4. US AIR FORCE DRONE RECOVERY PROGRAM SOR-190

The Air Force had a requirement to procure some helicopters to recover the Q2C Drone from the water.  They had narrowed the selection to a Sikorsky H-3 or the Vertol V-107, establishing a competition between the two, to be held at Wright Paterson Air Force base. 

We were delivering aircraft to New York Airways at that time so we were to delay delivery of one of them to use it in the competition. My good friend Tom Green and I were to be the flight test engineers for the program.   Tom was to monitor the program flown by the Air Force  pilots and I was to supervise the crew and the maintenance.  We also were charged with the preparation of the aircraft before we went to Wright Paterson.

One of the features we advertised to the Air Force was individually interchangeable  rotor blades, as opposed  to matched sets. The rotor blades on this aircraft were not interchangeable and had to be replaced  prior to departing.  A set of interchangeable blades were supplied and we installed them on the Air Force Demo aircraft.  The first flight with these was unacceptable  because of vibration.  We tried all of our magic but could not get the vibration level down to acceptable levels. For the demonstration the vibration levels needed  to be better than just acceptable.

Tom and I had the responsibility to solve the problem. We were running out of time with only a few days before departure.  After hours we were still laboring over the problem, we decided we had to reinstall the original blades, interchangeable  or not.

The problem became compounded when we found out that those blades were used to ferry another aircraft  to Canada for a rotor blade deicing test. Different blades were to be used for the test so our blades were sitting in Canada.  Now its really decision time!  We finally decided we had to have those blades which meant chartering a cargo type aircraft that could handle the blades. We said “do it”, knowing if this failed to correct the vibration  problem we would probably be looking for new jobs.

We had the blades the next evening, installed them and flew the aircraft the next morning.  We had a smooth bird, and we departed for Wright Paterson the next day.

The Air Force had painted a yellow line down the center of a hangar, we had one side, Sikorski the other.  These  two helicopters each had 2 T-58 GE Gas

Turbine engines. Both were instrumented and when weighed in, there was only 40 pounds difference. Well matched.

We got along fine with the Sikorski guys, we ignored each other. We ran across them in a restaurant and ordered a drink for them.  They did the same for us later.  The Air Force pilots were checked out in both aircraft and the program got under way.

They usually did not advise us of what test they were going to do unless it involved something special. Both a/c were prepared and ready to go every morning for three weeks.  One of the tests we did, it involved hover out of ground effect with a heavy load on the cargo hook. The Air Force gave us a cable to use but we didn’t like it, so we thanked them and told them we would use our own. Sikorski used the provided cable and it failed.  Lucky  for them it failed at the upper end and snapped down.  If it failed at the lower end it could have snapped up into the rotor.

We knew we would be required to demonstrate a drone,  recovery so Vertol fabricated a scale-size mock up of the drone. The actual drone had a ring on the top to attach a cargo hook.  The water demonstration portion was performed in a rather large lake on the Air Force property.

We deposited our mockup drone in the lake for the Air Force to fly to the lake and make a recovery. This maneuver was to be accomplished with a crewman standing on the passenger steps with a long pole and a hook attached.  He directed the pilot using the inter-phone. The crewman was to hook onto the drone, but as they hovered over the drone it flipped upside down.

The crewman continued trying to reach under the drone to attach to the hook.  While doing this he was directing the pilot to move back  but he wasn’t looking  back. The banks of the lake were about 30-40 feet above the lake level and angle up at about 45 degrees.

On the top of the bank some Air Force dependents had gathered to watch the operation. If the pilot continued to back up, the blades would have hit the bank, traveled up and could have hit the dependents.  All the Vertol and some Sikorski people were running around trying to get the pilot's attention. 

As luck would have it, there was a small boat tied up on the bank (the only one on the lake) and the helicopter fuselage hit the boat. The pilot felt it, moved forward, and saw our signals.  Some damage was done to the baggage bin on our helicopter, but it could have been much worse.

One of the Sikorski engineers photographed  this near disaster, and our project engineer took his camera away from  him. The Air Force got his camera back for him less the film.

Sikorski did their demonstration with a 50-gallon drum, a welded loop and some lead weights to keep it right side up. I guess we tried too hard.

Since this aircraft was not military, it had never been seen by Air Force personnel, our project engineer decided that when the AF guys were finished for the day, we should hover the A/C along the highway on AF property so everyone could see it.  It seems we caused some accidents by people watching the helicopter and not their driving, so the AF said stop.

When the program was over we were confident we had won. We had a distinct performance advantage since we did not waste horsepower on a tail rotor but we had to wait and see.

At the end, we discovered Sikorski had removed their instrumentation, installed their troop seats and were giving rides to the high ranking officers.  We couldn’t sit still for that. Since our helicopter was an airliner, we had removed the interior to do this program so we called back to the plant and had them truck out the complete interior, seats for 25 included. We worked all night installing it. Next day we lined them up for rides. We made a water landing on each trip. We not only had the high ranking officers, we had all the secretaries; we even saw the motel manager lined up. We took them all.

We won the competition but did not get the contract.  Our production line was committed  for some time in the future, we were building V-107 aircraft for Canada at that time. Not a big loss. I think they only built a few for the Air Force.

Sharing a Shoe Shine Kit

In 2003, Tom Green sent me this letter along with a shoeshine kit we had shared during our stay at Wright Field -- 42 years earlier! I brought back great memories! 

 

Charles Kessler is a retired flight test engineer for Boeing’s Vertol helicopter division (formerly Piasecki Helicopter Co.). He joined Piesecki in 1947, in the company’s fourth year, and retired from Boeing in 1983. During his 37-year career he took part in the testing of prototypes and alterations of such models as the CH-47 Chinook and Sea Knight, the H-16, HRP-2, and the V-107. He taught the stability augmentation system to the German Luftwaffe. He has written about his experience in a blog called “Early Helicopter Years,” which can be found at http://helicopterstory.blogspot.com/.