our origin story + friendship hot takes 💞

Okay, got the red smoke. Come on, go up the south. Where's the smoke? Where's the smoke? Okay, copy. Where's the smoke? I'm looking at danger close now. I don't want it, man. It can't come here. I can't. It can't come hot. Can't be clear hot. You ready, Michelle? You ready to do this? Let's do it. Dude, I know where we have to open. Okay. Well, what was it? A month ago, Medal of Honor awarded to ATF 160th pilot. Correct me if I'm wrong. That is the first 160th pilot who has been awarded a Medal of Honor. It is. What the hell happened? I don't know. You, of course, you know everything. It's a secret. It is not a secret. It sounds like they got their ass shot off on the way in. Don't they release the citation in and of itself? Or are they not really released much as to what happened that day? I think this one went a little out of its norm. I heard rumors of this thing about a week or two out. And I was like, "No, no, no, they can't give them the Medal of Honor yet. They've got to go through a process." It was fast because there are some guys Carl Meier, for example, who's a little bird pilot in Mogadishu, who they're trying to upgrade his Silver Star to a Medal of Honor. Okay. So it's a process. But you know-- Even getting awarded the thing in the first place, most of the time, if you go to the funeral for the-- Well, unfortunately, people may not know this most are given posthumously. Exactly. They're probably going to have a Silver Star or they be cross something along that line at the funeral and about a year later, until I would say honestly two years it gets upgraded. So it's quick. And he's the first CWB5 to get one as well. First off, nobody even knows what a CWB5 does. Nobody even knows. I still go into military installations now with my retired ID card and I go to Air Force Base one time and they had like the supervisor come over and they're looking at it and like, this is valid. He's real and I'm like, of course I'm real at the hell. We've never seen a W5 before. No. I mean, have you ever seen one outside of the aviation world? No. Okay. I mean, I've seen warrants exist in the SEAL community and I'm going to be totally honest. I know how to recognize a warren officer's color device, but if you were to ask me which one it was between one to five, I can't answer. The Army is easy. It's just dots. The W1 is one dot, W2 is two dots. And you get up to W5 and we have the coin slot. So it looks like you per quarter in there. Okay. So, you're never going to see one though. No. There's like four or five. Well, you can watch this episode and you can see one. There you go. So, okay. This guy gets him out of the owner. Are they going to let him fly anymore? I mean, let's be honest about the impact this has on your actual career. If he fly, well, first of all, he's got some extensive damage to his leg. Yeah. So, I think, wasn't it both? I don't know. Small arms fire, it sounded like at least, if not anti-aircraft fire. Yeah. Well, it goes to show you that the enemy has a boat, right? So, no matter how well it's planned, no matter what way you come in, no matter how you jam, comms or any kind of stuff, there's some guy. It's tough to jam lead. Yeah. And he was in a 47, correct? Yeah. Do you guys, I know your seats have some kind of lard in them, but other than that, are you just kind of. There's not a lot of armor. We had, in the very first days of the war, we took all the armor out because it was too heavy to get over the mountains. And then General Brown made us start putting it back in and then, you know, with it goes the penalty and cargo capacity. So, you generally don't put much armor in there. And just before I left, we got transparent door armor. So, it's about this thick, you know, but inch and a half thick. It's a panel about like this. And it just goes right here by your thigh, so you can look down and see, because otherwise, you had a solid boot of glass. Yeah. But it's only down here. So, it protects your legs, which is where he got shot. So, he must have got a shot through the front, you know, through the chin bubble or. If they really wanted to, like, if you were to put in everything in the armor package into 47, are you guys pretty encapsulated up there? No. That's what I said. The only thing, the only thing you can get was called a neocit for a non-cabatin evacuation. And that fills the back up. It doesn't help you up front. It doesn't help. And it just helps, you know, it gets civilians in the back. It's like, what are you quietly saying here? We're going to protect the area of this helicopter that matters the most. Well, you know, it's funny, because, you know, the chest plate is only like this, you know, get the soft armor, which isn't much. And the chest plate isn't big enough to cover all your vitals. And whenever I got in a situation where it was a hot infill ex-fill, if I wasn't on the controls, I put my arms like this to try to put my arm bone. So if something got shot, it wouldn't rattle around inside my chest cavity. Good luck with that, sir. Yeah. Well, they never happened to me, sir. So let's say he wasn't ending his career, which I have no idea where he was. As a W5, he'd been for a while. Yes, he was a flight lead. Yeah. And so he probably became what a W1, when he switched over from whatever he was doing in the military first to aviation, is that because that's the track where you guys have to be warrants. Yes. Okay, so he'd been flying for a while because how many years is it between W1 to 2345? Oh, geez. To make W5, you're talking almost 20 years. Okay. So he may have any way been kind of seeing the over the bridge. Yeah, actually, you know, it's funny is I don't know him well. Yeah. And he came on and was like, wow, I think I know him, you know, but I mean, I've been gone a while. Yeah. So I get my phone out and sure, if he's in my phone. And the last assignment I had in the 160th was I ran the training platoon, Green Platoon. And he was one of our students. And that's the last, so that was 2011, 2012. Yeah. So, and he was W3, I think at that point. Okay. I know some guys who were awarded the Medal of Honor. I mean, to me, a single person who, I'm going to say, is proud of it, even though that's not the right word. They're not thankful that they were awarded it because almost every story is horrific to a nature that's hard to understand. I'd say a lot of them involved the death of people, very proximal of them, close friends, just horrific situations. But the ones who stay active, they're active, but maybe not charging a machine gun nest anymore. They use them for a slightly different purpose. Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. I tell you what. Scott back from the grand opening of their headquarters on the Western edge of Missoula. And what a fantastic evolution. Thousands of people were there. They were waiting all night long. They were getting a tour of the Knife Building Facility that was the opening of their Black Rifle coffee shop there. A lot of people there from Black Rifle, obviously all the staff from Montana Knife Company. But you know why everybody else, not by everybody. Do you know why they were all there? They were supporting the brand that Josh and Brandon and so many others to some forget Jess, Joss's wife. They have helped make what they have built there is spectacular. There's no reason that people would spend, and I mean thousands of people would spend the night in line or show up at four o'clock in the morning for something that sucked. And let me tell you, that place didn't suck. In order to their knives, they have so much stuff going on right now. And I'm going to give you a little spoiler alert. They're working on, I don't know if I'm going to just go ahead and release it now. They're working on a folding knife. Yep. 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So head over to Montana knife company.com. Check out what they have to offer and just realize on those release dates, you need to act quickly. On honestly, I recommend going on there and buy in like a sticker or a patch so they have your information saved so you can action it as quickly as possible. Because otherwise, you are going to be left behind and it sucks. This has happened to me many times. I had a knife taken out of my cart because I was manually putting in my credit card information. Don't be that guy. Learn from my mistakes. Montana knife company.com. Trust me. You won't regret it. Back to the show. Yeah, I counted out based on his time and service and his age and the extent of the injuries, he probably would never do another combat deployment. But it doesn't mean he couldn't end up, you know, so at the training. One of the guys that was shot in Anaconda, again, him Chuck, he got hit in the femur and took him about two years to get back on flight status. And we had to take him out with the flight surgeon, let him watch him fly. Because you and I were talking earlier about how easy a shino can be to fly. You know, when everything's working. I was mocking that it doesn't have a tailrider. I've never flown one and I was just talking shit. Let's be clear. Honestly, it is. Yeah. If everything's working, it's a dream to fly. That beginning of that sentence, though, is a real interesting thing. Because not everything's always working. I mean, you're present. You know, I always talk about, you know, his your phone never breaked up on you and you got to reset it. I mean, the aircraft does that. But I turned off all the augment systems and made him work the pedals. And the flight surgeon wanted to see that. Interesting. You figured they could just give them some type of other physiological test. Yeah. I mean, that's the easiest way to do it. because Chuck is the guy that gave me mine. flight of out the flight lead, you know, I didn't take it easy on him if you know what I mean. Why would you? If you turn off all the systems like you said, is that thing a little bit more of a buck and bronco? Oh yeah. Okay. That's a challenge, yeah. What gets difficult about it? Well, other than the fact, it's a ridiculous piece of machinery that is probably trying to break itself into pieces the second you turn it on. Yeah, it is. Right. I mean, the road blades go up to directions, you know, so there's no torque. But the, you know, there's no heading hole, there's no augmentation or dampening. Yeah. So, you know, I'm trying to, it's been years since I've had to explain this, but you know, you move the cyclic and you can just let it go, typically. Well, in this case, you're just constantly, you know, turn and butter it out and it's trying to do something like this. So if you've got somebody that's really good in the aircraft, you would never know that the AFCS is off, yeah. I mean, like I used to practice all the time when I got shot down in Anaconda, we lost all of those, all the systems and the generators and I was flying it like that and, you know, I did dust landing on the side of a hill, AFCS off, but that's because I practiced it all the time. And there were a lot of other guys do the same thing, you know. Do you remember, I mean, I'll reference people. Michael, look up the episode the first time that Alan was on. I think it was two thirty five, it was in the two thirties. We talked about Anaconda pretty specifically, but so if people want to hear that full story, I would reference some back to that episode or whatever Michael's about to tell us which one it was two fifty three two fifty three. Two fifty three. There's a three and a five and they're somewhere inverted them. You guys basically pitch over the top after absorbing a couple RPGs just a lovely Sunday or whatever day it was. And that was and that was the event where Neil went out the back. Correct. Didn't you lose all hydraulic power as well? And then some just in my mind, I imagine him just having a couple like this and just a little funnel in that. That's pretty close. That's about as close as you can get. There's kids today wouldn't understand what an oil can. Yeah. Just to look like right. You used to, you know, pop a hole in it. Yeah. That's what he had is three cans of hydraulic fluid back there. I don't think that's enough. I think it's got the reservoirs about the size of that thing. And it's got a little tiny t-handle, you know, and he's just like the throw and it's like that. So he's just pumping like crazy because it's really meant just to top off the system not to fill it. Do you remember what your headspace was as the aircraft essentially started shedding surface-civil systems? I mean, do you remember where you scared it all? Or were you going back to, here's the problem, work the problem and just mechanically working your way through it? That's exactly it. I mean, you just, you know, there's a saying never, never quit flying the aircraft. Yeah. And then everything went at once, first of all. Yeah. It was just like, you know, as the RPG went through. Because didn't you have a battery or something? Yeah, the RPG went through the left avionist compartment and through the left ammo can. So the ammo can, you know, spread a bunch of stuff in the back. Yeah. Did some damage to some of my crew chiefs, a big explosion. I don't just went out the other side because all the doors were open. So there's no real overpressure. And then, you know, what happened, you know, the MH-47s all glass, right? There's no ammo. Even back then they were all glass. There's a conversation to be had about steam gauges versus glass. I have flung both. And I've only flown rotary with steam gauges. And I have actually most of my fixed wing time was with glass. There is a real argument for both actually. Yeah. And especially with the helicopters, the analog thing is nice about them. You know, your aircraft does have a, a mass moment in the gear. Yeah. That's one of the main things you check out. Right. And then the BK117, which was the predecessor of the EC-145, it was analog. And you can move the cyclic when you're sitting on the ground. That's how I do it. And I would just go, so what I'll do is before I take off, I look over at the mass meter and I trim it out until it keeps dropping down. Until any movement I make moves it up. And then you know you're going to have a great lift off. Because if you don't do that, hypothetically, not that I've ever tested this, you give it a little bit power and you're like, oh boy. Well, you're not paying attention. And the thing wants to go and you're like, oh, and then my instructor is like, hey, dip shit. Before you shut it down, trim the mass indicator until it's, you know, back well in the green. I'm like, oh, okay, it's almost like you've done this before. Yeah. The problem with the glass is that it's so much more sensitive. Right. So you just, and you don't know which way the end thing's going. You know, the newer ones have a, have a circular mass moment, right? So it gives you a line that tells you where, where to move the cyclic. Yeah. But in the, the original, which we flew at West Point, it's just, it's linear. And you don't know which way to move it. You know, you just start moving. Oh, that's worse. Yeah, that's better. So it could be a challenge. So you say this is the same thing my instructor has said as well many times. Like, it actually, even funny enough, my skydiving instructors, they're like, listen, if you're going to die, die fighting, meaning like deploy your handles, cut away, go, like, don't, don't go in on a skydiving jump with any of your handles in the pockets. Like work the problem until the problem works you from that RPG hit and you guys pitched over. How long do you think it was until you actually were wheels down on the ground though? About three minutes. Holy cow, 180 seconds of, but I'm going to describe having not been there. Probably some pretty intense moments. Yeah. You know, I mean, because you know, the RPG hits. Yeah. And then everything goes black. And you know, you're talking about, even you're looking at us, just like all the TV screens go black. And the noise that accompanies those, like, you know, and you're just your desk talking computer, you can hear, you can hear, oh crap, but you have the engines are so running. Do you have any steam gauge indicators up there that are like, like even a backup, like airspeed? There was a backup. Well, we call it easy. There was. So it was funny though, because the EASIS, it's a BF Good Rich. It's about this big. It's a little attitude indicator. Perfect. It did not have rotor RPM on it. It did not have engine indications. It just had speed, vertical speed, altitude. Every people listening, those first two things he mentioned are pretty important when it comes into emergencies. After, after, after this incident, because I was the senior 47 pilot, I was able to get those added to it. So now you get these two little squares in the corners that represent the engines. Once, you know, green, it's running red. It's not. So you went from all the data you needed to tell the complete health of your 47 to black and literally flying by the seat of your pants in your ears. Yeah. And so the crew chief in the back, the only one of them was still plugged in. Yeah. And the other two were, I guess they were plugged in, but they were kind of like rattled from the RPG pulling up. It's fair. So again, the back's like, you know, taking fire on a cockpit, go, go, go. It took off. And that's when you'll fill out the back as we rotated. Were you guys on the ground or were you another? We were on the ground. Okay. So there's all kinds of, you see all kinds of stories of what happened. Yeah. They were at a hover. Now I was on the ground. Yeah. We were still, engines were still rolling. Yeah. And everybody was still on board. So I picked up, dove down the hill to, and I thought, because the engines were in reversion area, which is like a backup mode. So there's some droop that happens. And you can hear that droop. You know, you go to pull power and you're, and not what you want to hear. No. And, because at that altitude, that weight, you're not going to fly single engine. So that's why I dove. Yeah. And the other thing is the dish gets started opening up on us. There's about a 50 cal kind of 14.5. Michael, go ahead and Google image a dishka for people's viewing pleasure. I would not want to be on the receiving end of one of these things. But we, at what distance? 100 yards? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. And so by diving down the hill, you know, he couldn't get a beat on us. And I'm trying to gain airspeed. Oh, my God. So that often seen in the back of, is that one on the left? I'm trying to play. Yeah. Often seen in the back of a Toyota Hilux. Yes. Yes. Don't laugh, Michael. I'm dead serious. Google. I know you are. Google dishka Toyota Hilux and prepare to see pictures from Afghanistan. Yeah. Probably I racked to. I'll be honest. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got plenty of those things shooting at me. But they, um, so we dove down and then the, this is when the crew starts kind of coming back to me and they're like, hey, we lost again the LZ. I'm like, no, nobody got off. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just totally not believing that, you know, Neil fell out the back. And at this point, the helicopter is flying normal ish at least. Well, we're still in the dive. Yeah. And the crew chiefs like, sir, both engines are running. You're okay. You can level off, right? So I'm like, okay. And what I don't know is that the crew chief on the ramp tried to stop Roberts and he falls out the back and he's hanging from his gunners tether. All right. So his toes are tickling the trees as I'm diving down, trying to, what would you estimate your angle of the bank was? Or nose down. No, the nose down is probably 20 degrees. No, I'm going to say it was 45. I mean, I feel like it was aggressive. 20 degrees nose down is aggressive. I've put it, I mean, 30 is kind of the limit, you know, that you're supposed to, like I would demonstrate that in training. Yeah. 30 degrees nose low. And I like that's probably a very wild cockpit visual. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because you're looking at the window here, you know, the trees and the ground are rushing up. We could several thousand feet up. Yeah. And so far would you say, or how would you say you were a GL? No more than 50 feet. Okay. So you're basically terrain flying it down because I'm trying to avoid the dish canal. Yeah. So reasonable. I'm trying to do things trying to keep my rotor RPM up as enough speed because I think I lost the engine. And then when the crew choose something on it, it's working. I was like, all right. You notice I start pulling the power back in. We start to level off. And then now they're explaining to me, you know, we lost a guy. Yeah. And I was like, I'm going to go back and get him, right? So now I got to climb back up, turn back. And as I'm in the turn, I level off one time and then I can't move the controls again. And now we're headed straight level out over the main battle, which is out over what they call the whale, which is a a big terrain feature. And it was so surreal, 'cause I was just looking, or I can't move anything. - Like they were locked in position. - Yeah, and that was because of no hydraulic fluid. - So, you know, the best example is you're in your car, back when the key was in the steering wheel. - Yeah. - If you took the key out, - Yeah, you're totally lost in play. - That's the only way. - So my co-pilot is like, well, maybe I'm working. So he's trying to move it, and I swear he must have bent the bike, like bent it. - Yeah. - No, it didn't move. And then, I was like, well, sorry guys, we're done. And-- - Oh, that's not a radio call you wanna hear. - I know. - I mean, imagine if you had been flying as opposed to out into the open, you had continued the turn, and you were going back towards ascending terrain. - Yeah. And the funny thing is, is years ago, like everyone was a W-1, where you would sit around and go, what would happen if you did have a dual hydraulic failure? Would you just keep going with the aircraft, go out of control? Would you just climb until you ran out of lift? I don't know. - There's a lot of what ifs there. - Yeah, but it just was going, you know, straight and level. And all of a sudden, the controls kind of come back alive in my hand, right? And what I didn't realize is the crew chief in the back, and we were talking, he poured a little hydroc fluid in there. And as soon as he did, I could move the controls again. I was like, all right guys, we're going back. I don't know, so we turn again. And now I'm wind up on about two, maybe three miles out, long final. And we're coming in, and the controls stop again. 'Cause you're always moving the controls. So I figured the leak was on the return side, 'cause if it was on the pressure side, it just went up, you know, one big pink mist cloud. - That makes sense. - So every time I moved the controls, I squirted out a bunch of fluids. So I had a-- - As it moved, whatever it was moving in. - So we had about a one minute per can of fluid, right, and he had three cans. Now I didn't know that. This is how it was playing out. So we're, you know, determining this as we go along. So it locks up again. Now I realize, well, now we're just going to crash on the, you know, it's 70 miles an hour, you know. - Yeah, it's not gonna be pretty. - And, you know, it's a snow covered LZ, the enemy's up there, and then they come back again, right? He poured another can in. And now I realize, okay, I got another chance here, but I can't land on the top of the hill, 'cause we'll never get off. And I've still got people on board. I'm responsible for my crew, I'm responsible for the rest of the seals. So my chalk too is gonna have to get them. That's Razor 04. And, but we didn't hear me radios. So you had to figure out that. But anyway, I turned left toward the valley where the big battle's going on. And I set up a rated descent of about 300 foot a minute, 70 knots. - Okay. - And the idea being, if I get to the bottom and they lock up again, maybe survive that, if you don't run into something, 'cause it looks pretty flat. And then my co-pilot starts reading out, all right, 70 knots, 30 feet of, you know, rated descent. I'm like, how are you getting that? And he taps on the, in the center of, between 20s, he's like, (laughing) - I don't have the one piece of information you guys, 'cause I was like so focused on just flying. - Yeah. - That I didn't, you know, your peripheral vision. And as soon as he did that, my peripheral vision came back. - Oh, it's not forget you're on night vision goggles as well, which killed peripheral vision to begin with. - Yeah. - Yeah. - We should add that. - But, you know, this is it night time. - But the thing is this, you know, I did a, I was a talking head on, a couple of news programs when that helicopter hit in DC. - Mm-hmm. - And I'm like, "I'm fishing goggles are terrible." You don't wanna say, "No." You say, "If you, when you, you just move your head." - Yeah. - I'm even out, I find myself driving down the road at night, scanning, you know, your wires. - I've flown that airspace in DC in day and in night. And people think that night vision goggles give you an incredible advantage. There are so many lights in that particular area. I would argue you might be able to see better with them flipped up. - Yeah. As a matter of fact, since we used to do so much urban training on the 160th, you know, you got to the point where sometimes if you were really in the city, that one pilot might flip his goggles up. - Yeah. - And the other one didn't. But if not, you're just constantly looking. - Yeah, you're changing out the side. - You're gonna have to side. You know, and this is the one thing that, you know, the more experience you have, as I was explaining on the news program, it's like, "This guy had a thousand hours to instruct a pilot." That's not a lot of time, you know. For his unit, that's a lot of time. But, and the world of night vision goggles, that's not a lot. - No. - But, yeah. So anyway, we're, you know, doing that, and we come down the bottom. And now this is where I said, never quit flying the aircraft. Because when we got down toward the bottom and the visual acuity started picking up, and I could see the terrain kind of undulating, where I wanted to land, it was like, where you are. And all of a sudden, we had an uncommanned slide to the right, but I could not move the cyclic to stop it. So, I tried all the other controls. I hit the pedals, things swung around in the direction of the slide. Now I'm going straight at a hill, and then I couldn't move it again. And as we hit the terrain, I just dropped the thrust, and the aircraft just settled. - And that was all the hydraulic food you guys had left? - That was it. - Three minutes. - Yeah, all of that occurred. Which is funny, because Slubinsky, you know, we get on the bottom, and he's like, we're going back right now. And I'm like, plotting our position on the map, I'm like, to where? He goes to the top of the hill, we got to get our guy. I'm like, it's way over there. - Yeah. - It's 10 miles away. And he's like, no, no, it's right here. I'm like, no, that, that, we've been flying for three minutes, you know. - Yeah. - 70, 80 miles an hour. - Man, that is, I have such limited experience in the rotary world. And even when you know that they're going to introduce whatever, auto rotation, whatever it is, right? Like, you're focused on the problem. And you know it's not even a real problem. I can't imagine all of the things that you are describing, let alone legitimate risk to your life and everybody else's life. And you're just up there working it. - Yeah, I mean, what can you do? I mean, this is like, you know, selling, right? He loses the engines and the Hudson. You can only do what you can do. And afterwards, if you survive, then you can, you know, - What if they can't for the rest of your life? - If I can't believe that happened or, or I should have done that, or I should have done that. - If you would have been able to go back in to where you had just gotten shot out of, how would you have approached that? Would you have come in as fast as you could and just slammed on the brakes? How would you have, 'cause you know you're going to be eaten. - Yeah. - Everything that they have on your way in. - Because the follow on aircraft raises or a one got shot down. - Same exact spot as me, - It's about 25 feet or so. - Yeah, well, cause of the same spot. - Yeah, 'cause he was on the upslope, whereas I was on the peak and was able to go down the downslope. - Yeah, and he'd been hit a little bit further. He might have been able to do the same thing I did. - But how, so knowing that you would have been going back into that, the first time you went in, you probably could have taken your time, assuming if you were thinking in your head, like maybe this is an occupied from what I've heard, people say they realize they're like, oh wow, there's a trend system. So they realize it was, but how would you have approached it if you could have gone back in there? - Well, part of the problem at the time is the mini guns, it's the electric gallon guns, seven, six, two, shoots up four thousand rounds a minute. - It's pretty amazing, there's two settings. - Yeah, if it has electricity. - Yeah. - Right, so at the time they were AC power. So with no generators, there's no guns. So there's no self-defense. - Yeah. - We would just take the abuse of guns, you know, RPGs probably at this point. So we all would have died up there, I think. - Would you've come in steeper, flatter? Would you just try to just pancake the thing back on the DZ? - Well, considering where I already was, and the aircraft damaged. - Let's say you had one that wasn't damaged. - Oh, I would come in low and pop up. I'll kind of like a oil rig. - So protect yourself with the terrain as much as possible and then just try to get it down. - And that's how Razor Zero 4 got in there when he re-delivered them back in. Is he, he came in initially kind of high and the AC went 30 was supposed to put down pre-assault fires and they did not. So he went around and came back. This time he came in low and just sort of popped up, popped him in there. So he kind of snuck up on him, you know. You think, how can you do that with a shunuck? It is hard to play hide and seek with a shunuck. - I used to do it at West Point with the cadets, right? So I used to fly the jump team. And so I'd come in, you know, I could be there at three o'clock or whatever. And it was the EC 145. And so I'd come in from different directions using the wind and the terrain. And I'd pop up on these guys. And almost every time I'd catch them by surprise. - Yeah. - See, helicopter, you hurt me? Yeah. Could you tell where I was coming from? - No, no. - God, especially in mountainous terrain and valleys too, where you're just sitting there looking completely the wrong direction, convinced that it's the right one. Michael, I just realized the upper lights aren't even plugged in. You didn't even do your job. Down there and that one over there, plugged the upper lights in. - Oh, okay, sounds good. - No, the one's over there. Great, now we have to start over. - Look. - Oh, oh. - What do I even pay you for? - Yeah, I know that's what I do. (gunshot) - Not even though I looked up there. - See that, Michael? - Oh, my back. - How much did you pay? - Would you like a pay decrease? - I deserve one. (laughing) - God, that is so wild to me. I think I said this the first time that you were onto. I had no understanding and appreciation for what you guys were doing up there. Most of the time, 'cause I engines, turbine specifically, if I don't have a job, they put me directly to sleep. Like if I'm doing a C-130 jump, I am unconscious by the time they are even taxing, 'cause you're just out. And some of the best naps I ever had, we're actually in the back as Chinooks after the crew chief told me I couldn't get in the truck. But I did get in the truck and he was just like, fucking whatever man, do what you wanna do. Like if we're gonna go down, we're gonna go down. Like just let me just reclining the seat. You guys are doing a lot up there. I'm amazed there hasn't been a medal of honor citation up until, So was that last month? Yeah, it sounds like he deserved it. Quite an operation, to do that off the ships, which is interesting when you go back to the formation of the unit. The reason that Desert 1, the failure at Desert 1, it was because they didn't use, well, there's a couple of reasons, but they intended to use Shenokélicoppers instead of the 53s. They didn't because they thought that the hardest part of the whole operation was taking off from a ship. So that's why they went and naval aviators. Why? They point the thing into the wind. Yeah, they went and naval aviators for that. And then when the Delta guys figured out the Navy guys couldn't fly over land, they said, "Oh, we'll take the Marines, that's the next best thing." And then the Marines, they weren't really any better. They're used to ship to shore, ship to ship, that kind of stuff, as the army pilots are used to the down low over the dirt. Didn't the helicopter, does it go into a fuel bladder or another aircraft? They flew into a C-130. So they were on the ground out? Yeah. So they picked up, from what I understand from a guy that was there, he said the ground guide had the wands, you know, you see at the airport, right? So he's given the helicopter the thing to come up to a hover and they're going to take off. They've already aborted the mission, right, because they're not enough helicopters. And then the guy left the wands on, stuck them in his back pocket, went in each pocket, and walked into the C-130. And the only visual reference, the helicopter pilot had was the wands. So he stayed with the wands and just went right into the aircraft. It blew up, killed a bunch of guys. Oh my God. Yeah, that's something. I mean, it did not hurt that. Yeah, and I got that from. And if you were in the brown, and that's all you could see, 100% you're following that. And it was a guy in the plane, one of the Delta operators, who jumped out like the door, I guess, and you know, on the side of the jump door. And he thought that they were under attack. So he pulled the pin on a grenade and jumped out of the thing, right? I like this story so far. Well, here's the best part, right? So. What do you think he was mean, attacked by a disaster? He didn't know. He was asleep. Like he was talking about, right? So he jumps out. He's still got this grenade in his hand. And they all rally up and they jump on another 130 and they're going to get out of there. And he goes up to the Sergeant Major, the Delta Sergeant Major. He used to know the names. I don't know anymore. He goes, "Hey Sergeant Major, I got this grenade." And he's like, "Yeah, put it away." And he's like, "I don't have the pin." And he's like, "Oh, shit." So they took duct tape and just wrapped his hand around the grenade. I mean, that does work. You could just. When they got the mysterious, you know, they found a pin. Holy shit. Take it out. Yeah. If people really knew how moderately high speed, the high speed, people were. Like, nobody would think, like, "So you tell me a Delta guy? Look up out of a dead sleep and thought the move was, I need the pin out of this grenade." Which is going to have the effective range of your throwing distance. And grenades are heavier than baseball. So we'll say if you're a stud, 35 yards. Yeah. And I'm history, but you know, I got this. I assume it's pretty clear. As the way you told it. That's how I want to imagine. At least, you know what? At least the gist of it. You know, he got on the plane with a grenade with no pin. Yeah. And they just taped his hand up. Good for him. I bet he was having one hell of a dream. I would like to talk to him about what dream he was having, because I feel like that played into his decision. Somebody's husband's home. How did flying for you guys change from pre-9/11 to post? Because our world drastically shifted. Or she shifted tremendously. I mean, we were from the conventional seal side. I remember doing river and stream crossings out at the Desert Training Facility on these siphons, not even real water features. I mean, slanted concrete on the sides that you're like clawing your way up to try to get up as you're, you know, just covered in water and, you know, classes on. Here's how you can stow a line in your backpack. So as you're going across, the people can pay it out. Everything was maritime. I mean, foot in the water, 100% of the time. I mean, my first gear list to Afghanistan had a dive mask on it, which I took, by the way, as I can follow instructions. I did not take it on the subsequent trips. I'm going to be honest. But the way that buildings were cleared, it just, it was so, the combat experience was so hypothetical. I remember there was one man at around team five who had been one of the snipers that was supporting in Mogadish. I was the only guy that I was aware of that had seen any combat experience. Anyone to talk about a guy who could walk in water. Like if he told you to do something that you were going to do it, but I look back at the way we were training and it was so, and not negatively so, but it was, and not intentionally so, but it was rear view mirror based. We did some, you know, some urban type stuff, but oh my god, comparative to what it became. I'm just curious what you guys world look like the day before 9/11 and the day after. It was significantly different, especially when it came to how many aircraft we would use. You know, because the 160th guarantees, you know, things, right? I'll guarantee I can get you on time at your target. The amount is how much though? 30 seconds, which is really a minute. I prefer 15, but I mean, I mean, you can do zero, just to make sense. I've heard it all the way into 60. I'm like, all of that's fine. But the things were always guaranteeing that will give you whatever we've told you. Yeah. So there's always a spare or two, you know, whatever we're redundancy built into the plan in some form or fashion. And we got to Afghanistan and we ended up having to put two teams in the same night, over 19th, 2001. The aircraft going to the higher mountain had to take three shnaucks, not two. And we only had four, which meant that I had to go by myself, you know, and they sent two daps with me, but they, they couldn't get up in the mountains. And daps for people listening are basically weaponized black ox. Yeah, those are my favorite, favorite gun platform. God, I love it when you just see him starting to really like you. She has somebody is so fucked right now. Yeah. And you know what they would do when I go off into the mountains is they would hang back in the lower terrain. Yeah, they're all right, trying to get shot at so they could there be an fishermen. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, all right. So they made that call. I would imagine based off weight and balance when they separated that or just the ability for the aircraft to achieve the altitude with the load. Yeah, because they were going, they were going to about 22,000, 23,000 feet. I was only going about 12. How high can those shnaucks go? I've been to 25. Did you do an out of ground effect hover up there? I don't think so. Did you think you could do an IG hover though in ground effect hover? Maybe. Okay. I would depend on the temperature. Yeah. And how heavy were the thing is the aircraft did have some armor in it. You know, the gunners had armor. Yeah. And the cockpit we took it all out, but you still had some in the floor. Okay. You know, but did it change the way you guys flew? Like how much urban stuff were you guys training on pre 9/11? A lot. Even like the way you guys were flying in, I mean, I, it is insane. The places I have been put specifically in a little bird. Whether it is just precision on the roof, which I feel like you guys were practicing that. Yeah. We've been kicked out every major city in the country a couple of times. You know, from the black helicopters, you know, landing on the skyscrapers. I linked up with my old squadron once I was back in San Diego and they were up in LA and they're like, Hey, you want to come ride the little birds? I'm like, Sure, whatever. They were setting car alarms off. They were so low. But if you think about it, LA is probably the best town to do that in because everybody is like, Oh, they're just, it's a steel team. It's a big show. LA is huge. Yeah. And they've got helicopter routes, which is what makes it nice, right? So you're following these little drainage ditches and the homeless encampments, you know, when a shunuck comes down. Yeah, but I think you guys were taking their tent from one side of the encampment and helping them maneuver it to the other side. Oh, I've moved tents. Yeah. A couple of times in Afghanistan, you come into a fire up in the, you know, when there's a lot of frame tenses there and it just picks up and comes over towards you. I can always tell people who haven't been around helicopters because as they see it coming into land, they maneuver slightly towards it as they're getting their cell phone out. And I go the other direction and take a knee with my back. To the, because I've been nuked so many times by the motor wash. Actually, the closest I've ever been to probably supermaning off a building was a fast rope underneath the 47. And I'm like, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run from under the 47 out to the edge of the building. And then the rotor wash catches you about 10 steps out. And then you're like, yeah, yeah. When you're like, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. Years ago, so my, my oldest son and my youngest son were both in military that all this is the Navy as F 18 was. And when he was out of some phase of training before he'd been flight school. And I took him out on a, what we call shock pad out of a Campbell's training area. And we were doing a farpe with a Chinook. So Ford Army and refueling point. So first thing in is some little birds, right? They come in, you know, they land. They come out. They come in. We put gas in them and I took my son up to one as I hear. Come on. Let's go. And so we walk up to it and we see it. We go back. They take off. Now what's coming in is two Chinooks, right to the same points. I get this is going to be different. So as we stood out there, they came in and it's grassy. So you don't have the rocks, but you know, you're getting them back and actually taking the unit bar and he's like, wow, that's so much different. Yeah. And the crew chiefs are out there, you know, the winter doing that crap. So when you stay inside the rotor arc, you're going to be okay. If you get to that point where it starts doing this number on the way out, yeah, stand up. Or the same thing if you're doing, doing amphibs. So if you're doing like a ladder ex-fill, you know, or hoist or something like that, when the aircraft comes in, you know, you get this bike. Waves hitting you and if you can hold on just for a minute you're in this quiet. It's a wall of air Yeah, once the earth is I haven't tornado I would describe it as yeah, and what you're on the inside? It's okay stay on the inside though Yeah, like I said if you fast-rope in and you're heavily loaded and you're going towards the edge of a building that does not have a barrier I have eject elected to just fall and then start grabbing before Yeah, you know the other thing that changed is that a lot of our training pre-9/11 Was always designed to succeed Right, it wasn't designed to fail you know, you pat ourselves on the back All right, look hey, we did this very successfully But the contingencies were always something that because we planned our own event, you know The contingencies were always something we could deal with because we typically would plan them into the operation anyway well In about 90 98 99 we got a commander in our company It was a former Delta operator with flight school I call him Joe Gourst in the book. It's not his real name But he was very intense and he was big into realistic training and to the point where and what year was this? This was I want to say 98 maybe Adopters and we were doing stuff that nobody else was doing so for example with a terrain falling radar You can separate all the aircraft say five aircraft by two minutes a piece right there Using the terrain falling radar to do the thing and then when you get to a visual area to join up You go into a holding pattern everybody just slowly joins up on you and off you go You kind of just race track until everybody's there. Okay. Yeah, but you're all two minutes apart So it goes like clockwork right? Yeah, well what he did is something nobody else had thought of doing is he told out of a flight of five He told chock three to not show up He's like, you know because you can't the other aircraft can't see you right dark and you're on the radar So he just that is an interesting problem he just turned away and went to our destination and so here you show up Everybody's there Hey, wait, so we're missing an aircraft Why don't they race track did you guys need to figure this way? Wow? Well you there's a problem We didn't have enough gas to stay for long and it wasn't in the plan, so this what you're describing is like an optimal training scenario Yes, so I'm saying an early adopter of somebody putting that stuff in this realistic issues And that's where the plan during in a conda so I went separately from my wingman two different infills and You know there's all kinds of comms scratcher side is a lot of jamming going on a lot of confusion And I said based on that scenario. I just told you I said all right. We're gonna link up at this this checkpoint If I don't show up within 15 minutes You do a quick radio search and you leave because you don't have the gas to wait and you have no idea where I am and Same thing with me when I get there. I'm starting o'clock 15 minutes. I'm leaving and so that you know what Joe had made us think of You know or experience and then you know that it was this Well, what do you do and so he did all that kind of stuff and he did these shoot down scenarios where you'd you know Long night I fly from Campbell up to Cleveland, you know air refueling both ways come back long night And he said oh Here's a piece paper with a grid on it go here. It's not in Fort Campbell somewhere What are we doing? You'll see when we get there the land there's a pickup truck, you know with fresh Pilots and crew and they we shut the aircraft down We simulated we've been shot down Zeroing all the the commsack and the computers all that stuff and then the maintenance guys came out reloaded everything This was a test to see they've been saying for years they could do it now. He wanted to see could they do it? And they did and then the new pilots and crew took the aircraft and then I stayed up with my guys for like another Three days a little easy scenario. Yeah, and it's it's sucked. It was like in December that's the stuff that saves your life though. Yeah, it's all stuff that I encountered. Yeah, you know in my shoot down You know for example Everything that did not have a little land you're on it. I lost So if I took out, uh, you know a compass Well the compass was on a lander, but my backup compass wasn't yeah, you know, and I lost it my fingerlight Lost, you know, I had one you know flashlight with a little pole cord on it. I had that but I lost everything else So I learned after that, you know, what do I really need to keep yeah, make sure this is dummy cord on it One of the main things uh, my instructor harps on is that if you're gonna have stuff in the bird it is positively secured Just nightmare stories of puffy jackets somehow just getting oh out the window on the tail rotor side see a You know or just everything backpacks fine haven't but everything is strapped in because if it does go to bad You don't want to add the ballistic hazard or something flying around in there. I know that you know being being snapped in you know, we had a A 47 in I'll bring out a shirana in Afghanistan And I just left and my replacement is first night they go out brownout objective to the x and The us engineers had owned the base at one time. It's like area And they'd put in a volleyball net and the volleyball net had like telephone poles as the poles And they sunk those babies in and the shunna came in and the rotor blades forward blades hit these poles They did not give and the aircraft flipped over And so in the back Is all these delta operators hanging from their you know their belt harness. Yeah, just The pilots saw me look back there and is everybody's just dangling It's a good time for a team photo. Yeah, I mean you got to be glass half full on that a little bit You know everything up before 9/11 I'm assuming other than in small engagements for you guys. It's all simulated gunfire. I mean I I guess in my job I could be way more reactive because I could say oh If you're gonna shoot at me I can shoot back at you. You guys at least up front or a touch Busier how was that going from watching somebody with a BFA or blank firing adapter With like this flame thrower flame coming out of a 556 round And then next thing you know you're on the end, you know the receiving end of Belfast 7-6-2 I mean how was that for the guys? It sucks It I mean this doesn't all the way because how do you train I mean how are you gonna train for that you really not going to until you're In it yeah and knowing that you could die. Yeah, you know the uh we did a hot ex-fill one time Army Rangers and you know They were in contact on the day at a waiting for night for us to come get him and we knew it was gonna be a hot ex-fill and I came in they were off to the left and you can hear You know the over the aircraft you can hear and feel the gunfire. Yeah, you know, and then all of a sudden the minigun opens up You know to suppress fire and say come You know switch it to high. It's like Well, they stopped doing that the the AC guns had the two power right? You know all right And they went to a DC powered gun which is not fun. That's how you could tell the emotional state of the door gunner If he was really into it, we'd get a little bit of high burst. Yeah Yeah, those things are you know, I tell you the the old guns were basically muskets You know, you go to shoot it in real life You know, and if it was too far forward or back, you know You got a kink on them in the belt and it would just jam you got a belt set So the DC guns they they routed them different. They were made by Dylan as opposed to a deal Yeah, yeah, I don't know things I only had one malfunction that I couldn't take to the target in the entire time we had those things So how did you train those pilots who had gone from a hypothetical world of simulated gunfire To be prepared for when they're sitting up front Tassaturated with flying these multi-million dollar machines with people in the back And real lead it's a good question. You know, it's at Stress inoculation right so during peacetime, you know, I know the the teams are the same way We're essentially assholes to each other Yeah, but like we can shoot like wax bullets that are you know, I mean like yeah and there's physical pain You can't oh there's nothing I mean, I mean, I like first off that would be fun to shoot that at you guys But also probably not best for the turbines to ingest all of that You know what I mean? So they you're limited and how much you can simulate I think yeah, and I think Really the I'm trying to think of way to describe this You just have to do it, you know, and once you've done it a couple of times. Yeah, you know, it's kind of no big deal You know, I mean, it's no fun. Yeah, you don't want to get hit because you know, there's a lot of important stuff Back there, you know black boxes and wire bundles and things like that and of course people Yeah, let's not forget the cockpit up front and the well, it's not glass plexiglass whatever it's made out of Yeah, it's just it's like golden laid plexiglass. Yeah, it's all that's in the windows and it's uh Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, there's no other way to put it. Do you just tell guys Just work the problem. I mean your your priority is to fly the ship So that's what you just focus on regardless of what's going on right? Yeah, you know, I never really had to say it I mean, you know, most of the 160th pilots are former operators of some sort, you know In the Shunook community is mostly Rangers and SF guys as the pilots as the pilots interesting. Okay, so they get tired to be on the ground Right watching the Shunooks fly away and they go to flight school deeply understand and so you know if they Do that. Let's see you made sergeant, you know as a ranger or a e6 or e7 as a as a green beret Now you got to flight school and then you did an assignment somewhere and then came to us You were very customer oriented, you know, you understood what the ground force wanted You know, and not that the other pilots didn't but it's just you know, maybe it's a little bit of a I don't know up east to the ground force to know that hey, you got a bunch of I think it just helps even it again did no aviation stuff in the military but at the last five years when I was An officer for the few times I likely was effective. I would directly associate that with an understanding of how the machine works from the enlisted side and knowing either a more efficient way to communicate, not a different way to communicate, but a more efficient way to communicate and achieve the end state. That previous experience helps for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when you don't have to tell somebody what it is that you're looking for because you already know the headspace that they are in because you've been in that headspace. Right. Now we're talking. So I think a lot of that has to play in there. Like we had a couple of guys that were Rangers and Mogadishu that were pilots with us. You know, a couple of them had, you know, purple hearts. That's awesome. Not the purple heart part. The enemy marksmanship award is highly overrated. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, guys that were in the convoy, you know, just going back and forth and back and forth. But so those guys in its contagious, you know, what was it? One of my favorite stories is, I think it's called endurance. It's with Ernest Shackleton. Oh, yeah. All right. And so he understood the chemistry and the, you know, people's mindset and how you had to keep like the naysayers away from the guys that could be influenced and stuff like that. So he would put groups of guys together in a way that their chemistry, you know, didn't you know, it offset each other. And so the same thing can happen in a cockpit or a crew. You know, you'll battle roster guys together based on their chemistry, their skill sets. You know, one guy, you know, you don't necessarily have the two best guys in the cockpit. You might have one great guy, one okay guy. That okay guy is probably like super cool under pressure. Yeah. Or he's got some future. I don't know if you want the two best guys in the same cockpit. You would want to probably aggregate that out a little bit. Yeah. Well, though, in 60th, the cool thing is, is almost everybody's pretty decent. And you know, as a flight lead, you know, one of these wide stuff. You know what I like the best of them being a flight lead. There was two things. Number one is when you went T.D. Why you get your own room. And number two, you got a fully mission qualified copilot. Number one is all the other chocks in the flight have an FMQ as the guy in charge. And then he's got a BMQ, a basic mission qualified pilot. Oh, really? Yeah. So as you go back in the flight until you get to trail, right? So the two best are in lead and in trail. And everybody else is kind of like a little rocking chair. Oh, no, we don't want the operators to know that. I'll be arguing to get in the front of the last helicopter. Yeah. Although, you know, the, you know, I would always put chalk to as the Casabak bird. So you could be on there. And if something happened, you know, that chalk to, they, those are good guys too, you know. Yeah. I mean, everybody's decent, but I would generally try to put trail as somebody good. And if, and if I couldn't be lead, I always wanted to be trail. Out of the, Shunuck's the Daps and the Little Birds, the A.H. as an M.H. as was there a platform that seemed to absorb more enemy fire than others or was it pretty well spread out across? Pretty well spread out. I mean, you know, everybody had their niche, right? So the Little Birds are generally going to the top of the building, you know, that the M.H.s. So, you know, they're like, as we come in, you know, because you always watch the ISR feeds. It shows like the overall objective and all of a sudden it zooms in soda straw just on the coupler and the rest of us are landing and say, Hey, come on guys, we want to see ourselves. Yeah. You know, but yeah, it seems to be just spread out. You know, the Black Hawks are really almost as big as a Shunuck. Yeah. I mean, I think it's really the same thing as the Black Hawks. You know, when I was flying at West Point, the superintendent would say, "Geith, I want a Black Hawk," because we had the EC 145s. Yeah. And I was like, "Sir, you don't want a Black Hawk." He's like, "Yeah, I do." But first off, the 145 is probably a more capable platform than the Black Hawk. It was perfect for what we were using it for, right? I mean, because I would fly him into DC, you know, or colleges, you know, Yale or something like that. You don't want to do that with a Black Hawk. Yeah. I could just come in with the, you know, the Lakota. It was quiet. You know, we never got any noise complaints. Every summer when the Black Hawks come from Port Drum and they do the summer training. It's all, you know, noise complaints. And they're just flying the same profile I was doing. They weren't doing anything wrong. But I feel like the maintenance costs on it. Well, I was going to say I feel like it's really high, but I feel like also if you can afford a Black Hawk, you probably can afford the maintenance. Yeah. I feel like, you know, my Lamborghini is super, I love this thing, but I can't afford the gas. I feel like you can probably have, if you have a Lambo money, you probably have Lambo gas and insurance money too. Yeah. It's a wild world. People are just snapping them up and some interesting paint schemes and they are out there just banging corners in the Black Hawks. You know, in a Black Hawks and amazing aircraft. You know, of course we all talk crap about each other's airframes, you know, but it's a good airframe. Yeah. Man, unbelievable. You guys do crash from time to time though. I will say even the 160th will water them up from time to time. All right. I had one last summer that actually flew into wires out of the Seattle area. Did they survive it? Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. Training flight. How, it's okay. In a training flight, nighttime or daytime? Had they done site survey, do you guys have software that can look for that? And obviously things can, if software is an updated thing. Yeah. Like there was a God, dude. I don't know how much you follow a civilian aviation. I think it was Robinson and nothing against Robinson, but I think it was loaded with four people. And there was a, I want to say, it was some type of like a slackline wire and they had published it in a no-tam, which I'm going to be real honest, no pilots or really reading no-tams. And it was only associated with an airport that was a distance away. So, where God was flying a path that He had done many, many times. All four. I think, you know, I haven't seen the results yet. The actual accident, but it sounds like kind of the same thing. You know, they just, you know, it's a local area. They were kind of familiar with it. They used to scare the crap out of me at West Point. We had these wires down by the front gate that during football games, I'd have to go fly around due traffic duty after I did the jump team. And I was always like, you know, on a crappy day, those wires, you just can't see them. You know, I knew they were there. You know, it's like in DC, it was a funny story. So we're flying the superintendent to the Pentagon and daytime meetings going to be a nighttime ex-fill. And I couldn't get the safe open to get the goggles out. The combo was messed up right. And I was like, what the hell? And they were like, sure, we got to go. You know, they were like, all right, we're going un-aided, right? Now I've been down there a lot. So I understood, you know, where to go from the observatory up around the marina to the Pentagon. So we did that all un-aided. And you have to be a hundred feet or below because, you know, Reagan, the traffic comes in right there. It's very technical. And so here I am, zero-alume night, flying over the marina, and there's like cranes and masks and stuff. And I get just the white light on. But I know what's there. And I was like, it was scary, you know, and--no to self understand the safe combo. Yeah. I got back and said, what's wrong? I don't know. Is it the-- is it as a wire strike, survivable as long as it doesn't interact with the rotor disc, or I would say come through the cockpit? Like if you can--you know what I mean? Like, is it ever survivable? I don't think so. We had a Shinokana training flight down. They were head to Fort Rucker from Savannah, brand new G model. They were flying along at like 900 feet in the clouds. They were not doing what they were supposed to do. Yeah. But they were just coupled up, letting the aircraft drive and they had to digital map up. Yeah. And what they didn't realize is that there was a thousand foot antenna that was mislabeled on the map. It was about a half mile off. And they ran smack dab into this thing. And the wire came through, like the guy wires to the tower. It came through the cockpit and-- But like decapitated the cockpit as it was, it was nasty. And one of the pilots actually lived. The cockpit actually separated and the main rotor stayed on board or the forward rotor, stayed on. And he just sort of came down and the--what was left of the cockpit landed in the trees backwards. And the--what? He unbuckled his seatbelt and stepped out. And right there was killed, yeah. Yeah. It was pretty wild. I feel like that happened so fast, too. And we had one desert storm, a D model. C-47D ran into an on-let tower. They were unated. They--you know, back then, not everybody flew goggles. Yeah. Well, that's not anything to think there were that many goggles to go around. There weren't out of 16 air crews. We had--I want to say six crews, maybe nine, but I think it was six. Well, man. And not everybody had to be qualified back then. So you could be a gargle qualified guy. I was in Korea one time in a regular unit and I had to fly down to Gansal at the Pusan and fly back at night in the mountains with a guy who wasn't gargle qualified. So I had to fly unated in the mountains. And we couldn't go up because it was a cloud deck. Yeah. And it wasn't like his instrument ticket was expired. Great. It was a staff guy. Awesome. No, thank you. How do--I mean, I know you've been out of the game for a bit, but how does the 1/60 keep pushing the training envelope to make sure they're ready for whatever is next? Is it just--is it reps? Are they--you think the left room move away from those platforms too? The 47s, the Black Hawks, and the Little Birds? Are they looking at new and emerging platforms? They are. They're looking at the V280, I think it is. The Valor? I don't know which one that. I know the--it's a tilt router. It's a tilt router. Okay. But it looks like--way I would describe it--it looks like a Black Hawk with tilt router. So instead of having a router system-- Was that V280? Where am I? I'm going to use that picture. V here. I mean, I would imagine just like any other Tier 1, you know, they're looking-- that you want to stay on the cutting edge. - Check, 'cause it'll do, you know, a 300 knots. - Really, you know? - Yeah, I mean, the best thing is gonna get in helicopters, you know, 220 or something like that. - What? - That's right there. - That is basically a black Hawk fuselage. - And what's cool about that? - What about that? - See how the propellers go up and the missiles still like this. So now you can have door guns. See the problem with the V-22 is the whole engine missile moves and there's no way to-- - Go back on picture, man. - Oh, look at that. So you see the front of it, Michael, how the front of the Nissel goes up. - The whole thing doesn't rotate. - Well, before, pull up a picture of the V-22 hovering and pull them upside-by-side. You'll be able to see the exact-- - Yeah, exactly. - And this, by the way, is the original tilt-roller design from the '50s. - The V-22 killed a lot of people in certification. So you see how the Nissel or the exhaust is coming down with that, Michael, on the picture on the right. Now look at the one, you'll have to switch to the other picture. That's in flight. But if you go to the-- See how it snaps in half? So you have a clear view underneath the wing. - Wow. - 300 knots. - Yeah. - It's sweet. I did an article for Stars and Stripes on this. - Yeah. - And I was op-ed and I was talking about, I don't remember the distances and times now, but we, operation during Freedom Philippines was happening right after 9/11 as well. And we had 47s flying out of Cebu down to Basel and Island. And that's about three or 400 miles one way. And they were doing that with tankers, you know? Tankers support, long nights. This aircraft, the one that's behind there, could do it, you know, they're back, you know, just that much faster. And so they're flying 120s, doing 300. - How long would it take, let's say, you know, like the 160th? First off, let's say that the aircraft is built and certified in the Enters Military Service. How long would it take them from when they got their hands on that and let's say they could get as many as they wanted to being FMCUDed with that platform? We're talking years to just finally get an understanding about how the thing flies. - I guess two years. - Okay. Because we had the G model, the MH47G, to replace the Echo. And it was a significant difference in the cockpit, you know, the aircraft still flew the same. So that wasn't the issue. It was software. You know, how you build a flight plan? How do you control things, right? And in the initial work they did was horrible. You know, it was Rockwell Collins, who you'd think would do a great job, but they mixed their experience from other airframes into this thing and it just didn't work. So for example, something like the color scheme in the MFDs, right? They had magenta, is one of the colors. But the problem in a dark cockpit, when you dim the MFDs down, you can't see magenta. When it's dim. - MFDs, a multifunctional. - Multi-functional. - It's the glass cockpit, right? It's the little TV screens. So when you would dim it down to where people don't see you and shoot at you, you know. - You also can't see where you are with your magenta line. - It's excellent. - So we changed the colors. You know, and I remember the engineers just going, "Why would you?" Come here. You know, you go into dark cockpit, dim it down and go, this is where how we fly. - Yeah. - Well, you can't read it. - You had no shit. - No shit, that's why you're here. - That's why I'm telling you. - So how would they do that though? Would they dedicate an entire squadron for lack of a better term to be offline for that two years till they could get up and running with that? Like a whole group of people that are just-- - Well, it would start with SOATB, right? So the special operations training battalion would, well, first SIMO, systems, integration, maintenance office. They'd develop the hardware in the software. Then they bring it over to SOATB and they have some experienced guys working it, flying it. - Just trying to bend the thing. - After they get the airworthiness release. And so they'll go out and they'll figure out what they do and don't like about it. They'll make changes, which is nice about the 160th 'cause the regular RME was feeling the F model Shinook, which is the same cockpit, same hardware. But the software was about five versions behind ours. And they couldn't change it and they hated it. And so they brought me down 'cause I was the senior pilot and I was down with DES, which is the directorate of evaluation standards. And they're like, "Al, tell us what we're doing wrong with us." I'm like, "Well, you get the wrong software." They said, "That sucks. We had that and we did not like it." And I showed them an example of what we had. I was like, "This is what we've done." - And they probably went, "That's amazing. That's exactly what we're trying to do." But we can't get it. - Right. And they eventually kind of did, but initially they had that paint. So anyway, you go back to the 160th. So you've got this, that's one of these organizations within the organization exists. So you can develop and then you can do a spiral development. So it continues to go out into improvements. And then you field it to a company. An entire company will just stand down, go over to your training, and then they'll go out, I want we call it UMT, unit mission training. And they'll go out in all the environments. They go to Colorado in the mountains, they'll go somewhere to hit a ship. - Just fly everything out of it. - And they'll do everything they can to learn it really quick 'cause they're going to be the next ones to deploy it in combat. And then when those guys do that, now they have lessons learned from overseas. And now they'll come back once he's in Tuesdays and go out with whatever the next company is that stands down and they'll be like a liaison to them and they'll be like, "Go hang out with them." So it's a really neat process. - How old are the designs for the 47s, the 60s, and the little birds? I mean, little birds are what? I mean, Magnum PI was flying around in a little bird. So we're talking 80s, 70s. What about the 47s and the 60s? Are they about the same? - No, the 47s were developed for Vietnam. - Okay, wow. - For the 101st, right? They actually the 10th and I can remember that designation before they were the 101st, for first-air assault test or something like that. - Okay. - And so they built the shinnok's so the 101st could go to Vietnam 'cause without the shinnok's, they didn't have the lift capacity. They didn't for some of the stuff. I don't remember the details. - So it's time. - But it was built 1959, 1961, something like that. - Okay. - So it's time. - Yeah, and so there's a poster that Boeing put out one time is called only the silhouette remains the same. So it looks like a shinnok, you can tell, oh, it's a shinnok, I used to fly those in Vietnam. Come take a look. - Same as the 130s now. I was a commercial airliner taxing by an air national guard. I think that looks like a C130, but that is a very interesting blade design. - Yeah, the J-Models. - Yeah, it's got a curve to it. - Yeah, very, I'm like, - I'm like, - I'm like, - I just 12 feet longer. - Yeah, but I bet you somewhere in there is a stamp that says 1968. - Oh yeah. - From the French shinnok. - They're shinnok's that I think, so now what they're doing is there's, I guess 72 of them, right? When I first got to the 160th, we had 24 E-Models, that was it. And the old D-Modeled Adverse Weathercock that's went to Savannah, and there was 12 of those. And now there's 72, but they're sending them all to get turned into beer cans now. - Really? - Yeah. So they're all doing new builds, because all of these things were, some of the original Shinnok airframes, you know? - I feel like there's some people out there with some shinnok money, and they should be able to also buy a shinnok. - Wow, that's nice, right? - If we're gonna DRM of Black Hawk, I think diesel Dave needs a shinnok. I don't know what kind of money a shinnok costs. I feel like it's a tremendous operating cost per year. When I left the G-Models, we're 62 million a copy with a turn-in. So you had to turn in an aircraft, basically. - Yeah, but that's government pricing. So they're probably gonna get that for 6.2 million. Not that that's a small amount of money by the stretch. - I think now they're like, eight or 90 million. And good God. - Like Columbia Helicopter has them. You know, they use them for logging and for-- - They're out here, well, yeah, it's a 47. The firefighters, I think they're based out of billings, but yeah, they rotate through sometimes. They'll park it over there. - Their friends would do that. - Yeah. It's a big bird. So speaking of shinnoks, I swear to God every year. And you'll understand your direct tie into this. This narrative comes around about extortion 17, where it was a sacrifice operation where Obama sold out gold squadron because of red squadron actioning Neptune spear. And unfortunately, there is at least one that I know of, family member that helps perpetuate this. - Right. - And correct me if I'm wrong, but you were the investigating officer for that accident or what? - Event. - No, I wasn't involved, but not as the-- - So you may not have been the person who actually bottom-lined it, but I'm hoping that we could walk through that a little bit. And one, I have tried to explain to people, the complete and utter unrealistic nature that I don't even know how you would coordinate that, by the way. - No, you couldn't. - And because extortion, the first of all, it was a 47D, right? It was a conventional aircraft. That family member you're talking about, I think is the one that was saying, why don't they give us the black box? That would tell us everything. Well, there was no voice data recorder on those things. Only the echoes and the golf stuff. - So for my understanding, the thing burned for hours. - Yeah, so magnesium and fuel. - Yes. - But the other thing with that aircraft is it wasn't, the problem, the easiest way to boil it down is that when Cag left a rack and they went to Afghanistan, they now had priority on the rotary platforms, the soft platforms. So everybody else had to get it. So that's the seals doing the ground assault force and then you could have what they call opportune air, right? So you get somebody that's not busy and they come help you. Yeah, just a scheduling issue for people listening. If it's available, you could ask. Right, but here's the thing. In order for a conventional aircraft to fly a Tier 1 unit, you had to meet certain criteria. And like you had to be in country for a period of time, you had to pilot's had to hit so many hours and all that stuff. So the extortion guys did, right? And so they could do what's called an offset infill. You know, they weren't even supposed to do what we call to the Y, which is 300 meters from the target or to the X because they don't have the same defensive armament and a bunch of other things. So anyway, they can only do an offset infill. So that unit was ripping out, right? They were a relief in place and the new unit was coming in and they were out doing a local area orientation. Right. So what that encompasses is, you know, so you're the new pilot coming in. I'm the old guy going out. We get in the cockpit together and we fly around to all the forward operating bases. And I show you this is how you get in and out of this farp. This is where you can watch out over here. There's a big balloon on a tether, you know, you come at this base from the side. We do the same thing on the ground force. We do the left seat, right seat. We leave a headquarters contingent or we send one over early. You get atmospheric on the ground, operation on tempo. So here are these guys doing that. They're a blue force tracker, right? The beacon that tells people back in the talk, it screens like this up on the wall. Yeah. Oh, we need a helicopter to take, you know, gold squad are not to reinforce the Rangers. You know, they're under fire. Okay. Oh, look, extortion 17 is certified to move Tera 1 forces. Send them. Well, these guys, that wasn't their mission brief. It wasn't anything they analyzed. They're out checking out, you know, fobs and farms. And they have never flown together. But the pilots and half the crew in the back is also different units. So there's a little bit of a disconnect because, you know, the one thing about battle-rostring in the 160, is you know the guy next to you. You know what he's going to do or not do. You know, a lot of times you don't even have to say it. It's just, it's just known. And so they get sent in there, you know, and they all in a cycle of darkness as well, like the, as I'm saying. So yeah, I mean, everything you're describing wasn't like a multi-day process. It's what I'd probably called in troops in contact. They looked at what they had available. It's not, it wouldn't be incredibly uncommon for a Tera 1 unit to be a response force like that. You're going to go. I mean, sometimes we would have other units doing the exact same thing for us on a contingency basis. So it sounds like they got the call, got the bird there as fast as they could. I'd heard there was some decision about whether splitting into two helicopters and going a lower route or one helicopter and going over a piece of terrain, which is, I believe, what they chose. Correct. They is for what one I understand. They drove right up the high speed avid remote approach because they, they bumped everybody in a one-aircraft. And so now it's heavier. Now it's not going up or around. It's going to go right up the road. And, you know, so think of a V-shaped valley, right? Instead of running at the bottom of the V where it's the lowest where you have the most payload capacity, but you have no room to maneuver. And one of the problems with the Army Aviation, well, military road-roading aviation in general is when you get shot at, people have a tendency of trying to dive down a way, right? Like I did on the hill. If it's your own amount of time. But, but that's only good if you can put terrain between you and the guys shooting at you, right? So what happens, and I almost was the chief of the aviation shoot down assessment team says, I know some of this stuff, is I've watched some of the videos of like a black cock and Air Force Black Hawk getting shot at and he's running down a valley just like what they did in extortion. And he's getting shot at from all these different directions. And as they're talking on the ice, yes, you can hear the bullets hitting and they're just zipping around. They can't go any lower, but they're doing this. And the only thing they didn't do was go up at all, right? And there's a maneuver called the Wells maneuver where you essentially when you get shot at instead of diving down a way or turning, you actually climb a little bit and then you start to turn and everything's done. So that the gunner can't see you doing it. He doesn't know that you just climbed up a little bit. He doesn't know that you did geometry. Every nine seconds you're doing something different. So the gunner can't anticipate what you're doing because they used to helicopter just diving down and trying to break contact. Well, there's nowhere to go if you're already flying at the bottom of the V. Yeah. You're just, you know, like if it had been me doing that based on my experiences, you know, I would have found a way to get around. I would not have gone up that may have an approach. And that's kind of what happened on Redwings, you know, with Turbin 33. You know, they went right up the spine of the ridge. You said I'm not the one that got shot down. That was, did the RPG actually go into the back of the helicopter on that one? Yeah. Right up into the ramp area, we believe it hit the aftransmission or the sea box, the commensual transmission. And you know, it's funny, you know, you talk about extortion. You know, Turbin 33, we still have people. I didn't interview for an article that's going to the Smithsonian sometime this summer. And they were talking about that and a couple of seals, I don't know from who, said that they know that there's ISR footage of the battle of the four original guys, you know, Marcus and Mercy. I have heard of that. I've heard people saying, I was going to say I've heard people saying that. Yeah. I've never met somebody who says they have seen it. Yeah, there's not. The only. And again, this is what people don't understand about ISR, which we're largely talking about predators or what does this stand for? Intelligence surveillance, surveillance reconnaissance. Predator Reaper, it would have had to have been overhead to begin with for that to exist. They might have surged it there once they got the red star club, like metaphorical red star cluster, which is everybody come help me. Right. But they didn't have that. They had an A10 with a lightning pod. Yeah. So what we call non-standard ISR, you know, so it's an A10 overhead. And that's after, you know, the whole compromise had happened. So there's none, but they insist that it exists. And the guy I was talking, I wrote the article, he's like, he's seen all the classified materials and he's like, there's no, you know, and the same thing is everybody thinks a manpad brought it down. It's like, no, it's an RPG. I watched it on a feed, you know, from the A10, you know, and you know, if it were a manpad, the flares would have shot out. None of that happened. I don't know how to stop the rumor with extortion. It's rough to see. And personally, I'm biased on this one because I knew the vast majority of people on that hell of a goal. Right. I was a gold and I was in two-troop and that was two-troop of gold. I'm not saying I would have been on the helicopter, but I'd stay there. I spent the minimum amount of time in that command. I'm just saying, the guy from my blood's class, Jonas Kelsal, who was enlisted in buds and then went to college right after graduating buds before going into the SEAL teams was the -- oh, but you've been. Ground Force Commander. I don't know if he was the commanding officer or gold at that time, but he was at least the GFC that night. I mean, it's rough. And I just -- I don't understand why some of those things get so sticky. And why -- Red Wings is a really touchy one in the community because externally, it could be viewed as the makings of a great Hollywood movie. But internally, it is full of lessons learned that didn't quite make it into the movie. And I don't even know if people would have understood those lessons learned. But it's taught as not a success. It's taught as a failure and a breakdown of so many things. But that to me doesn't -- I don't understand why people get so to use Michael's word vehemently, which is not the way you say it. So no, I always say it incorrectly because he demanded that he just was like, "That's how you say it." They won't let it go. And what is it? What is it supposed to show? I mean, I know the argument because the discussion basically comes down to this. And as the movie shows, Marcus stay in fight until he was almost out of ammunition, or did the opposite of that occur. Those are basically the two narratives. And there's some real weird things in there like, "Why were there two after-actions that were written? Why was he asked to write another one? Why did the military essentially issue him an editor in a publisher?" I mean, an early answer to that because they knew they could turn it into a great recruiting piece, and I very barely know Marcus. I'm hung out with him two times. And I'm not trying to throw shade at him in any way because the guy has to live -- whatever the reality on the ground is, that man has to live with it for the rest of his life. So I'm not trying to throw shade at it. But both sides of that conversation have these things that they have their talents in and they won't let them go. It's the same thing with extortion. Like, I can't fathom what it would feel like to be a family member losing somebody in that situation. Wanting and demanding answers that like the black box, if they can't even give it to you, but you are convinced that it does exist and because you're not getting it, it's there for a conspiracy. And then let's attach that to the president just waking up and going to the Oval Office one morning over his coffee and just saying, "You know what? Let's just sacrifice gold squadron because that makes sense in any universe." Right. And just think of, you know, Occam's razor, right? The simplest, right? For sure. If you're a group of bad guys and you've got the the Rangers, you know, under fire and you feel like you're out and overing them and you may do some serious damage on them, what's going to come? You know that the Americans are going to send out a whole bunch of gold. Especially over a decade deep into that. Right. They know. don't fight your enemy too much or they'll know your ways, right? So, uh, all you got to do, and this is why I said, what's different between me and the guys from my timeframe is we learned, we, you know, with blood, you know, what you do and you don't do. And you don't just fly right up the valley because it's the quickest way in. You know, I would always take, guys used to hate when I would come over. At least I always felt that way because I would always, I'd always make them do things the hard way. Yeah. That would be like, Hey, uh, let's take, you know, the seals want to go here. All right. Well, let's go like this. No, we're going to come this way over the shittiest terrain. And we're going to come in and they're like, Oh, wow. That you know what the approach is going to be like going in there. I'm like, yeah, they won't expect this. Also, don't, all their guns are pointing this way. Don't you guys love that shit though upfront? Like I feel like you guys would love to come in the most difficult way and just bend those machines to the best of your life. Yeah. See this because you're going to, you're going to, but, you know, that's what I used to say all the time was that, uh, you know, um, I always tried to leave myself and out. Right. Now I was thinking about, you know, you flying around here in your helicopter, I always have an out. You gotta, right? Yep. The seals wouldn't let me have one. They'd be like, we went land at the end of this box canyon. But if I do that and we brown out, there's nowhere for me to go and I don't have enough power to get out of there. Yeah, but you'll do it. I don't know until it doesn't. Well, and then I end up doing it. You know, and we've done stuff. We talked last time I was here about doing a one-wheel landing, uh, to ex-fill guys. Oh, there's iconic pictures of you guys doing that stuff. Yeah. And it's like, I don't want to, yeah, but you can. I'm like, but I don't. So sunny out. It's two hours past sunrise. Go ahead and come in. Yeah. The AC's already gone because, you know, they're like, yeah, we're out of here. We can see Eastern glow. Yeah. The sun's going to come up. We're leaving. I mean, there's a time to go up the gut. I mean, if somebody is calling a casavac and it is lifeline eyesight, and I'm like, go for it. But if it's, you know, what I would do on a hot ex-fill for a casavac, let's say I don't have the, the medical board is chalk too, as I'd escort them in essentially, he come in low, I'd come in high and I would do everything I could to draw attention to me. It's like, here, shoot at me. You know, I'm still moving. I'm not maneuvering, you know, to land, let him come in and do this. And this worked several times. Is it safer actually once you guys are on the ground? Because sometimes, especially in an urban environment, you don't have direct line of sight. Yeah, only if you can block, you know, if you have cover. Yeah. Because the helmet's not good. See what works at Heiden's Seek, though. Don't confuse the two-in-a-gun fight. Both work in Heiden's Seek. One's way better in a ballistic environment. Yeah, I figured you guys were always looking for the most challenging way up. I just figure aviators love doing aviator stuff. So they're just, they make great stories, but they're no fun to do. You know, it's like I was thinking on the way here, you know, talking about air refueling. So air refueling can be fun and terrifying all in the same flight. You know, like, yeah, just as simple as, you know, you got a nice smooth night. You know, you're plugging away. Everything's good. And it's smooth because it's, you know, a warm front with low clouds, but it's looking pretty good. And all of a sudden, the tanker drags you into a fricking cloud. Now all you can see is the hose and the markings. And you might not even see the tanker, but you got to, how would the tanker do that to you guys? Cause he's got a windshield too. I think they're up here eating cornflake. Should I go, he's more milk, you know, now they're probably just like, they have a little dial. They're like, give me three left on the heading. We're putting them right through that cloud. Sometimes you know, and then you know what they do is they'll, they'll turn. But once you're in the cloud, you gotta just stay level. But what they'll do is they'll turn out of it. Oh my God. And it's, it's really a challenge to stay with the tanker. And once you're on the hose, you don't want to get off. No. You know, and what's the fuel for like on that thing? And we're talking about for people listening to the big extended boom that's usually on the, usually on the right hand side, isn't it? Yes. On the right hand side. Yeah. What kind of fuel flow are you getting in that? 750 pounds a minute. Really? Yeah. And a, uh, power, uh, seven pounds of jet A is going to be about a gallon. So that's about a hundred, we'll call it a hundred gallons a minute. Yeah. It's quick. I mean, it takes, you can fill up 13,000 pounds of gas and about three, four minutes. I like the ones where the rotors they cut off the hose. Those are my, that happens. I know. They're on the internet. Yeah. The blades take it though. And for a little, I mean, I'm not saying the pilots are enjoying it. And they know they don't have, I don't know what they see on their hand. You know what they turn up the aircraft is on landing. So, so the, the, you know, we were talking earlier that the, when you move the cyclic forward on a shinrock, the blades don't tilt. They actually decrease the pitch and the forward and increase it in half in the whole airframe. Yeah. Tilts. So what they do is they have these little computers that will, will tilt the rotors once you get in forward flight and it gives you a more level attitude. Those are called longitudinal cyclic trims. That makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, you'd be way nose down. Right. Now, the problem with that is that when you're doing air refueling, these things can move based on what the computer is sense. So you put them in manual so they can't move. So you're doing 120 knots. You'll lock these things in place. Now you just hit the hose and you're, you know, you take a chunk of your blade off like this and now you're like a washing machine out of balance. And you're just looking down and go, okay, let's put this on the ground. Right. So you say that can't feel amazing when it starts shaking. No, when, when, you know, the RPG came through my aircraft, you know, parts of the, what I think was probably the ammo can came out the other side of the aircraft and took a chunk out of the rotor blade and that thing, you know, I didn't even describe how it's flying like this. Yeah. But so here's these guys that hit the hose. Now they're all freaked out because they don't want the aircraft to come apart and they want to just get on the ground. They never, I know of three incidents that this happened in my time there. Not one of them remembered to put the LCTs back in auto. So when they touch down, a rotor blades are still tilted at 120 knots. So you don't slow down. You know, you get down, you get the forward gear and you're still getting pulled along because the rotor blades are tilted in a way that they're not supposed to be. Michael, this one's worth work. Do you find any? Yeah, I'm actively searching. Just go on to YouTube and put helicopter mid air refueling chop hose. It's probably going to be a 53. I don't know. They're, they're, um, their probe tips sticks out from the rotor. So you know, Shenuk, it's like eight feet inside the rotor disc. So you've got to make contact. Well, so you get about five feet away from the hose. Yeah. And then once it's ready to move, you move to contact and you move quick. And you just hit it, get connected. And then once it's on the probe, it's there, you know, and then it can't fly up and down into the rotor system allegedly. Well, you can, I've seen people toss it off. We, the very first target we hit with you guys in Iraq and O3 was that Ken bio target. And I think it's about four hours each way. We refueled on the way in and the way out. I chose to look out the window very briefly. But I know that. And then said, no, I'm just going to sit. Down and pretend like this isn't happening. Because they were on both sides too. We were in, we were going into Yemen for a target with DevGrew. And but one of the tankers was going to also be like a backup far up and a wet-wing Kasebat kind of thing. So we refueled on the way in or up. I think that's a red sea. He got Yemen and Eritrea and Ethiopia over here. And so you're going up there and you know, the up and down dress are terrible. And the the drug, you know, the parodrogue is going up and down below the rotor. And you get on there and boy, once you got on and I remember the troop chief was on my aircraft and he's looking out the window and he's like, holy shit, that sucks. He goes, I don't ever want to see that again. And he's like, man, yeah, unplug and go turn around. But it was funny because one of the one of the guys didn't get enough gas and the tanker that's supposed to be on the ground starts accelerating away. And it's shunook wouldn't let him go. You know, as chasing him down, so you're doing 130. They were doing like 160 still on the hose and the guys like trying to outrun him. And finally, they just pulled away, but he got his gas. Good God. Would you find me, show? Today's episodes brought to you by David, the industry leader in protein bars. There's two different type of bars I'm going to talk about today. First, there is the gold, which is actually in this gold wrapping. I have these in the studio. These are my go to right after Jiu Jitsu in between episodes or just when I want to get a high protein snack. 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, zero grams of sugar. So that equates to a 75% calorie from protein, the highest protein to calorie ratio of any leading bar on the market. Each of these bars has an indulgent doughy texture, studded with satisfying chunks and airy crisps. I can attest to that chocolate chip cookie dough peanut butter, chocolate chunk salted peanut butter, fudge brown, a cinnamon roll, blueberry pie, red velvet and cake batter. I've talked about this before. 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And if you prefer to shop in person, David is available at leading retailers, nationwide, including target, Walmart, Kruger, Wegmans and the vitamin shop. Just check out their. store locator and find a location near you back to the show. Cutting the hose. Yes, you did. No, just. This is the beginning of. Yeah, here he goes. Yep. Oh, he got his own pro. Yeah. Yeah. Now see, that's what a shunna can't do. You know what though? I'd say I'd say just try to put it back in the old drug shoot there. I mean, like what's, I'm sure you probably, oh my god. So those probes are probably made out of a harder material than the foam wrapped in Kivler. Okay. What cut? I don't want to. So we honestly don't even understand how the helicopter is still flight. One of those blades is incredibly damaged if not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's that whole. This is actually the video I was thinking in my mind for whatever reason I thought they had hit the the drug shoot. Yeah. You know, you just cut off the last five feet of it there. And you see little white markings all the way up as a hose marking so you can see how far the hose is. And that guy has got some paperwork to do at the end of his day. Well, you said it can be fun and it can be terrifying all in the same flight. Is it fun up until that happens? And now you've got to deal with it on the refueling on that first objective. A missile went underneath the refueling bird and it was like we're leaving and just bailed. And again, I was just sitting in the back like I don't know what's going on. And you know, that's the thing. You asked me the difference between the 90s and after 2001 and we always had redundancy planned in. So air refueling always had a redundant fuel plan. Ground fuel somewhere else or a short and route or something. This Afghanistan happened, you know, the very first time we had talons instead of Papa models. So the C-130 Papa is a dedicated refueler. And the talent, the combat talent is for also delivery of air packages, right? And that's what they consider themselves. We're talon pilots. We're not tanker pilots. And so one day they prioritized a drop over my fuel and I had to land in Afghanistan was a flight of two and wait for another Shinook to fly fuel to me because I ran out of gas. You had to wait for one of your buddies to go ahead the gas station and bring you a basically I assume it was a red Jerry can bring a big black one. It was about 500 pounds. But yeah, I remember being so pissed. It's like, come on guys, you know, because and they were just so used to us being able to absorb not getting our gas. You know, and that changed because now we were going, okay, look, we're going to get to the tanker with 20 minutes of fuel. There's a thin margin, man. But when you start talking about Afghanistan in particular, in order to carry the amount of assaulters that the ground force feels they need, something's going to give. Yeah, wait until it's a real thing. It's usually going to be fuel. So that's the questions, you know, the go back and forth out of it with the troop commander would be, okay, do you want a lot more people? Or do you want me to have power to go over the mountains that nobody else is flying over and surprise the enemy? Or do you want me to have more gas on the objective so I can do casavac or hang, what do you want? You got to tell me. And so there'd be this little, you know, in the early days, which is like, I want everything. You can't have everything. You can have one of these three things. It's always the way it is. Looking back on your career, I mean, obviously other than Robert's Ridge, does anything else stick out at you where you're like, wow, I am never doing that again? Or that you really got away with one where it shouldn't have gone your way, but it did. Yeah, there's a lot of those. I mean, I have to pick one. You don't have to pick one. No, no, I could listen to this though. Well, here's the cool one. My wife will be like, why are you watching helicopters crash? Because I'm trying to learn. So this book, "Racers are three," came out, oh, almost three years ago now. And so I wrote a second book called "Shinook's in the Dark," same publisher, it's waiting to hit print. Took a year to get through the Pentagon Security Review. And then now it's been. Surprise, actually, you made it through. You know, it's funny is that Mark Bissonet is bitching that his book is. Matt. Oh, yeah, Matt Bissonet. Yeah, he's like, oh, yeah. They're trying to get me. They've taken this time. It's like, dude, you're in it even a third of the way through what I had to do. What substantial changes did they come back with in your manuscript? None. And see, that's what's wild. At this point, I mean, I guess people could write the tell off they wanted to, but here's the thing. If they do that, they're not going to put it through. Exactly. And that was why I thought Shunox and the Dark would get through so much quicker. I think it's a manpower issue on the receiving end of the manual script, yes. It is. So-com, they only had one guy and he wasn't doing his job. He's reservist. And then a new guy came in who had a reputation and getting shit done and he did manage. Boom, he got in, like, too much number. One guy. Yeah. Really well-staffed up. We're just really placed up here. Yeah. But anyway, the first chapter in that book, I was in a rack and there was a dust one. Three, 101 soldiers were taken. Dust one stands for duty status undetermined- Whereabouts unknown. Whereabouts unknown. Yeah. And so they think there's a source that knows where these guys are. He's up in Mosul and we're down in Bologna and the Cag guys are down in the green zone at the MSS. So I got to go up and pick up this source. Now the source is like 600 pounds. This guy, that's what they wouldn't let me put the book out. There was a nickname for him. I don't know what to say. I was a thin, skinny person. It has to be. It was a job. Yeah. But actually, as you just said, 600 pounds, I'm not going to lie. My first thought was of job of the hut. Well, it's what he looked like. Yeah. And you could Google me. He'll pop right. But so he gets on the aircraft and it felt like a home-view was driving on board. And I was like, you could feel it. And then I got a haul ass down to Camp Cropper and they're going to debrief him. So that night, convinced that in a place called Yusufia, it's down just west of Baghdad. And it's a very nasty place. A lot of it and something about Bagh guys. So we go in there with five Black Oaks, two Chinooks, two MH-6s and two AH-6s. That's a heavy package. That's the package, right? Because we think we're going to get American soldiers. And as we come in, it was interesting. It's beautiful weather. We got a big stack overhead, all the firepower you could want. And I remember the little birds doing their bump. And the funny thing is I've never seen them do the bump. Oh, really? I've only seen the rockets hit. Oh, you're talking about it from the other AHs as they do their little pop-up? Yeah. So they're always on my, you know, behind me. So when they go up and come down and they start shooting, all I see is the many guns in the rockets. I don't ever get to see the aircraft. Yeah. And so one day we did this. I'm not going to. Okay. So we do this. We put everybody in. We go back to the MSS now. It's just time to wait. You know, the action's on or happening. And while that happens, a thunderstorm rolls through. And it's a biggie, right? And it drives all of the upper package. ISR fires. Everything gone. Everything left. So now the ground forces on the ground. So people listening to this from the ground force perspective, everything you're describing is stuff that they love, right? Because the stack overhead is literally aircraft stacked. It'll be at 1000 to 2000 foot intervals. You could have a tens, F 18s, F 15s, F 16s. You could have a, everything. And they're kind of coordinating and doing their own thing. Right? The AC 130 is lower in their orbit. But then they can coordinate like who's looking at what? And you're just on the radio and you can just, I want that to destroy it. Not a problem. And so then though, imagine being in a contentious environment and then all of that leads. And now it's just boots on the ground versus. And then the sun's going to come up soon. Oh, of course. Right? So the weather, so the rain has stopped. But you know, anybody who understands meteorology, you know, the wind is now, you know, five to six knots, the dew point spreads like four. And there's a lot of dust in the air. So there's fog, right? There's a lot of water around. You're afraid you's river and all that stuff. So it's solid fog. And the LNO comes to me. We're sitting there. And he's like, how? Ground force commander wants to talk to you, right? This is, you know, the actual green commander. And he's like, Al, they tell me you can get my guys out. I'm like, what do you mean? We can't get them out because have you looked out the window? And it's like, no, right? So I walked the door and you can't see across the road to the, the hell of it. So this is like low hanging ground fog just the dead. Yeah. That actually happens up here quite a bit too. Talking about well, the temperature dew point spreads just smashes together, even in freezing times. Yeah. You can fog up an air craft or an airfield with an air craft, right? You just get that mixing action. Yeah. But anyway, so I look ahead and I'm like, shit, you know, what do the other guys do? You know, the black hawk guys have all the same equipment as me. Yeah. You know, the radar, all this other stuff, but they don't practice it the way the Shenok guys do because the Shenok guys have been doing this since early 2001. And this has got to be 2005 or 2006 now. So I said, okay, give me half hour. I'll go get him right with two Shenok's. So you know, I told you the package, five black hawks, two Shenok's, there's a lot of guys. So I call, I pick what I think is a good LZ and then I call up to Balaad to the imagery guy and we're now talking back and forth and he's like, all right, man, move it here. He's menstruating, you know, the target imagery. He's at his telephone pole here. You don't know where to go there. And so he picks two spots on the same big, you know, lot and we were. We're gonna go take off two minutes apart, fly up to like 2,000 feet, couple up the aircraft and let it drive down to a 40 foot hover and then we're gonna land. You're basically we're gonna do an instrument approach into a combat landing. That's never been turped, right? So like any instrument approach you've ever done to an airfield, there's math that's been done and they flight check. It's almost as if it's certified and checked. Oh my! Remember stamped? There's a guy from the FAA has done all these flight check. So we go on as we're walking to the aircraft, I remember I couldn't even see the helicopters. It was still dark and the emphasized the fact they really needed them to come out. It's kind of before the sun came up. So we go out there and my chalk too. And I gotta tell you this. I think as after I did your podcast actually, the guy who was the copot, not the copob, he was the pilot and command of that aircraft, said, "Al, I noticed you say I did this, I did that a lot." He goes, "As I recall, I was either in the cockpit or behind you doing the same thing." So I got to put that out there. Fair enough. You wanted a solo flight of one? No. And the guys that flew with me, they're riding right along. So we go out there and we get cranked up. And now we're going to do what's called an ITO, an instrument take off from a walled compound. And you can't see. So pick up straight. You can see the edge of your rotor arc. Only because the rotor. Oh, static. Yes, you get the halo, they call it. And it's just static. Which, by the way, under nads watching you guys come in or just spin on the ground. It was one of my favorite things to do. And I don't know why it happens other than the static electricity. I don't understand the mechanism. It's the nickel, the nickel erosion cap. Yeah, it's like, I know what happens. And I can kind of talk about why, but it's so cool under nads too. Well, that's all we could see. And so we took off. And we've been flying multiple nights. Everybody knows we're all the telephone poles are also. So we come up to about, I don't know, 75 feet and then start a forward flight. Are you just head down looking at an instrument? Or is the machine have the ability to do this autonomously? No, it does now. Okay. Back then it didn't. So you're just straight off. It's a video game. Okay. There's a little circle that aligns and across here. And you just got to keep them all lined up. So we do that. And then you get up to, and once you get up to about 60, 70 knots. You can couple. Right. So now the aircraft will drive on its own. Right. This is all pilot induced. And so now the aircraft is climbing on its own, on a heading. And then you couple up to the flight plan. Yep. And then it turns while it's climbing. And it goes up to like, I think we went to 2000 feet out of the clouds at that point. It's a real fog. No, we're still in the clouds. So this whole time we're in the clouds. And the aircraft turns and you hit what's called top of descent. And it starts to come down. And now everything's fine except the radar altimeter kicks on at 1500 feet. AGL, above ground. And so once that happens, it's like any instrument approach you've ever done to an airfield when you're really shooting to decision height. It kind of sucks once you have the radar altimeter kicks on now and it's like, we're actually getting the other ground. Yeah. And especially when you're getting your potential go around criteria and you're getting the 400 feet in your decision altitude is 200 and you still don't have ground contact. Right. And we're going to 40 feet. So now I've got to hope that the imagery guy was good. Yeah. And he was. Oh, it's his name. Cotson, Craig Cotson. It literally would take the substitution of one digit and probably the 10 digit that he gave you guys you guys would die. And the other thing we did have is the uniform element went out and walked the grounds. So the one of the that still is assuming that your hardware is going to fly you to that designated point. But we've done this. We've done this in Afghanistan a number of times. I just never done it. I had never done it to a field that I hadn't already been to. Yeah. I've done it to fobs. I've done it to runways. Never done this. So this let me say my seat cushions up and up here. Watertight. Yeah. Yeah. I was just a fugs ass water. Watertight. Oh, yes. But so we committed an actuals effect. Yeah, but I didn't know there was this. Okay. And I've got chalk two two minutes behind me. So he's doing the same thing, but he's slightly offset. He's going to land about 200 meters away. That's it. And so we come down. We're at 40 feet. And now you take over the pilot does. And you just come straight down and land it about and that's a dust now too. So as the dust settles, I can see it look like pilots, pirates of the Caribbean, the very first movie with it with it. They come out of the pirates that come out of the mist and the underwater or whatever. It looked like that is the ground force came at us. And now I took, got out almost to Ben 60, 70 people on board each aircraft. And then we what? And we yeah, I got the whole assault force. So you had to been super light on gas then too to be able to pull out. Well, in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, you can, I can, I can carry. I can take more than you can put inside. You know, a raccoon or a raccoon? I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you know, I'd say you can have, you know, 20 on the infill and 60 on the ex-fill. And you know, okay, you know, for contingencies. That is. But so we took back off, did the same thing went back to the MSS. Now the fog was starting to dissipate. And as we flew over the top of the MSS, what I told the commander was, I'm not doing an approach into there. You know, it's too many things. You know, I said, but I'll come over the top. And if I can see down, I'll come and land. If not, I'm taking the guys to Balaad and we're going to do a real instrument approach to the runway. But I came over the top, looked down and I could see the MSS. And so I just spiral on down. I, isn't we? Yeah. You know, spiral on down, set them down and got everybody. And so the next day I come out there and the commanders like, good job, Al. You and you guys did a great job. As a reward, you can have ice cream. Thanks. Because that's the big thing with the tier one forces is they sometimes get basket-robbing ice cream. Sometimes. Yeah. What they didn't know is we've been pilfering it for weeks anyway. Right. It's like, oh yeah. Maybe we knew and we're facilitating that so you would pick us up on foggy days. It could be. It could be. But you know, it's funny because nobody had ever done that before. Yeah, because it sounds wildly dangerous. Well, there's a lot of risk to it. And there's not a lot of, not a lot of leeway to screw it. Were you the final authority on the go-no go for that or did you have to push it? Would you, if something would have happened on that, would have been my fault, would have been your, okay, so like your CEO above you wouldn't have bitten the bullet for that one or do you, well, no, they would have because they asked, you know, Al, can you do it? Yes. Right. So a flight lead in the one six, a flight lead in the one sixty, that has a lot of trust. So if I say I can do something, chances are the commanders gonna let me do it. He may have some criteria that, you know, makes him happier. Like, all right, but can you take five guys less, you know, so you're a little bit lighter, I'm sure, you know, whatever. But for the most part, like in Afghanistan, I was allowed out of Shirana to do vehicle interdiction with Shinnux. Now, there was a, what they call the Davey eye package, which was the birds and black ox. You don't do V.I. with Shinnux, right? And everybody, you know, the one sixty, it's opinion, right? But the black ox couldn't fly at Shirana. It's too high. Yeah. And the summer, they couldn't even come to a hover with no ground force, let alone. Wow. You know, so I would do these V.I.s. And the other, the other flight leads were, I don't know, jealous, right? They were mad that they weren't allowed to do it. But it just happened to be that, you know, I was in the one place where you could only do it in Shinnux. Yeah. Where they were, you could do it with the package. Yeah, that was an interesting time when they shifted from doing daytime V.I., which is vehicle interdiction from the night. Because again, traditionally, the night stalkers, shockingly enough, prefer to flight nighttime as they showed because the odds are stacked in your favor. But you know, never underestimate your enemy. It's like, wow, we've been looking for this guy and he's not very active at night. But in the daylight hours, he seems to be out there. And yeah, I mean, there's certainly more risk, but also you can probably catch these guys. Well, look at Iraq. Iran, with the, you know, the decapitation strike, you know, the guys were brazen enough to meet together in the daylight. They went quite the day. Yeah. I mean, dropping bombs at the days, a little bit of a different story. I mean, where you're talking literally, I won't get into details of the V.I., but let's just say that the helicopters and assets are in pretty close proximity to what's going on. You know, let's just protect it a little bit more in the cover of darkness. So yeah, I was at Balzimov for sure, but you know, for high, high value enough target. Well, that's the thing, you know, the last hurdle I had to get was Shinnux in the dark with a DOD was they sent it back to me, approved was some minor changes. It was all stuff that was inconsequential. It's like, even in Razor Zero 3, the stuff they made me take out is they wouldn't let me put Kagan there or Dev Group. It had to be seals and SF. Both of those names are very, that is the actual util, the name that the name that they came in for. That's the last one. Yeah. That is stupid. But anyway, so I didn't put in Shinnux in the dark. I didn't put that. Yeah. But they sent me back to saying it's approved. I sent it to the publisher and then the guy from the Pentagon calls me and he's like, yeah, you didn't send it to your publisher yet. Did you guys say, yeah, why? He goes, well, one of the commands just came back. They've got some concerns. Like, okay, turns out it was Pekom or Sockpack, the Pacific area, you know, the Philippines, the chapter I did on the OEFP. And they were doing boat interdiction like, like Vi. Yeah. Just Vi in the water. But it was very sensitive because the Americans weren't really supposed to be doing offensive operations. And in this case, they weren't. But if they were shot up by the boat, they could defend themselves. Right. And then they were going after a guy. name Abu Sabbara, who was the head of the Abu Siaf group, had the Burnham's hostage. And so the Philippine seals were on a boat with one set of goggles from the night stockers. And they ran right over the bad guys. >> Potentially, unintentionally. >> No, unintentionally. Because all they had is the one guy who was like the liaison was on the bow. And so they ran him over in a boat. I love every part of this. >> And these idiots, I don't know if they're idiots or not, they're probably going to die anyway. So they're in the water, the bad guys, and they're shooting at the- >> While floating in the water? >> Yeah. >> So they all, yeah, that's exactly what happened. So I thought that's what the concern was going to be. And it was nothing but I had mentioned what the mission set was for the night stockers. And they wanted one acronym removed. That was it. And I'm like, okay, that doesn't change anything. >> Yeah, I would take it. >> But the stuff I thought was going to be a problem, wasn't, and the stuff that was like, that's not a big deal. >> How many hours did you exit service with? >> Flying. How many hours did you- >> How many hours did you- >> How many hours did you have? >> I think officially on my flight ride, I had 6700. >> What's the biggest lesson you learned in that 6700? Advice to young rotary pilots like myself or any aviators out there. >> I remember that half of that with my fixed wing in there, but just a couple hundred of rotary. >> Yeah, I mean, the big thing is two things. Number one, always leave yourself an out when you can. And never quit flying the aircraft. Just like you said about skydiving, you're going to do everything you can. >> If it's going to kill you anyway, you might as well fight the thing until the very end. >> Yeah, you know, so I was talking to the mother of the pilots that died in Wild 4-2, which was the aircraft and the Philippines, they know's done about 150 knots. >> The water? >> Yeah, that's not so horrible. >> They were chalked to and long night, it's detailed in the book, but they essentially got spatial disorientation and drove it right into the water. And I've heard the voice data recorder, cockpit conversations. At the end, they tried, it was a true chief saying climb, climb, climb. And they tried and one of the pilots' mother is asking me, did he suffer? And I was like, no. I said, he thought he was going to be successful until he ceased to exist. He just wasn't there anymore, but he was trying. >> Yeah, and he was working the problem until he came out to the thing is you don't know until you pull away and you're like, holy crap. >> Yeah. >> I made it. Other than that, you've never known. >> Even when I was flying, fixed wing, very current and flying professionally part 135 and then part 91, I'm voraciously read accident reports. And it's amazing at how often it is not the piece of equipment. >> Do you have up here, like in Colorado, we used to fly out of a place called Gunnerson. It's kind of up in the mountains. >> I know it is, yeah. And every box canyon, and I, every, it doesn't mean literally everyone, but probably eight or nine of them had airplanes at the end of a box canyon. >> Really? >> That did not make it out for every reason. So the advice I would give you flying around here in the mountains, two things. Number one, when it comes to power, never do an OG maneuver right at your power. Always give yourself 10% at least of power. >> Yeah, OG stands for out of ground effect for people listening, yeah. Which they're not going to understand, but that's what it means. And the other thing is always flying one side or the other in a valley. >> Yeah, so you can turn either left or right. >> Right. And that's the one thing you know I talked earlier about the guys were always like, oh, I was going to make us do this the hard way. You know, when you come down from like, you know, 12,000 foot mountain to a 3000 foot landing zone in like a three, four mile stretch, you're coming down. >> Yeah. >> And the only way to do that is to hug one, the guy on the control is to hug that side of the valley. So you're seeing the terrain rush past you, but if you go right up the center, which is what most guys try to do, everybody's just disoriented, you know, because you don't have any real rush of the terrain. >> You just-- >> You just-- >> You just-- >> Yeah. And it's like, ah, I mean, you get to the bottom. It's like, ah, shit. >> Yeah. >> It's interesting not all-- I mean, not all pilots are created equal and not all instructors are created equal. And I have noticed a difference between instructors that have the vast majority of their time only instructing in a very linear airport environment versus instructors that learned in that environment and now have tens of thousands of hours in an operational world. And they basically will say this. This is me speaking, but they'll say, hey, you know that stuff you learned in those 90 degree turns that you do and everything is linear? Why pure ask with that shit? Let's go go and the mountains. And I will show you how you actually stay alive and how some of that stuff will actually kill you. Which is wild. There's a huge gap between those two knowledge bases between the operational pilot and the instructor pilot and by no stretch throwing any shade at that instructor pilot because-- >> No, you just know. >> Exactly. They don't know and they're not trying to be dangerous and they aren't being dangerous. What they are teaching people to do is to pass their private pilot's license test, which is a license to go fucking kill yourself. >> If you're not kidding. >> You know what I'm saying? One of the things I learned in avoiding threats turned out to be great for environmental conditions. So, for example, flying in the mountains, if I've got to go from that 3,000 foot valley floor to 12,000 foot right here, I'm not going to start this gradual climb because now I'm blue sky, if you will, for a manpad. So, he's going to lock into me with no trouble. So instead, you stay low until you can't and then you kind of zigzag almost like a switchback. >> Yeah, like you're hiking up a mountain. >> Yeah. So, you can still be at 50 feet above the terrain, but you're coming up. And then if you run out of power or somebody gets shoots at you, all you do is just dive down it away and get the valley out there. And my instructor has been awesome about this as well too. Depending on where the wind is at, you might get some nice or graphic lift. And the next thing you know, you're doing like 1,500 feet per minute up. It's 60% torque. You're like, "This is awesome." >> Yeah. And that's just that we didn't even, I didn't even thought about that in years, but you know, when you do a pinnacle approach, you know, you're looking to come into the wind, you've got this line of demarcation, or if you come in under it, you're probably going to get a down draft just as you're at the wrong time. >> Yeah, you don't want to confuse those two. If you're expecting an up draft and you have a power setting for that and you start getting the hand of God put on the top of your-- >> Yeah. >> There's a lot of lines of a microburst that are fixed winged. >> Yeah. So there's a grass runway just outside the airspace and probably the physical boundary of Glacier National Park. And there were two fatal accidents there last year, both in the summer, both on very hot days. So they were hot and high, meaning hot temperature, high and I'm talking density altitude, which is not necessarily what the altimeter is showing you. This is what your engine thinks, both of which unfortunately included passengers, both of them long into the trees, which I mean-- >> I think you see a lot in a leadville in Colorado. >> Wouldn't surprise me. Highest airport in the country. >> I've jumped into leadville. And when I flared my canopy, I heard it laugh at me as I smashed into the ground. But again, I tried to read up on that stuff as much as possible and I'm not shared on a morning quarterback, but hot and high days appear will kill you for sure. Like if I am going to go out and fly in the morning or go to the evening when things cool down a little bit just to give me that more power. Same thing you said, like hugging always make-- I mean, the classic flight school approaches that you approach everything from a 90 degree straight out, it's like, no, no, take an incredibly oblique angle so it's just a nice peel off to the side. You know, learn that stuff though until after you have your license. >> Yeah. >> And hopefully not-- I used to say that when I was a W1 or a young W2 in a conventional unit and they sent me out with another guy, my equal or less. And I said, there's a saying that bad decisions equal experience, experience equals good judgment. And I said, I was getting a lot of good judgment because I was getting a lot of experience doing stupid things I shouldn't do because I was junior. And the other guy was no better to say, oh, that's not a good idea. It's like, oh, it was true. You know? And if you survive these things, you know, then-- >> Well, if I were to say in terms of buckets, you have luck bucket and experience bucket. And it takes a little bit of time to move-- yeah, I just hope that you're around at that. The second book, what did you change between Razor 03 and then Shunx in the Night? >> Shunx in the Dark. So Razor 03 was mostly stories in Afghanistan that had already hit the news. So I figured that was the easiest way to get through. So there was already some open source stuff. >> So the talk about you're inserting the horse soldiers and all that stuff, really. And then, Megan, what was it, Michael, 253? >> 253. >> Let me double check. >> The pressure was 253. So we went into that pretty deeply the first time. So people are interested in the early-- and by that, I mean, early, early Afghanistan. >> Yeah. >> And then I had some family challenges. My wife at the time had an opioid addiction, prescription meds. She ended up dying. >> I'm sorry, I mean. >> Yeah. >> Hey, buddy, you know, I just, you've been here for years, was that now. But, you know, that's why I went to West Point to fly there and found my new wife, Patty, who's great. But so Shunx in the Dark doesn't have that family drama and it's mostly a rack. Although there's the Philippines, you know, I talked to those guys, put that in there. I talked to General Jay Dele, who we, nicknamed Coach. He's one of the original commanders of the 160th. And I interviewed him on a thing called Mount Hope III. So Mount Hope III was they took a Shunx and they flew into Libya and they stole a hind that was disabled. So far I love every part of the story. When did this happen? This was in the 80s. Did they obviously fly a mechanic in there too to like help put it back together and get it servosable? No, they flew it to Chad I think it was. So they just got in there, kicked the tires and. They slunked, no they slunked. Oh, can't believe they shunucked. No, in this story. No, they tried that. They did that in Mount Hope 1. Okay, good. They tried that. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. They didn't get it going. There's bullets in the engine so they could get started. That does make it problem. And then Mount Hope 2, I'm not sure what it was, if something along those lines. And Mount Hope 3 is the very first use of a shunuck being moved by C5. They had to devise this whole process. Oh, interesting. And so this is like early 1980s, maybe 80, 80, 80, two. So remember the Iranians were mining the. And then there's a gold food in a 5. So I do not remember. Well, anyway, the 160th was shooting up all these my lane boats. Okay. The prime chance was the name of the thing. During that time for him is when this happened. So General Daly, who was a carol at the time, the regiment commander, actually it wasn't a regiment. It was the Sso-Agg, special operations aviation group. And he's fighting with the Air Force and the State Department doesn't want him to do it. But I can't remember who at least I'm in the book. So they figured out how to put a two shunucks into C5. They fly out, they put it back together. They fly in, they sling this thing out. And they put it on another C5 and they took it back to Fort Rucker. And it flew for the test activity for years. Now this is back when you couldn't buy a hind here now, you can probably buy them. I think you. Well, I mean, I flew in the back of a Russian mig down in Bozeman. So I think, yeah, depending on the pocketbook. But the era you're talking about, yeah, they didn't want us to have one of those. It was interesting to listen to him talk about what it was like, you know, the regiment. And as he told me about the things that they did and they developed and the techniques and the equipment, I thought, wow. I was in the unit longer than it existed when I got there. Oh, wow. So I got there, the unit was like 15 years old and I was there 17 years. So when I got there, I just thought this is the way it's always been. You know, the Shenooks only got really involved there. And that was the fastest deployable aviation task force in the world. And that was kind of the proof that you could do that with everything to include the Shenooks. How long did it take him to sling that thing? It didn't take long. I mean, I feel like they were doing NASCAR pit rills somewhere. They knew what they did. They flew in with a C-130 with a rigging team. They rigged it up and they had been practicing all this out of Bragg as a place called ATF. And they had a Navy SH3 is the closest thing they could find and they put a bunch of weight in it. Okay, yeah. And the idea was the airframe was the right shape to see what it would fly like. And so they did a proof of concept. They went out to Hollum and Air Force Base and flew 500 gallon blivots beneath the Shenooks, which is 18,000 pounds or so. And they still, no matter what they did, that aircraft was trashed when it was done because they were way overgrossed. But that's the kind of stuff that's in the book. And then I talk about every step of the way from assessment to flight lead using real vignettes of you to stuff that happened to me or other people that I talked to. So, you know, I talked to, let's see, they did a hostage rescue in Afghanistan on top of the mountain where they came in. You've seen the video of the guys walking up and the bad guys don't have any centuries and they're asleep with their blankets. Probably. You see the helmet camera, the guy, you know, come up, you see the muzzle of an M4 and the guy pulls the blanket down and then pulls it back up. But, anyways, the move. Do you watch it happen or do you go back into your blanket? It's tough to say. I don't know. But anyway, there's that and some other stories in Iraq. You know, like I don't want to tell you about the, you know, getting everybody out. One of the coolest ones I did is I think called Kayawa, which was a guy that came out of Iran into Iraq and was crappy weather. So, he figured he was safe. But, you know, we flew ground force out, got him, you know, and it's a pretty cool story, actually. When you guys, what is the selection and assessment like? Do you guys put a message out and say, hey, if you want to fly here, you're gonna have a web criteria? They have a recruiting team that goes around to all of the installations that have pilots and crew members. Army only, are you guys go service white? The recruiting effort only goes to the army. But, it's very successful. The last five years or so that I was there, we had 11 Marine Corps aviators, Lieutenant Colonel's, everyone on them. All came across to be Army Warnoffsters and fly for the 160th. They did an inner service transfer. Is there a pay hit associated with that? That's gonna save. But, what they did is they give them a bonus to offset it. Yeah. When I went from E6 to O1, there was a pay hit, but that's why it's O1E. There's a little bit of a stop loss. I feel like Lieutenant Colonel to see W1 is gonna sting. And then you can just put in for it, you know, you don't have to go to, but the recruiting brief, they show you a little huravidio. Yeah. You know, they. So, then do they fly you out to the unit? And what if you're not, do you have to be flying one of the assets that they fly? So then how do you test them on something like, so say they've never flown either an MH Black Hawk or a Chinook? Let's say they're 53 pilot. How do you assess them then? You get in there in the cockpit with them and you may know, obviously somebody in that aircraft is fully certified and qualified. Yeah. And you're looking at their stick and rudder. Is this an interview thing? Is it everything? So, it's only a week long assessment. But you fill out this packet, it's like this thick book, you know. And I can't remember the numbers. I did put it in the book, the numbers of the people they actually assessed. They reject from the packet. They bring you in. And then you do, you know, a standard Army PT test, a swim test, just a Navy. Yeah, all the basic military stuff. And then, you know, psychology, a couple of psychology tests. And then depending on which aircraft you're assessing for. So, if you're already a Chinook pilot, you know, you're assessing for a Chinook. If you are another airframe that we don't have, like, you know, on Apache guy or a 53 guy, they'll figure out where they're going to put you. And then those guys will assess you. And so, for example. Damn. I found that Apache and Kyle Warrior guys, which was the OH-58, were the best Chinook transplants. Really? And the reason was Chinook pilots that came. Already had kind of a cushy life. So they generally don't come to the 160th because it's an assault platform. You know, it's not really a cargo. It's heavy assault. Yeah. So it's more like a black Hawk mission. So if you get black Hawk guys, the black Hawk guys have what's called interference, you know, in their mind. And they kinda. They're like, "I feel like this is ding on black Hawk guys." No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, it should be. But it's not. Just that, you know, they would be like, "This is now you're doing assault in a black Hawk. This is a Chinook." You know, these other things. So they're a little bit tougher to get through that initial, you know, "Okay, this is how we do it." But the Apache and the KW guys haven't got a clue. They're attack guys, right? And they just come in and you tell them what to do and they just do it. Okay. Or a cobra guys. They're a lot of fun. Interesting. You know, if you're an attack guy, generally you want to come in and you want to be an H6 pilot, right? But there's only so many of them. And if you're good enough, like they want you, but they just can't take you in that unit, they'll say, "Would you accept a Chinook transition?" And almost always they say, "Yes." That is the correct answer. Yeah. And then they'll bring in. So how can they assess. So say you bring in an Apache guy and whatever he's gonna get into a Chinook. What are you asking them to do in that bird? Given that they've never flown it before to really give you an idea of the level of aviator. So they don't. If they're not qualified in the Chinook, for example, they don't fly in the Chinook. Okay. Right. What they do is they'll come to the simulator, flight simulator is very realistic. And I will sit there and say, "Okay, look at this stuff. Here's what the aircraft will do, right?" And it's twofold. Number one, it's a little. Ooh, and a. You know, recruiting pitch. You can look what you can fly. But I want to see his retention. Can he figure out. 'Cause, you know, 20 minutes into this, I'm gonna say, "Okay, bring up the hover page." And if he remembers the right button to push, and then I tell him how to use it, and if he can do it, then, okay, in my opinion, he's trainable. So it's actually less stick and rudder and more your ability to learn. Yes. Are there people who are just not good enough pilots? And then just wadding the simulator up left. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those guys, you know. Yeah. No, there are. And, you know, there are guys that have gotten through where there were good enough pilots, but their personality sucked. You know, and you can tell, you know, when the board happens at the end, right? You sit in front of those board of officers, you know, you're instructor pilot, the recruiter, the colonel, you know, and they sit there and they critique your performance, and you have to give a briefing and some other things. But they critique your performance. And if we already know that we're not going to take you, it's generally a very gentle, you know, 20 minutes in your out of there, right? Let you down easy. Maybe we'll even ask you to come back. You weren't ready. Yeah, especially, yeah, there's no reason to drag that up. The news is already bad enough, let me. But if you're an asshole, and there are a few. 60 minutes minimum. Oh, you're gonna run the whole game it. (laughing) I've seen Captain's army of threes, veins popping out of their head, sweat, and just, you know, spittle flying as they walk out of their fuck you guys, I'm out of here. And as they leave, the colonel's like, yeah. I knew he wasn't gonna fit in. And your name will be put on whatever roster it is to make sure that you never return. Well, you know what sucks those? Those are the guys that go back to the unit, their unit, and talk bad about us. I go, those guys, you know, a bunch of cowboys, they wouldn't take me, you know, and it's like-- - They missed out. - Yeah, they missed out, right? It's like, you know, we dodged a bullet. But you know, then there's other guys who, we're not gonna take 'em, well, you might take 'em and they're kind of on the fence. And you're like, okay, let's put the screws to 'em and see how he handles it. You know, how does he handle the stress of this? 'Cause it's no fun. And, you know, I remember, I was on the other end of it, thinking, you know, this sucks, you know, but I was expecting them to ask me questions about my wife at the time that I wasn't ready to answer or I thought would stop me from getting in and they never did. So every hard question they asked me was not hard 'cause it wasn't the one I feared. - Yeah, it makes sense. - And then afterwards the shrink took me a size of, hey, we purposely didn't talk about that. We'll deal with it, you know, kind of thing. What, how long does it mean a civilian world they would call a getting type rated? How long is the, if somebody comes in there, they're gonna be a shun a guy, they're coming from an Apache. - Takes about eight months. - Eight months? Jesus, I was gonna say two weeks. - No, but that includes the environments. - Okay. - So you gotta do mission training. So you do terrain following radar, you do air refueling, ship board landings, mountain, oxygen, urban, right? - Okay. - So you do all that stuff in the course of eight months. So, - Okay. - Well, that's way more like in the civilian world, you would go learn the aircraft itself, the minimum to be able to kill yourself by getting it off the ground and then you'd get a rubber stamp. - Yeah, yeah. That's what a friend of mine, when I went to the Lakota transition, Indian town gap, a friend of mine was flying EC 145's for air methods. - Yeah. - And he goes, I did a ride along with him, he goes, "Yes, see this? Three days, I got three days of training and they sent me off on my own." He goes, "You're gonna go to Indian town gap and take eight weeks to learn what I learned in three days." - I don't know if learned in three days is the appropriate word to say there. Yeah, you'll learn in eight weeks what he tried to learn in three days. Those two products are not the same, but that is about what it is in the, you're gonna do, you know, what's the maximum gross weight? You know, what's the maximum allowable? You know, I wanna say it's probably two months of that eight is spent just learning to fly it. - Yeah, air frame specific. - So you're doing your engine failures, roll-on landings, emergency, AFCS off-flight. - Yep. - And then once you're good at that, then we do instruments. - Yep. - And then you transition into missions stuff. And each of those mission environments, you do in the simulator first. - I was gonna say, how much of this time is in the Sim versus the real aircraft? - Not very much, but you always proceed the next phase of training in the simulator. - That makes sense. - So air refueling, you get up there, and the thing is it's not that realistic, but you can do the maneuver, because the tanker comes at you 300 foot above you, half mile offset, he's doing 180. And as you combine, you're doing 120. And then he loses all his speed as he comes around you and stops at your two o'clock, you climb up, get into position, plug, into your thing. So you can do that in the simulator, and then it run the checklist and all that kind of stuff. But the actual movement to contact, the simulator's the Fidelis, not that good. But dust landings, it's good for that. And you can go land into walled compounds or canyons and stuff like that and transition to the, what we call loss of visual reference approach. And so it's good for all its up deck landings. You land on LHD, LPDs, right there in the simulator. So before you go to do deck landings, you're gonna be in the simulator. So it's actually better than, what do they call it, the FCLP? I can't remember the acronym. So typically when you go to a Navy ship, you have to do a refresher. You have to do six bounces at an airfield that has markings like a ship. Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about, yeah. Like, nah, I can't remember the acronym. But we didn't have to because the Navy certified our simulator is good enough to do that. Yeah. What's the most impressive thing you've ever seen happen in a helicopter? That's a good question. I think the most impressive thing I've ever seen is what we talked about earlier, the one-wheel landing in Afghanistan on a regiment. It probably wasn't much wider than this table. See if you can find this, Michael. It would probably be Army Chinook rear wheel landing on, hot on mountainside. Yeah, that's a famous picture of the guys out of Pennsylvania. They made a Christmas card. I mean, as far as Christmas cards, you hide you at eight Santa Claus. Yeah, you know. And this is a two-wheel landing, maybe he's gonna pull him. Try doing a one because now you're balancing. If you get two, the thing is stable. Yeah. And kind of like, you know this, you know, you're moving. Yeah, if you're on one, you're still in a place. Yeah, three-dimensional rotation. What'd you find there, Michael? Still. But the most impressive was to see that happen once on a target that went hot. So, the guys just rock solid. Yeah, we're doing as with silver. And we come in and every approach was a fast-rope approach, except for this one, which was a two-wheel landing. And he, he's doing it. The ground forces getting out and a machine gun is right there, like a belt-fed machine gun. And the minigun opens up while the guy is doing this. That's weak. I love the exact video that you're looking for. That is not the exact video I'm looking for. Does that look like a hut in Afghanistan? You discuss me. I did his-- Oh, it's on. (laughing) His key key. What that is in theory, though, kind of what we're talking about, except take, put a structure on there. And the guy didn't destroy-- Well, he probably did when he left, when he applied power, but-- But see, so if you look where the pilots are, so they've got an armor panel in the right door. Right, so the chin bubble's clear. But the right panel looks like it's probably got a armor panel there. So he's not looking down. So because you get the point, he knows the chin bubble's not as big. So you have like-- You can't look. You get nothing to look at. Is this just-- Oh, yeah, there we go. Is this just better? Listen to the crew chief, too. Yeah. Forward five right there. That's it. You got to listen to the crew chief. The crew chief is everything. Especially I've done stuff to, like, leave you a little patrol basis. Like this is similar, but this is demonstrated. Yeah, again, are you up there? Is there in the modern ones? Is there a button they can push that would hold that position or are the guys-- Where is now? Wow. It wasn't-- I was going to say, so you're up there and just-- There's stuff right in the bowl. There's stuff now I'm jealous. There's stuff they can do now. I mean, that's ridiculous. Also, did he back into that? Or did he come straight down? Permaking straight down. It's the easiest thing to do. Back and up sucks. Oh, yeah. So like, when you do an external load, for example, you'll come to a hover about 10 feet above the load. You're stable. And then you go, OK, moving forward. And you just ease forward. And the crew chief's looking through the hole. He's like, all right, forward, you know, 20, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And as you hit that final count, then you just slow down. And you stop. But if you stay there too long and you start moving around because there's no visual reference-- Yeah. And then he's like, you know, back five. Might as well just go around and come back. Because it's so much easier. Because you're starting out into space, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's the guys. Those are the guys out of the Pennsylvania guard, actually. I mean, basically the front of that is parked in a tree. Yeah. And that's what you want. That's what you want. That's a great visual reference though, right? It is great. I did a thing actually on Red Wings. I put Red Squadron in. And they were supposed to fast-stroke 90 foot, right? That's not fun, by the way. No. And the other aircraft did it from 90 feet. And they all burned their hands and stuff. And as I came to a hover, the other pilot was flying. Actually, he came to a hover. And the crew says, come down 20, 10, 9, and the guy goes, I can't see. I got nothing to look at. And I had a little bush out the side. And I was like, oh, I got a visual. I'll take the controls, right? And then the crew chief goes, search. Keep coming down. 20. We did a 10 foot rope. And the best is when you kick the rope, and it doesn't even go out of frame, and you just see the bag. You're like, yeah. That's what I'm-- So here's a great example. Pre-9/11 versus post. Pre-9/11. We would go do our static fast-stroke training in the air lofts, right? And we do 90 footers or whatever we could get. And I remember the old guys, like, if I even see your boots on the rope, you will never live it down. You pussy. It's just-- I mean, we were in these thick-ass welding gloves with flight gloves underneath. Post-9/11 is like, I got all of-- and then we were in flight suits, right? So light. And people were still burning in at the bottom. We'd have like the honeycomb down there as if it's going to do anything. And then post-9/11, it's like, all of my shit fully loaded out with a backpack. And they're like, hey, grab the rope with whatever you can. [LAUGHS] It's just the difference between how awesome we thought we were. And then the reality of a 90 footer, even with your feet on the rope, it just sucks. Right. But now, you know what I'm saying is the aircraft. A good friend of mine, John Woodard, was the guy that actually developed what's called daffix, digital AFCS, automatic flight control system and it just sounds like cheating. Oh, it is. It's I would love to have had that. I got to fly it when it was still in the test phase, but I wasn't there when they implemented it. But you could come in to an approach and I think there was a button on the cyclic you hit and it was position hold and then the altitude. And it was all the only altitude we had for the ground was a radar altitude hold. And the problem with that is the slope. This thing is all the INS. So it's a gyro and it knows the aircraft is steady. So you could come six inches off the ground and just hit it. And it's good. And then you can move it left and right just with the thumb and bring it up and down with your other thumb. And now do you think that decreases stick and rudder skills? It does. It does. But also there's a time and place for that too. But you don't need it. You know, so I mean when you need it is when that stuff goes away like battle damage. And you know there's for example there's we had three types of desert landings or what we call loss of visual reference approach 20 with 30. It was called. And you had what's called an alpha, bravo and charlie. So an alpha you come into a stationary hover above the dust cloud. And you get stable. You center up everything on the hover page and you just come down at 300 foot a minute and just descend into your touchdown. And one of my favorite pilots getting bubbles used to call it the screaming alpha. Because if you're sometimes a ground force would say I want all three aircraft in the same LZ. You know like one at a time. And so the first aircraft it sucks. Now the second one you've got all this talc is up in here. And by the third guy, you know, your way up here. Yeah, so you're hovering at 600 feet to be out of the dust. That's the alpha. Right. It's the look. It's actually the least traumatic of the bunch. Okay. The bravo is a VMC approach a little bit steeper than normal. Where at about 80 feet you try to match your altitude above the ground with your half your airspeed. Right. So 80 feet. You want to be 40 knots. 40 feet. 20 knots. And if you do it right, when you get to the bottom, it's not too bad. Although you've been there. You know, yeah, sometimes it's fine when you're in the high lux. It's bad. Right. Well, when you're not, it's an equally tough. And then what was called the charlie. Now the charlie is essentially an old fashioned thing. And then you could do this in your helicopter right now. So let's say you're going to land to a snowy field. And there's really when you come in, you start to come into a hover, you start bringing up the white out gap. And you go to your speed. You go, okay, that's not going to work. You're going to come over there speed. But here's the deal. You come in well, short of where you're going to land. And you essentially air taxi on up. And you keep slowing back until the dust cloud comes up. And it comes to about here. So before that though, you have enough ground speed where you are outpacing this. Okay. So you're slowing back. Yep. The cloud will come up. Yep. And it will start to come up on you. So you're catching it in your periphery. And you'll see it. And you just look, okay. And all you do is once it gets to here, even if it comes around like this and you don't like what you see in front of you, you just speed up just a little bit. It's just just, it sounds like that. Yep. And then you just, then you steer with the pedals to find where you're going to go. I like that. Yeah. Now what you've done with this cloud is now you're as slow as you can go in those conditions, the wind or whatever it is. It's almost like a single engine or engine out procedure in an EC 145. You go as slow as you can at about five feet. Yeah. Until it goes me. You don't go, okay, that's it. And you just run on. And it could be a hover. Right. But you don't know. And that's what this does is it allows you to do that. But nobody ever liked doing it. And they always like, why would I have to learn that? I was like, okay, you ever had your MFD shot out? I have. And you might want to know how to do this. I feel like. And you could do this without the MFDs, just the backup attitude indicator. Yeah. So you're just looking. And if it gets to the point where, you know, you're still doing 20, 30 knots on the clouds here. And you might want to rethink. There's actually really cool grass strips here. The Forest Service Grass Strip. You could practice this in the winter time, relatively consequence free, where you could. Because for what you're describing, I will go practice this next season because the season was horrible for snow. I would just go land somewhere else where there's no snow and hike. If you guaranteed to not wad up the helicopter. But we would do this out at. We're flying for slightly different reasons than you were though. So we were playing with this at Fort Lewis. We were landing to this trail. It wasn't snow. It was dust. And it was super tau, powder, dust. And we were just coming in and landing like this, you know, because I was showing their instructor, you know, the right way to do this. Because the, I was lucky enough to be on the ground floor of inventing these procedures. It was a guy, Chuck Grant. I'm going to say his name, it's not a general name. He's the one that came up with it. And then we, as a group, polished it up and wrote it down as a, you know, task-conditioned standard. And Afghanistan was the first place we got to really use it. And our company was really good at it because we'd been in a couple of years. I mentioned this on that first podcast. And the other company had didn't quite embrace it yet. And they lost a couple of landing years and like, you know, what? We'll start doing that. Those dust clouds that you're talking about, I mean, do you have maintenance people up there just washing after every flight and cleaning and compressor washing? And they just pulling blades out of the, basically the N1 blades of the turbine all the time. Because I can't imagine those. You guys ingesting stuff that should shut down an engine. They flush the engines every day. So how could they not? We fly at night. So we come in and it was always interesting. We'd come back, you know, a sun up. We do a pre-flight for the next period of darkness. Then we go eat breakfast for me. We do breakfast for us. We wait for the sun to come up. And then we all go to bed. And then at the end of the day, which is our beginning of the day, you know, the maintenance guys have been up the day walkers have been doing anything. And, you know, I would be the first one into the planning area. I'd make coffee. I'd turn on all the, the big screens and look and see what the ISR is looking at. And then I'd look at the coordinates on all of them and see which ones were in our AOR. It's like, okay, those three of five are possible from my guys. So I would then plot them, get a general idea of what was involved. And then I'd read the daily, what they call insums and the misreps. So all of the sapphire events, all the shooting, people shooting at helicopters and stuff like that. And so I would know what was going on before everybody else came in. And then the maintenance guy would come in. And he'd rip into me about, you know, how we, he had something for you every day. It was every day. And he was, he was one of my favorite pilots. But yeah, I get my ass handed to me every day for stuff that wasn't my doing. We landed one time on a rock, but this big. And it got stuck between the two tires on the front landing gear. It was in a riverbed. And it would not come out. The guys were like trying to kick it out. And we flew all night, you know, into the chaper pass. Just a flare piece. Well, there was, you know, we, it's like he was new. Yeah, they were in contact almost the whole night. We did a couple of CAS of acts. And so the next day, he's like, what the hell? You, that rock could have dropped on somebody. And like, could you get it out? He goes, yeah, we got it out with no problem. I said, how'd you get it out? We tried. Like, well, we had to jack it up, deflate the tires and pull it out with a chain of these tools that we didn't have available tools at the time. And I'm like, do you hear yourself? He's like, well, you guys should know better. Hey, man, real world situation is dictate. But they did, they did, the maintenance guys are the unsung heroes. You know, I would go and Iraq, what was cool, I do detail this in Shinnok's and the dark as we go down there. And I'd bring like a contact team. So it would be a gator with a bunch of avionics and engine parts. And I'd bring an avionics guy, electrician, the engine man and a tech inspector, a TI. And sometimes be a hydraulic guy. And we'd go down there and they would sit and these were echo models. And they were on the end of their time. And they were always breaking. And if I go, the ground force is going to be here in 15 minutes. Oh, and this sensor just went bad. Bill, got it, sir. It was like a NASCAR pit crew. And it was so great. You know, I couldn't do that all the time, but they're in Iraq. I could. And we had enough people. So they had a day and a night schedule. And what you're describing is just hard shut down for any other type of aviation. Yeah. Like there's no gator with all the extra avionics. And oh, yeah, just switch out the blade. And you know, but some of the compressor fans on the number like, and these are guys that want to do it. They want to get out of the wire. They want to go down. You know, that's like a hard stop. Maybe disassemble the rotor head as it gets lifted onto a truck and take into the mechanics somewhere and you get it back four months later in this civilian world. I had a flat tire all the time as an all a sod and worked with gold actually. And I come out there and my left aft tires flat. And I'm like, the seals are going to be here in like 20 minutes. And like, don't worry, sir, we got it. Go ahead, get inside. I get excited to bring the evening up online. I feel the aircraft to get jack up. It sounded just like something on a formula and they go. Yeah. Yeah. None of that stuff would work without those guys who in gals who never get the recognition that they don't get a movie made about them. You know, they're so it's nice to have a chance to talk about them right here. No, it's amazing. I try to as often as possible. It's you know, putting stuff out on the internet. You have no control over where it goes and where it lands and what people do with it. But all the time, I will have people who are have a conventional military background and they'll email and say well, you know, did I do enough? I feel like I didn't like listen. I'm sorry that the special operations world writ large gets more attention because the special operations world just so you know Can't operate without every other conventional unit enforced by the way whether it's by within through whether it's the supply network Like you know, there's not getting a movie either the pilots who flew us from Virginia Beach to fill in the blank in the world, you know with the helicopters, you know, and that's one of the chapters I did was I so I did a chapter on the flight medics doing a CAS evac I talked to Jimmy Hatch I know what you mean well, and so I did an interview with that and so we had a CAS evac thing and then I did one from the maintenance guys perspective and and you know the the guys that don't get out like the the operations guys They were great and they're just flight ups guys that you they keep track of your flight time right but not overseas Overseas there keep and track everything they're keeping the blue forest trackers out. Yeah, they're the guys making sure you have fuel So they're like, you know, okay, sir These five fobs normally have fuel but only two of them do because there's Contamination at these other ones don't go there, you know, or they would keep track of the hospital beds that were available So we do CAS evac where they were taken or not and then Well, what else did I do the airmation commander, which is a role that doesn't get a lot of It's tough. They're sitting in the seat in between and behind me and that a pilot right so they have no Reach on the controls. Yeah, yet they're seeing all of it and so like when you look up front sometimes you're like, oh Yeah, I'll just close my eyes and if you don't like what you see don't look You know, well, he's got a watch and he has no control over it And so I did a you know a chapter on that you know saying Some of the things and it was just it was fun. It was fun book to write. I'd say 99 of 100 people would have no idea The air mission commander role. It is kind of an invisible spot in the movie blackhawk down I think they portrayed it a little bit because they were at least relaying up to that individual that said Don't her all yeah, man, and yeah, so this would be like he's in the Chinook in the flight and then they used to try So this was a 90s thing that they tried into the early 2000s was the AB triple C So the airborne command and control Form, right? So it'd be a C 130 with a bunch of radio consoles But there's no ISR there's no video. How can you imagine trying to coordinate that just by you and that's what they were doing and it just It's suck, you know, so now we've come so far like When I left you could see the ISR feed in the cockpit. Yeah, right? I mean years before that You know the ground force had a laptop that we plug into the sat antenna maker watches before that There wasn't that though either you know it evolved over time right and I get radio updates right like people are running You're like where yeah, in which direction so that you know the The fact that you can now see that and get some situational awareness You know, I did one time you know the follow-on missions are always fun because I got to use the The goodies, you know all the stuff the aircraft had to offer the ground force to come in and go hey, we got a follow-on target Here's the grid I'd pull it up on the MFD go to imagery Yeah, and instead of a map and they look at it and they go yeah, we want to go there to that spot And then I could press another button that had contour intervals And I would show that that empty spot was actually like this. Yes I was like, yeah, I can't put you there. They're like why not watch this Like oh, okay But we still want to go there, but you know in Afghanistan if you see an empty spot in a mountainous area From overhead imagery. It's probably a cemetery or a hill. Yeah, right? I mean, there's no Place that's flat in the hills that's not built on Yeah, the topography lines in Afghanistan are often very close together Yeah, yeah, what do you want to do with your rest of your life man? Now that you're I mean you lived a life of a hell of an adventure What do you got now? Well So I did the time in the 160th and then I did my last assignment at West Point as a commander of the flight detachment That was where I learned to skydive and fly the general around and I like to say that that was just enough stress as the commander to I think if I had stopped Being a special operator just stopped. I think it'd be tough, you know mentally and emotionally But instead I got to do this other job that still had a lot of responsibility extended off ramp if you will Yeah, that's what I was and so when I finished that I got this job with the county so I ended up being the deputy commissioner emergency services for the division emergency management Right, and that's a long way of saying I dealt with floods and storms and you know things like that Did that for 10 years and then this takes me up to now so I retired from New York State doing that and it's like all right, what's next right I get a little older so I went back to school So I'm I'm getting my masters and communications at Johns Hopkins and I'm doing that all online and so that's given me time to sort of Figure out where I want to go because what I've been doing the last couple years in addition to my real job the emergency manager was speaking gigs for fundraisers for nonprofits like the Night's soccer foundation and the special operators transition foundation So I'd be the guy the draw that brings in the money, you know Oh, you want to sit and have a you know the owl that's $15,000 you know like okay, you know And sit down and you raise money that way so that's been a lot of fun and I'm gonna I'm trying to You know kind of hone that a little bit better For some corporate speaking so that's where I'm I'm here. I'm waiting for the other book to come out and I'm writing another book I'm actually outlining right now. It's gonna be a fiction book military thriller and That's kind of that their own I'm gonna visit my grandkids now and I was here before I had three grandkids and I have five That's not life worse and they're all over the place. Yeah, so you know, I was just down in DC watching the chair competition For girls so happy my daughter never got into that. Oh, it's insane That very good choice of my grand-daughters both of them are little peanuts, you know, and hey, they're the ones they throw in the flyers Yeah, they get any desire to fly anymore at all No Interesting how that is huh a friend of mine Used to same guy the game they ride along with their methods. Yeah Or a statinative act I think is what it was I'm gonna talk about a dangerous job Dude, I didn't realize how often those helicopters Crash yeah, well they've they've been to theater bunch of stuff that yeah follow the it's they're safer than they used to be But he retired from that and then he got asked to this other company. I can't remember the name They're out of Don't rehearse. He is Harrisburg so there's this company that they fly like heart transplants a lung transplants in by jet That makes sense but the traffic in that area is so bad you got to fly it by helicopter They didn't have a middle from airport. Yeah, so they didn't have that component So they asked him to you know set one up and so he calls me and he's like, oh I want you to be one of my pilots I don't want to do that You know, I don't think it would probably check all the boxes for you But I mean again, it depends on how much or why you would want to fly anymore. Maybe you got all your flying done Yeah, maybe but you know the where I was going partly with the You know the step down from the special operations to the west point to this other thing it was very similar You know, you know, we had a a school bus crash Where bus flew off the road and I helped coordinate that effort. Yeah You know, we've had you know the funny thing is president Maduro Not only did the one six just go pick. I know up there. It was my FOMO. You know, I'm not there doing that But they brought him back to steward air base which was my Hanger for west point and probably just to ease you off you sit like this and my office in the background. I'm like shit And I thought they chose that intentionally just to irritate they did and I just retired the day before oh no way from that job The county job. Yeah, and the emergency management section was involved in dealing with the state police and the That's all stuff securing him and providing cons that would have been me So I've totally missed out on everything. I wonder though if you were to Whatever get a little of Robinson or whatever it is and if you were able to just fly because you wanted to and just Mess around I wonder if you would fall back and and love with it again with all the other pressures and stuff for me I could get bored because you said or or I could see that or you'd be like oh my god. This is amazing I'd love with aviation. Oh, maybe but you know At at west point like every year, you know, you get to you know, October September you know and say oh we've got these flight hours to burn we didn't use them And I'd go out single pilot in the in the Lakota and just fly around these beautiful days and you know upstate in New York's beautiful. Yeah for sure But I got bored really quick. It's like all right. There's an hour Oh, you know, because I what I liked wasn't the flying. I mean, I did like flying But yeah, I like bringing you know, and a soul force to the target and beat no bad guys You know, watching them do it I mean, there's a lot of problem solving in that too that terminates and then being able to get there I get it. Yeah, and that's you know, that's the the thing problem solving So here's what a lot of people don't realize is that like in the 160th it's more fun To be the guy running the cockpit than the guy flying the aircraft really yeah, so you know, just because you're busier Well, you're making shit happen, you know, you're the one making sure that you know that guys you tell them you know fly right turn left You know climb to send and he's doing it and sometimes there's control of the monkey on the controls. Yeah It's a fly monkey You're creating, yeah, we call it the stick monkey. It is like, alright. - Right? - And there's some level of truth to that. - And he called Monkey Skulls. - Yeah. - It is, Monkey Skulls are a dime a dozen. But to be able to get to target, around the threat, my buddy, I don't know if he can't see his name. He did the bellotten thing. - Yep. - And he tried to go public whether he was told he could and he started to and then he got his PP Shwack and he was like, - So, well, you say the bellotten thing, did he successfully land the hair craft, - The craft or did he crash what in the front yard? - No, no, he's the sh-- - Okay. - He was the overall flailee and he's, you know, but the simple fact that he had come up with the plan that originally didn't include those stealth birds. - Yeah. - But he doesn't have the opportunity to tell that story. It's a wonderful story. - Yeah. - You know, and he doesn't get credit for that. - I wish they wouldn't have taken those birds. Only because China now has them. Within like 72 hours, I think the vast majority of that helicopter was in another country. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Maybe it's just funny, the-- - Yeah. - State in the hangar, maybe. - The, I can't remember the, the first stealth drum, can't have Afghanistan, right? Now you get a special briefing. All right. If this thing goes down, because normally we just jade am one more go pick up the, some of the black boxes you might go get. They said, "This thing goes down, you're going to go recover it." Right? Period. It doesn't matter what time of day. And then I was like, okay, I'm gonna go get it. - Yeah, like, you just told me that wherever this goes, so we got, we're loading up the fuel truck. Oh man. Yeah, I didn't, at the coffee shop, the alert pilots and crew will come in, and I'll chat with them, and they're based out of the hospital. And they're one of the few helicopters in town. And I love Washington helicopters fly, but I hate hearing that one. I'm not sure if I can do that. I hate hearing that one take off, because it's not going to a birthday party. And then once you know what to listen for, and I last time I saw someone's like, you guys are flying a lot, they're like, yeah. They were flying yesterday, brick down the South like, man, that is, and then also, I guess you could feel great that you're helping people, but at the same time, do you get joy from flying to somebody's worst day? - Yeah, you know, C-SAR PR and CASVAC are the same way. You know, in the military. So, you know, PR's personal recovery, CASVAC is, it's like Medevac, but the difference with Medevac is as dedicated, they have these bubbles that they operate in, right? Whereas CASVAC, you're tackling, you're along with the mission, and you've got the same capabilities, sometimes better. You know, we would carry a, what's called a SRT, surgical recestitation team, four high-speed doctors, plus our flight medics, which are the best in the business. - Yeah. - But when somebody gets hurt, you know, like Jimmy Hatch, you know, you're going, and you're going to do everything you can to get to 'em. And there's no joy in that type of flying. - I've had a lot of success stories where, you know, six months later, you get an email, saying, "Hey man, thanks for coming to get me." It's like, of course I came to get you. I don't think I was going to do. And, but, you know, it's nice. - Yeah. - That's my favorite mission, actually. You know Nick Palmaschano, I do. So I did his podcast a while back, and he asked me, he goes, "What was your most rewarding missions?" And I said, "CASVAC." And he said, "Why?" I said, "Well, assault, especially when it works out, is satisfying just because the plan worked. But CASVAC, you're saving somebody, you know?" And if you can bring a guy home, and his, it was, I'm doing an out-of-two, I started to tear up, and he's like, "You okay?" I'm like, "Sorry, he just, it's very emotional to me." - I get it man, yeah, I get it. - But, yeah, so those are my favorite, most rewarding, favorite stuff there anyway. But most rewarding was that, - I can see that. - So you actually pull somebody out. - Yeah, and be the difference to them, having a family, where they're being, you know, a solely forgotten member of a family, for sure. - Yeah. - When does the book come out? I'll let you get it, we've been out for almost three hours, I'll let you get it. - Oh, you know, it's supposed to be between September October. - Oh, so you have no idea, amazing. - Yeah, yeah, it's a matter of fact, especially when I, you know, I was coming here, I called my editor and I was like, "Come on, give me a date." And he's like, "I'll give you a date range." - Yeah, he's like, "Well, you know, like, how did your book go?" I mean, you're, you know, it's not out yet. - Oh, it isn't April 14th. I have a date though, next couple weeks away. It, man, what an interesting process. The writing it I enjoyed, then I didn't know, thankfully there are people who are book editors 'cause I tell you what, I didn't know how to use some words properly or punctuation. Semicolons really got me. And I think every time that they showed up in the book is because I hit the wrong key and didn't realize it. But those were corrected. - And then you did your audio book? I did the audio book, I did right here, actually sitting right here. I guess in previous years, you would have to travel to a studio, but I mean, these are the same microphones that they would use. So I zoom called into an audio guy expert, super cool, on a zoom call and there were some settings that we could change so he could hear the audio better and more professional because they were worried about like if he get too close or too far with a popping. - Yeah. - Red through it was about six hours a day for three days, which I didn't mind at all, two podcasts in a day. I'm literally sitting in this same chair. - Yeah, I had fun. - I did mine in a home studio that I made. - Okay. - You don't like it's on the wall, - Yeah, and as long as you have the controlled environment I didn't take chair. - And it did okay. I mean, I really enjoyed it, but my dog, I'm wearing headphones, you know, I had a nice microphone. And my dog would come, he's a little jack Russell Terrier. - Yeah, they're assholes. - And he's like, you know, and I didn't hear it until the book is done. I'm listening to the final product and I hear. - So that's why I was lucky I had another guy listening. And I would almost always know when I needed to repeat something, but you know, you blow to every, you round something on a word, it doesn't come out super clear. So three days of that. But I turned it into the written manual script, which I think is the right word for it, it's nonfiction. Well over a year ago. So the process has just been really long. I finally got actual hardcover versions of it. Is it hardcover or hardback? Hardcover, right? - Bigger, it's hardcover, right? - Yeah. Two days ago, and it comes out in today's the 26th of March, three weeks. - Nice. - It might be, I have absolutely no idea what to expect. - The publishers don't do much for you anymore. I mean, even Nick was saying about scars and stripes. He said, you pretty much have to do your own problem and stuff. - That's what he said, this is still selling. I mean, the paperback just came out. - So how do they decide when they transition from a hardcover to paperback? - It's usually 18 months. - Okay, so that is going to happen at some point. - Probably. - You signed a contract that probably has that in there? - Yeah, I didn't read that though. - Oh. (laughing) - Again, if I turned the manual script in a year ago, I signed that contract two years ago. I might have signed away the rights and rights and I chose an effect. - Well that's the thing, right? - Yeah. - So the hooks on the door, I signed that contract two years ago. - Yeah. - You know what I mean? - I'm sure I could find it somewhere buried in a file folder on my computer, but at this point, I'm like, hey, three weeks this thing comes out, so. - Well, it's cool, is it still selling, which is fun. You know, I go on Amazon every couple of days, and look at the seller ranking. - Ranking, yeah. - And if I can be in the double digits as opposed to three digits, that's good. - What genre is it in on Amazon? Military history and memoir. - Okay, I don't know where my will land. I did Andy Frizella's podcast, not too long ago. Holy cow. It was, it peaked at number 143 of all books on Amazon, and it's not out yet. - Oh. Hey, let me tell you, when I did the Sean Ryan's podcast, they ran out of books. - Yeah. - I'm sure the same thing will happen here, your listenership probably just as big. - Nope, not at all. - But I don't know Sean, well at all, but I am super appreciative of the platform that he has built. It's amazing to me. There's something weird going on in the veteran community right now, and I don't know if it's a matter of, because the GWAT is increasingly farther away in the rear view mirror, but there seem to be two camps. One of them is it doesn't matter how much you've done, it wasn't enough. And the other camp is even if you've done things outside of the military, never forget that you would have been nothing without your military service. - Yeah, I don't understand that. Like, by theory is this, your experiences are yours to do with what you want to. So if you are a train wreck and you lie upon those military experiences, go ahead and do that, but you get to eat the consequences of that. And I don't understand why people can't realize that you could have had a military job that was very interesting, but also without that qualifier, you could still be an interesting person as well. And I don't know if it's because some people view what other people are doing, and they want to have that, so they try to chop them down at the knees. To me, it's like, dude, awesome. That just shows you what's possible. Now, if you want to go get that, let me tell you right now, the path to getting to where Sean is, is not by talking shit about Sean, and saying, oh, he shouldn't be doing that, or we should be doing it a different way. It's like, dude, just do better. Figure out, maybe he has a personality that you're never gonna have. Sorry, welcome to the real world. - And he's super nice, by the way. - That's what I'm saying. We text back and forth very infrequently. Usually it's memes or when he and I get put into the same thing and be like, "Did you see this shit?" I'm like, "I know I saw it too." (laughs) And I met it one time, but again, why not from a distance be like, dude, that's awesome. I'm stoked that you were able to build something like that. Did you take the exact path or approach that I would? No, but I'm not into this competitive success. - Right. Well, that's the thing is, one of the things I'm considering, is I try to support myself. these nonprofits is, other than corporate speaking, is maybe doing a podcast, but I don't know where I would even start with something like that. I look at what you guys do and it's like, - This is like a, I mean, so what we are sitting inside of right now is basically it was a shell that was created by a Hollywood set production company, which, who'd better to make things that look real, that aren't real, that a Hollywood set production company, 'cause that's what they do. Before this, it was curtains. Before that, it was a smaller room in the same building with smaller curtains and Michael Bailey fit behind his desk, quedged into the wall. Before that, it was just me and the room. - This is gorgeous. - It's amazing. - Before that, it was me just in a room and I had to watch back every interview that I did and I was doing the camera angles afterwards. So you wanna talk about wanting to put a gun in your mouth, just listen to yourself talk for three to four hours on a conversation you've already had. And before that, it was, I was at my house. And before that, it was audio, so I mean, don't view it as a current snapshot of what I'm super, super happy with what it is right now, but like this is many iterations down the road. - Well, I'm in the process of deciding the first iteration. - So I would just say do it further. What if you can figure out a reason, or if you know the reason that you wanna do it is because you're generally interested in doing it, I would say go for it. I get bombarded with people who say, hey, I wanna start a podcast and they almost always add this one qualifier and they say, so they'll say, I wanna start a podcast. How did you monetize yours? Ooh. - Card in front of the horse a little bit. - Ah, you know, I know the funny thing about that is, so I get through my website, people will come on there and they'll ask me to speak, and if it's a good thing, I'm pretty much like, sure. And like, what do you charge me? - Nothing. - You know, just pay my expenses. And my wife kind of is like, no. Have them talk to me. 'Cause I would just go. - That's actually the move - That is the move. - 'Cause I'll always be like, yeah, tell you what, buy 50 books and pay my plane fare and welcome, do whatever you want. - And outsource that to somebody else. - Yeah, I have to, 'cause, yeah. - I'm the same that you, like a fire department. - Fire department will hit me up or an agency, I have two prices. I have the not-for-profit agencies, which I will do anything I can to work inside of budgets. And then there's the for-profit price, which, those are two different things. Listen, we've got a thing for your listeners. In October, it's the 25th, well, September 11th, 25th anniversary. And then in October, the Night Starcare Foundation is doing this thing at the top of the Freedom Tower. They've got to be giving you up there. And it's one of those fundraisers for the Night Starcare Foundation. I'm not sure who the keynote speaker's gonna be yet. They were looking at some big names, but they were kind of hoping for some pro bono work or something like that. But it has to be somebody, it can't just be somebody who's cool, like in our eyes, it has to be somebody who, you know, finance people in New York City. - You wanna come see-- - We'll find interesting. Oh, I'd like to go hear him. You know, we've had, you know, Bill McCrave and do some stuff. He's a pretty good draw, you know, but, you know, we've seen him. - Yeah. - It kind of thing. - So I don't need somebody to use it. - No, I don't know, I'm sure you're saying. How did the 160th get permission to fly under that bridge in New York? - I don't know. - 'Cause you know what I'm talking about, don't you? - I do know. - And I can tell you-- - The Loders went first and then I think it was a black hox. I don't know if Chinooks were involved in this evolution. - I have seen video of it, now I don't know if it's real. And that's the problem is, I think this one's real. Michael, TF160 flying under bridge in New York. I'm pretty-- - When did New York go with the San Francisco? - His New York. - Okay. I think-- - Yeah. This happened once before I got to the 160th. So I got there in '95. So I can 90-- - Oh, three or four? - Death. - They under flew a bridge. - This is definitely modern era. - Yeah, I know. I saw it. - Yeah, I don't know if it's not AI. - I don't think it is. - Come on, Michael. I mean, this is New York, right? Okay. - That was Brooklyn Bridge, okay? - Yeah. Let's get some volume, Michael. Volume up. That's not AI. (engine revving) That is not AI. I mean, they're not putting anybody at risk. No. Here's something that people may not understand are not gonna like. Military aviation is not really constrained by the same rules as the FAA. - Yeah, and chances are, if that's, it probably is real, but-- - Yeah, I think that's not a big area. - But we've done stuff where I went out to New York approach control, and we were doing a parachute jump with the cadets into, I don't know, giant stadium or something. - Oh, did you, so you actually went out to the building there, right? - Yeah, so I went to the track, huh? - Which is actually been talked of. - Really cool to see how they do stuff. - It was, but here's what's even cooler. So it's a very, it's just a couple of buildings in a fence that are-- - They look like non-descripted offices, yeah. - And so they're like, "Hey, can you come back "one month before, or we wanna talk you one more time "about how we're gonna do this?" It's like, sure. And they go, "Can you land right there?" And they point at the grass outside their building. - Obviously. - And I'm like, "I can, but this is the tray con." And they go, "Yeah, we'll give you permission." So they just wanted to see it. So I mean, they're easy to work with. - Yeah. - You know, and I would fly over that all the time. You get the BMW, the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridge, and then you get to U.N. And LaGuardia is right there. But yeah, in South, hella port, or in South, but yeah. - Yeah, listen, the unmarked black helicopters do what they want. There's a process, you know? I bet you they went and surveyed it firsthand. - Oh for sure. - Right, well this is taken from, called the Riverside Cafe. I guarantee you, they walk the grounds, make sure there's nothing to hang down. - For sure. - There's a process in the, so there's a manual called the ATM, Air Crew Training Manual, that has everything you do in the aircraft with a task-conditioned standard. Tell you how to do it, right? Underflying obstacles is a task. - I agree. - And like I said, the FAA can get real mad, but if they were doing military training, - I would bet they had permission. - I would think they did too. - 'Cause I hope that they did. - 'Cause they didn't. - I did high profile. - Yeah, I was gonna say if you didn't, you'd hear about it by now. - Oh the boss is 100% getting sent that faster than you would, probably before those turbines spun down. - You know, I told you before we started filming about being in Colorado with the snowmobiles in the back of the Shinnok's. - Yeah. - Somebody took a picture of that and sent it to the regimental commander and said, "Look, you guys are out screwing off, "you know, taking guys with snowmobiles up in the mountains." And it's like, those are 10th group, those are their official vehicles. And yes, we are doing that. - It's also a shut up nerd. - But at first they're all mad, you know, and it's like, what are they doing? - Where can people find you? - You swedify me is my website, AlanCMac.com. - Okay. - Or just Google AlanMac podcast and you find, you know, me on all of the place I did, Sean, yours now twice, did Mike Ritland. - Yep. - I was also super nice. - Yep. - Sortman of other guys, less her nouns, but also very good interviewers. - Well, yeah, man, thank you for making the trip out. I deeply appreciate it. You gotta sign those books for me. - Yep, these are signed and I promise Michael you could have one. - But the thing is this, promises are made to Michael all the time. - Oh, I got a coin for you too. I think I'll see you in one of these. - Last time, but I don't know. I don't know. - So, Michael, looking at this, which direction is the helicopter turning? - I can barely see. It's too far away. - Unbelievable. - Now imagine just getting that guy as you can barely see. - This is all you get in your life depends on it. We are at, what are we looking at here? - Slight rate turn, I think. - Slight rate turn, about a 10 degree bank. - Oh, let's look on the left side of the little diamond. - Yep. - That's a terrain following radar queue. - Okay. - That's called a floating diamond. - Yep. - Not bad. - So, always Michael try to keep the blue on top of the brown. - Yeah, I realize not what it is. (laughing) - Awesome, Ed, thank you. - All right. - Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great, you love the host, you seek it out and download it, you listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? 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