An excerpt from Black Cat 2-1 by Bob Ford, including his experience at Fort Wolters:
By October 1966, I was stationed at Fort Wolters near Mineral Wells, Texas, home of the US Army Primary Helicopter School. New student pilots try to absorb their surroundings and every word spoken.
All 105 officers in my class, 67-10, were looking forward to their first fight with our instructor. There were two informative posters by the preflight briefing room door that opened to the tarmac where the helicopters were parked on the flight line. One warned to bend over when approaching or exiting a Hiller OH-23-D Raven on the ground when the rotor blades were spinning. It read, "The OH-23-D min rotor can flex down to four feet. How tall are you?" The other pose stated, "You will not run on the tarmac. However, there is no speed limit on walking."
I received my first real experience in a cockpit as I handled the controls of an OH-23-D. My stocky Southwest Airways civilian IP, J. L. Walker, monitored my every move. Like most of the students, l overcorrected the aircraft while on the practice field. After a couple of hours though, I improved and felt it would only be a short time before I soloed.
After a few more flights with the IP, I felt I had a knack for flying.
Handling the emergency techniques such as autorotation, which is landing the helicopter without engine power to the rotor blades, rook more time.
A day before my first solo flight, my IP pulled me to the side and said, "OK, Ford. If I had my way, you'd have your solo wings even though you don't have the required seven hours. But you will be the first one in this class to receive them."
The next day, we were about to leave the Da Nang Stage Fick. about seven miles north of the main heliport in Mineral Wells. I had just completed a practice autorotation without any assistance from my IP. As the helicopter skids touched the ground, he looked at me and said, "I'm going to walk over there and wait. Take it up and fly three traffic patterns."
As soon as he was clear of the main rotor and gave me a thumbs-up, I lifted the helicopter off the ground and flew the traffic patterns. The flight lasted about fifteen minutes. When I was back on the ground, my IP got into the aircraft and said, "Congratulations, Ford. How did you like it?"
With a feeling of accomplishment, I answered with a grin that it felt good to be the only one in the cockpit. I started to add "and much lighter" but didn't.
"You're one of the best I've had," he continued. As I accepted his praise, he stopped abruptly, pointed his finger within six inches of my nose, and said, "Now don't get cocky!" His advice has stayed with me.
After completing my first solo flight, my classmates carried out a military tradition by throwing me into the closest water available. It was a half-full drainage ditch they found during the bus ride back to the main heliport. Since it was November, the cold water chilled me to the bone. The rest of my classmates were thrown into the nice clean hotel pool at the Mineral Wells Holiday Inn after their solos.
I was pleased to be the first in my class to solo. After debriefing at the operations building back at the main heliport, I hurried to take my yellow cap, which was used to identify my flight class, to a seamstress to have my solo wings turned right side up.
Several weeks later, I was one of three officers chosen for an experiment. We were taken out of our officer flight-training course to train with the warrant officer candidates (WOCs) in the Hughes TH-55 Osage, which we nicknamed the "Mattel Messerschmidt." The WOCs were enlisted men who after passing a battery of tests were admitted to flight school. They wanted to fly more than anything else. After graduation, they would become a single-specialty type officer-warrant officer army aviator. I found my training with them both challenging and rewarding.
Transitioning to another helicopter after only two months of student training was not easy. All of the flight characteristics of the TH-55, especially emergency procedures, were quite different from the Hiller H-23. They even looked different. The experiment rested whether we could catch up and complete the next two months of full training I soloed after two hours and caught up with the training requirement.
The other two lieutenants with me in the experiment had difficulty. To my knowledge, the transition to another aircraft this early in training was never attempted again with student pilots.
The Museum would like to thank Bob Ford for allowing us to include this excerpt in our newsletter and website. His book is sold in the museum gift shop and available online.
