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http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130416/DEFREG03/304160014/U-S-Military-Helicopter-Crashes-Near-N-Korea-Border
Exercise Foal Eagle. North Korea is angry over this exercise, which it sees as an invasion rehearsal. They used to call this exercise "Team Spirit" back in the day. I participated in Team Spirt-79 and Team Spirit-86. We assaulted the beach on South Korea's eastern coast, north of Pohang. In '86, I had two overloaded jeeps inside my CH-53D, and instead of turning left away from my tail-rotor (proper nomenclature: "rotary-rudder") like he was supposed to, the driver drove straight back and his trailer bounced up into my tail rotor. I had to execute an emergency shut-down and ended up replacing two tail rotor blades in the muddy rice paddy we landed in. I remember a toothless old Korean lady came out and started laughing her ass off at our broken-down helicopter.
The article described the CH-53E that went down on the DMZ as having a "hard-landing." Twenty-one people aboard, but all survived, even though the helicopter was destroyed by a post-crash fire. "Hard landing" is an understatement-clearly another Class A mishap. CH-53s are notorious widow-makers, and when I flew them they were sometimes referred to as "Crowd-Killers." You had to have your stuff tightly-packed to fly those aircraft safely. The last CH-53 crash has yet to occur.
Exercise Foal Eagle. North Korea is angry over this exercise, which it sees as an invasion rehearsal. They used to call this exercise "Team Spirit" back in the day. I participated in Team Spirt-79 and Team Spirit-86. We assaulted the beach on South Korea's eastern coast, north of Pohang. In '86, I had two overloaded jeeps inside my CH-53D, and instead of turning left away from my tail-rotor (proper nomenclature: "rotary-rudder") like he was supposed to, the driver drove straight back and his trailer bounced up into my tail rotor. I had to execute an emergency shut-down and ended up replacing two tail rotor blades in the muddy rice paddy we landed in. I remember a toothless old Korean lady came out and started laughing her ass off at our broken-down helicopter.
The article described the CH-53E that went down on the DMZ as having a "hard-landing." Twenty-one people aboard, but all survived, even though the helicopter was destroyed by a post-crash fire. "Hard landing" is an understatement-clearly another Class A mishap. CH-53s are notorious widow-makers, and when I flew them they were sometimes referred to as "Crowd-Killers." You had to have your stuff tightly-packed to fly those aircraft safely. The last CH-53 crash has yet to occur.
