Radio Check - Legends and Legacy

From CAPT Randy Abshier, USN (Ret.)

Time for one of my lengthy sea stories:

Back in the late 70s, the HS/SH-3 Community was starting to work off the decks of the new Spruance-DDGs/Perry-FFGs when HSL couldn’t fill all the requirements-no fault of theirs. Day ops only for the HS folks. I was the Ops O and Doug Yesensky was my assistant in HS-7. Our skipper, CDR Dick Sidney, decided we needed to be able to do night ops. Doug and I were sent out to practice night ops as copilots for the skipper. We practiced night landings on our replenishment ship (SLQs) then DLQs on the actual Spruance. After the skipper felt we were ready, we then moved to practicing night HIFR. He made Doug and I the squadron’s Night DLQ/SLQ/HIFR “Stan Pilots” and we qualified the rest of the squadron. We formalized a squadron policy for day/night currency requirements to be able to do night landings/HIFR once you were originally qualified, similar to the go-faster’s CV landing currency policy. This forced CAG/CARGRU to get us deck time to stay current and be a force multiplier. Remember this was all new to the HS Community in the late 70s. I moved over to the Maintenance Officer job and Doug became the OPS O. We then made a Med cruise and the CAG/CARGRU used our night DLQ/HIFR capability regularly during the deployment. Definite force multiplier. Our aircrewmen did a fantastic job and were definitely a key factor in our success.

Now to the early 80s, the West Coast HS Community was not doing these types of ops. Some limited night SLQs. I became the CO of HS-8 and Doug was my XO. I met with RADM Rich, COMASWWINGPAC, and discussed doing night DLQs/ HIFR. He told me if I felt so strong about it, I should set up a program like we had in HS-7 and go for it. He was familiar with the program from when he was CO of NAS Jax. A couple of the more senior HS COs and the AIRPAC HS Rep were adamantly against doing them and said it wasn’t operationally necessary. We had RADM Rich’s blessing, so Doug and I felt good about it. Doug and I took our two best qualified DH’s, Chuck Finney and Mike Brattland, and went through a day/night training program for DLQs/SLQs/HIFR. We flew with both through the qualification program. We then designated them as our squadron’s “Stan Pilots” and let them qualify the rest of the squadron pilots. We used the HS-7 currency policy. During our WESTPAC, we made a couple MEDEVACs at night from our BG DDGs and had a couple short duration detachments that operated at night from our accompanying DDGs/FFGs. A couple times we had to do actual operational requirement night HIFRs due to the CV operational tempo. CAG/CARGRU loved us having this capability and supported our currency requirements, ensuring we got deck time to maintain our capability.

I know in today’s HSC Community these ops are probably routine. When I was the CO of VX-1 doing the OPEVAL for the SH-60F, I made sure the test crew were day/ night DLQ/HIFR qualified and a few were NVG qualified for these ops. All pilots/ aircrew were NVG qualified.

Just another story of when flying was fun and a CO wasn’t worried that big brother was looking over his shoulder. In other words, the good old days.

Thanks for listening to this old rotorhead,