to the final crew lists, and that was by elimination. Army pilots showed up, too. So did Army air crew for maintainance, none of them survived the slection process.
I guess I can’t blame you for being in small error, but many people were told to say a certain line, I heard it in private outside of that line.
As did some of mine come from Colonel Beckwith himself in a one on one conversation, from his lips to my ears.
LOL, you answered that one. As you said, after the mission they learned that navy pilots would have ignored the warning and proceeded, just as the Desert 1 commander states in that page I posted.
And I’ll tell you I trust my Marine crew chief who told me he HEARD Beckwith openly state, “I will NOT place my men on any aircraft that is not 100% capable”.
It was NOT a Marine who called that mission off. The Marines wanted to continue.
And Beckwith knew it. He was told by the aircraft commander they were willing to continue the flight with only the secondary hydraulic system since they had been flying on it for the last 5 hours and it was fine.
The AFCS system on the one that turned back, to me that is the only problem that can be raised against any Marine pilot. I dont know where you heard of the Navy co-pilot arguing to stay on the flight, that is not what the Navy historians from HM-16 say at all. The pilot didnt know his attitude, pitch or yaw, was flying almost blind. Why he didn’t go on, I dont know. I disagree with his choice, also, especially knowing how long he had been flying and how much closer he was to Desert One than the Nimitz, the math is simple. But from what I was told from inside sources, there was NO disagreement between the pilots.
Col Sieffert, in a discussion with Army officers openly called that pilot a coward, though. I got that from an Army officer I used to work for. Sieffert was one straight shooter and one of the best of any service to lead the air wing helo section.
I never said that. I said that Sikorsky, or insinuated without saying the company name, Sikorsky knew the details.
Not one blade that had a BIMS indicator go off was shown to have cracks.
I wasn’t a 53 mech then, so I dont know how different the RH blade was compared to a CH-53 blade, it may have been larger or composite vs aluminum
But if YOU want to fly on a cracked rotor blade, feel free. Just dont ask me to go along.
http://www.rescueattempt.com/id15.html
The person who wrote the first letter was NAvy personnel on the mission. I quoted a Marine. You can read the Navy agrees with me concerning Beckwith calling it off, Not Kyle.
Here is how the Marines recognize and acknowledge the consensus by the Special Operations Community of their role in the mission. This is an excerpt from the
USAWC STRATEGY RESEARCH PROJECT
SHOULD THE MARINE CORPS EXPAND ITS ROLE IN SPECIAL OPERATIONS?
by
Ltcol Mark A. Clark USMC
“Most people in the Marine Corps were pleased with the decision not to join SOCOM due
to their fear of losing forces and funding, coupled with their animosity towards SOF. The special
operations community was content with the Marine Corps decision to not join the band wagon
for a couple of reasons. For one, it was one less service to compete for funds in the special
operations funding fight. Secondly, there was still a lot of harbored anger towards the Corps for
Desert One. Many of those inside the SOF circles still placed blame on the Marines for the
mission failure of the Desert One rescue attempt.
The controversy stemming from the 1980 Desert One rescue mission places blame on
the Marines for having to abort the mission due to not having enough helicopters arrive at the
forward refueling site. The lack of sufficient helicopters arriving at the site, and being mission
ready for the final portion of the mission was attributed to a couple reasons. The Navy RH-53Ds
flown by Marine Corps aircrews and one Air Force pilot, encountered mechanical problems
during the mission causing some aircraft to abort. The mechanical problems encountered were
complicated with the Marine Corps aircrews’ unfamiliarity with the Navy aircraft peculiar
systems; a significant factor when analyzing an aircraft emergency and determining abort
criteria. However, when missions fail, blame must be directed somewhere and the Marine
Corps aircrews were the easiest target. “It is all too easy to blame an abort situation on
mechanical failure, since with human factors involved, most commanders hesitate to challenge
a pilot’s decision. But in this case I think we have to ask the question “Did the machine fail the
man or did the man fail the machine?’”33
Since Desert One, there are still people in the SOF community who refuse to put that
event behind them and continue to blame the Marine Corps for the abort of that mission. Blame
is easy to redirect to someone else. Had another force been used to fly the helicopters, would
they have been any more successful? Had the required number of helicopters made it to the
final destination, would the ground teams have been successful in rescuing the hostages? It is
easy to say yes when a second attempt was never made, and the hostages were subsequently released through diplomatic means.
LtCol Clark wasn’t there, either, nor does it appear he ever spoke to anyone who was there.
You still havent commented on the personal accounts from Desert One from my site.
They all back up what I’ve been tellig you.
BTW, Clark himself doesn’t say the accusations are accurate, only that they exist. Sadly, the SOF people dont know enough to accurately test their theories, since the aircraft that were actually on the mission are NOT the ones the Marines trained in leading up to the mission. Every Marine I spoke to agrees: If they used the actual RH-53’s they trained in at Yuma, there would have been no broke down aircraft.
Tell your prof I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Charging Charlie on day and that I am very proud of the men who went to Desert 1 and consider it a great honor to have shook hands with many of them.
Again you explain it, the navy in a war time operation would have kept flying as proper procedure, you wouldn't and the Marines didn't, as the one co-pilot kept saying as he challenged his pilot unsuccessfully (the one with the leader in it) to not give up and go back to the ship, it was war time rules, not peace time rules.
Also I'm not saying the Marines called off the mission, they just did not deliver their part of the assets felt necessary to pull off the mission so it had to be cancelled.
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