Navy helicopter pilots see their profile rise

Sign On San Diego ^ | 5/8/2010 | Jeanette Steele

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Their $33 million helicopters are new. There’s an aircraft-carrier briefing room with their name on the door now. And they get extra parking spaces on the multimillion-dollar real estate of the carrier flight deck.

All the attention feels a little odd, Navy helicopter pilots say.

“We’re not used to being the story,” said Cmdr. Ken Strong, executive officer of HSM-77, a San Diego-based squadron of MH-60R Seahawks.

It’s a good time to be flying helicopters for the Navy.

Long in the shadow of the jet jockeys — no one has ever made a movie about the rotor-blade community with Tom Cruise — naval helicopter pilots are playing a more central role on aircraft carriers. Because the nation’s 11 flattops are the heartbeat of the sea service, the careers of helicopter pilots are on the rise.

Someday soon, the commander of Naval Air Forces has said, a helicopter pilot may land the job that represents one of the summits of Navy aviation: the CAG, or commander of all aircraft in a carrier strike group of nine ships.

[lentulusgracchus]

And as a helo ordnance maintainer, I get the added perk of occasionally being able to fly in the birds I work on (which is more than the Hornet maintainers get to say).

When my old man was flying in B-24's (bombardier), the ground-echelon sergeants who'd had training on MG's would occasionally be called up to fill gaps in the aircrew lists. One of the sergeants in the squadron's ground-echelon roster from October, 1942, was with the old man's much-shuffled aircrew, in a new a/c, when they disappeared during the first Ploesti raid on August 1, 1943. Dad didn't make the trip: they did a big personnel reshuffle just before moving the air group from England to Libya, the flying officers grounded for medical or on sick call got moved to base ops so the squadron skippers could get fresh duty-ready officers (only way they could wangle that), and off they went in a big cloud of dust on temporary transfer to Ninth Air Force and the pleasures of Bizerte. My old man thought his navigator had gone down, too, but then he ran into him in the Lowry AFB O-club in Denver in 1951: the guy had been in the shuffle, too, and got shipped out to a sister squadron for two draft choices to be named later. (He went on the raid, though.) Each thought the other had gone down with their crew.

[Pentagon Leatherneck]

As a jet jockey on active duty, I walked the walk and talked the talk, but later in my career as a test pilot I came to realize that helo and tiltrotor aircrews served the grunts far more directly and regularly than we fast-movers do. And flying their machines takes every bit as much skill as flying a jet. I have the utmost respect for rotorheads regardless of which service.

TC