Hey guys,

It was a really good turn-out today! Probably just about the right number of people:
Attendees Included:

1. Pfc.Rapaki
2. Ric_Recondo
3. JBRanger
4. Foxoq
5. Lorian
6. Cappy
7. Acid
8. Gabriel87
9. Wimpinator
10. Blonov
11. Goat

With later drop-ins by:

1. BigGaayAl
2. Gahlas
3. Troublesome4u
4. Axis

I really appreciated how cooperative everyone was...it really made things much easier on me. I admit deviating from my course plan a couple times...but that always happens! We did get to most of what I wanted to cover, although the differing levels of piloting skill meant some crews got to the harder stuff sooner (we also started the more experienced pilots out in the HH-60 and AH-6J as well).

It was pretty cool seeing 5 helos flying landing patterns...all making that right turn coming in for a touch-and-go on the foredeck of the carrier! Blonov captured this shot of Cappy's approach. Admittedly, it took awhile before that drill looked less like the FAA's worst-nightmare-come-true, and more like a coordinated effort. Depsite the very high skill level of today's pilots, we did occaisonally break some of the toys

I had actually planned to conduct a drill whereby we rescue people from the water, but this became a neccessity early on I was intending this to be a way to practice controlled hovering...turned out we got lot's of practice plucking downed crewman from the drink!

This is an excerpt from my notes on the drills I planned to run...much of which we got to. Of course, once helos started pancaking it seemed evident that we weren't going to get to all ot this

Drills

1] Rotate helo 360 cw & ccw while landed

2] Take off, hover in position about 10' above the deck, set it down
Keep control of cyclic while landed to avoid rolling the helo

3] Take off, fly to city and back focussing on maintaining straight/level flight

4] Hover while looking out right side window

5] Fly laps around the carrier, cw & ccw

6] Landing practice on carrier foredeck
200m out, 120m altitude, zero out collective, land on smoke

7] Landing at city CPs (which one?)

8] Drop troops off on hotel, and pick troops up from hotel

9] Touch and go insertions

10] Follow the leader

11] Water rescue

12] AA awareness

13] Route planning

For the touch-and-go insertions we had 2 aircrews fly a pair of MH-6s into Market under simulated fire (thanks to our volunteer MEC forces), drop off the troops, then cycle back out to the carrier and come in for an extraction.

This is certainly one element that I'd like to spend more time on as this is the most typical MH-6 scenario in-game. If we got an aircrew of 4 (2 pilots, 2 co-pilots) sorted out to do this well, and a couple squad leaders who could prepare the LZ and get their chalk organized we could see some very fast insertions of force on the field. I'm sure the 160th will master this!

Cheers,