Posted on 05/14/2015 9:10:50 AM PDT by don-o
Military helicopters flew over eastern Nepal and a team sent up a drone on Thursday to search for a missing U.S. Marines Huey chopper, as the death toll rose from the Himalayan country's second big earthquake in less than three weeks.
snip
In Koshikhet village, a two-man U.S. civilian team was using a drone to search for the missing Marine Corps UH-1Y, or Huey as the model is better known, which was carrying six Marines and two Nepali soldiers.
"We are using infrared vision to look for hotspots and any signs of life," said drone operator Shepherd Eaton, from GlobalMedic, a U.S. aid agency that specializes in search and rescue. Eaton and his partner wore cowboy hats, T-shirts and jeans and worked with a Nepali army team that had a helicopter.
The search, involving U.S., Indian and Nepali military choppers and a battalion of 400 Nepali soldiers, has been joined by tw
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
That terrain is awful rugged. Wonder if they strayed in to China?
It’s all unknowns as far as what is being let out. No Mayday. Some chatter about a possible fuel problem. This is hitting me hard because my son is in Primary Flight Training at Corpus Christi right now.
Huey... Huey... WHOS GOT THE HUEY?....
Now darkness again - Thursday night coming up on 2200 hours there. I read that the drones they we sending up had infrared.
Unbelievably vast area; let’s hope the searchers find the right spot.
The helicopter would have had to get over the crest of the Himalayas to get into China.
It is that. But, the mission involves going from point A to point B.
Let’s hope they didn’t stray off course....
I would be interested to know what support they have. Do they just give them a map and send them off? Would we have had something in the air to track them?
Alas, I have no idea.
I have to suppose they had one or two Nepali troopers with them who ‘knew the area’ but... doesn’t seem to have done any good.
It’s an enormous region with mountains that boggle the mind, and if the helicopter crashed and burned the wreckage could be all but invisible.
Worst case: they never find it.
Map? Yes, hopefully they read it correctly and inputted the correct datum. I doubt it was the mil standard datum. If true, and they weren't doing their terrain association, then they could get lost easily, and their GPS wouldn't help.
While possible, it is doubtful that they had any flight following. Having the natives onboard might have contributed to a less than strenuous mission planning.
Hopefully they got lost and made the decision to land before fuel starvation.
Glad they found them.
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