Helicopter Wars | White Out | Season 1 Episode 3 | Full Episode

the falklands war 1982 high on a remote glacier special forces troops are trapped by hurricane force winds royal navy helicopters stage a daring rescue risking catastrophic engine failure have i got the bottle it's no good putting on a uniform and saying yeah i'm in the navy of course i can go to war tomorrow you don't know in a lethal maze of ice and rock the only way out is by radar you can't see it's like being in the dark but it's white three helicopters head into the void [Music] only one will come back south georgia a remote and forbidding outcrop in the far south of the atlantic 12 000 kilometers from london the island is a british territory dating back more than 200 years eleven mountains saw over two thousand meters with majestic glaciers spanning the gaps [Music] from april to september only scientists braved the hostile winter but on march 19 1982 argentinian forces invade the island occupying the few human settlements then 14 days later argentina annexes the falklands thirteen hundred kilometers to the northwest the british government responds in force a heavily armed task force spearheaded by two aircraft carriers set sail for the falklands but another smaller force gathered in secret just four ships with orders to retake south georgia on the flagship hms antrim one aging helicopter is destined to fire the opening shots a westland wessex iii affectionately known as humphrey 19 years old even then it's now housed in the navy's fleet aero museum as the veteran crew recall wessex threes had a single engine with a worrying failure rate i mean the one thing i always uh think about in retrospect how many failures they've had on west x3 engines before we went up well i'd had two yeah two one in the water yeah it was six three as well yeah i've had quite a few heavy landings but humphrey is a much-loved old workhorse the pilot lieutenant commander ian stanley and you get to the edges of the flight envelope quite often it's when you get too close to it or you're being pushed by circumstances to get too close to but life gets a little bit more interesting stanley's crew chris parry stewart cooper and dave fitzgerald four men and the machine that carried them to war april 1982 aboard the antrim the great vine buzzes about a mysterious troop of soldiers we all sort of whispered to each other didn't we are these guys in the sas who are these guys i mean why they got long hair and why are they speaking with irish accents we had them at rms and they they brought all their guns with them all right and they actually kept there you sleep with them they slept with their guts this is the elite special air service hardened by years of covert operations in northern ireland now they have a spectacular plan to retake south georgia by helicopter the first time we heard about it of course is when we arrived south georgia and they said we want to go there we went you what the flight plan verges on the impossible the gateway to south georgia is the face of a glacier three-quarters the height of the empire state building higher still the route twists and climbs between huge mountains while the temperature plummets the drop zone is the very top of fortuna glacier 600 meters above sea level and minus 20 celsius from there the sas will cover the last 15 kilometers on foot their objective the argentinian garrison at lee harbour [Music] i remember you saying why are we going up there and this chap said to you well they won't expect us to come from that direction and you said well they won't expect you to come by polaris missile either there's no good reason to do it i remember thinking that's a really gutsy call [Applause] on april 21st the sas make their move the strike team 16 highly trained specialists in arctic and mountain warfare three helicopters head for the glacier most of the sas go in two wessex troop carriers each with ample room for fully kitted soldiers humphrey takes the lead acting as the mission's pathfinder instead of troops the bulk of the cabin is filled with radar navigation equipment the radar's transmitter gives the west x3 its distinctive hump humphrey and its crew normally specialize in anti-submarine warfare but for this mission lieutenant chris parry will improvise adapting humphrey's radar for navigation what we're being required to do is flying between mountains in cloud because most of the days in south georgia the weather was atrocious heavy clouds snow storms and very high winds indeed and possibly charts that weren't entirely accurate co-pilot stuart cooper is an extra pair of eyes and ears monitoring the instrument panel and the daunting mountain terrain as flight photographer he also captures a unique record of the mission you can see the scale of the cliffs behind the helicopter huge over a thousand feet just immediate rise from the from the sea air crewman dave fitzgerald keeps a doorway lookout in constant communication with his pilot [Music] even this barren landscape might be patrolled by the enemy you're always looking out to see the flash of a small arms fire or something you know and in fact the weather was so bad if they had any sense they were all indoors and that's what we were banking on the argentinians stay undercover but the real enemy is about to strike we soon hit a real a really bad weather front we got buffeted on the way in quite severely we were working pretty hard to make sure we weren't going to crash into something the glacier looms through thickening cloud and driving snow with solid ice and rock on all sides ian stanley is flying blind the two troop carriers stay close anxious to maintain visual contact as stanley leads the way navigating by radar chris parry struggles to find the narrow gaps between the mountains i was desperately trying to fix the helicopter's position and on the radar i could see these massive sort of edges against the mountains and on several occasions we were getting a mismatch between what people were saying was out the front of the aircraft what was on the radar and what was on the charts the problem is paris radar is really designed to hunt submarines the radar beam is reflected if a submarine breaks the surface of the ocean so it works best in a flat environment with skill it can be used for navigation the echoes from the landscape give a rough idea of the changing terrain but in the mountains the radar bounces in all directions false echoes can cause a fatal collision with solid rock for safety a skilled navigator compares the radar data with his maps and the evidence of his own eyes ian stanley retired from the royal navy nine years ago but now he's back in the saddle over loch lomond and the scottish highlands a stretch of water with steep hills on either side 26 years on stanley plans to fly between the hills the way he did on south georgia live okay with the hood on all he can see is the instrument panel he has an artificial horizon for staying level an altimeter for height above the water and a compass to steerboard when you're flying on instruments and you learn this right from day one when you you start doing it you have to build up resistance to what your ears and balance systems telling you so what you see is right as opposed to what you feel 400 yards nearest point landed so just judging out on the right hand side quarter past 12 range the navigator guides stanley towards a bottleneck just 180 meters wide but the radar must be confirmed by human eyes the crew gives stanley as many visual updates as they can okay nice wide open space out from left to the left up to three three five turn right three three [Music] it's a tight squeeze but he's made south georgia with visibility close to zero chris parry cross checks the radar with the crew's verbal updates we're picking up clues glimpses of a mountain here glimpses of a bit of glacier there and we're trying to piece it all together like a giant jigsaw air crewman dave fitzgerald gives ian stanley feedback from the side doorway you're reporting back everything that you can see especially anything coming in from the side i'm telling him yes you're at 40 feet 50 feet whatever co-pilot stuart cooper senses danger all around as we flew up the glacier i was aware that there were rocks and in fact mountains on either side i couldn't see it because it was shrouded in mist but the fact that you knew it was there was enough to focus the mind never mind your eyes 25 minutes from hms antrim they reached the drop zone near the top of fortuna glacier the two troop carriers stay close waiting to unload their cargos of sas men but ian stanley will test the ground first he and croom and dave fitzgerald must somehow find a safe landing spot [Music] the only trouble is they can't see more than a few meters in any direction loch lomond 26 years later ian stanley faces the same task he had on top of fortuna glacier he's flying on instruments alone [Applause] flying blind he must reach the drop zone an island in the middle of the lock but like humphrey the helicopter has a built-in instrument to guide him the doppler the crosshair gives him the vital information he needs which way he's moving and how fast there's a little circle in the middle if you're on that little circle you're doing five knots either five knots left five knots ahead or whatever at little more than walking pace stanley fine-tunes his position until finally he's directly over the drop zone close enough for visual contact even in a blizzard on fortuna glacier stanley prepares to land but one of his instruments has a problem the radar altimeter or rad out measures height using a beam of radar waves if the helicopter goes up an on-board computer brings it back down automatically in theory the pilot chooses the height he wants and the computer keeps him there but on fortuna glacier something strange is going on their adult is jumping and jerking and one minute it's indicating 50 feet the next minute 200 feet the drop zone is scarred by crevasses hundreds of meters deep i remember looking out that window on the other side and looking down and thinking jesus christ that just goes all the way down that's right because i'm saying to you this is really dark blue then it's true what they say about the inside of glaciers it's really dark the radar altimeter thinks they're up high on automatic hover it will drag them into the abyss so stanley stays on manual control his radar and doppler readings must be confirmed by human eyes i'm telling him yes you're at 40 feet 50 feet whatever so he's also balancing that with what he's seeing and what he's hearing from the flight control system you know you've got a big crevasse just out the window here you know you better move over as we're coming down i moved left and took up a new hover and i did say to the pilot you know you're going down you're going down and uh in the end he said i am not bloody well going down shut up i said no you're absolutely right you're not going down it's just the ground on the right is coming up to meet us stanley decides to risk a landing the aircraft's quite heavy so there's quite a lot of pressure going on one of those wheels which might just have punched through something like a snow bridge so it was a long time before i put all the weight on the wheels with stanley safely down the two troop carriers go next lieutenant mike tipp has the lives of seven sas men in his hands instead of having you know a rock face or something to give you references as you as you let yourself down onto the glacier you you were looking out over nothing the two troop carriers have very little guidance equipment tid has no doppler to tell him which way he's moving and yes you can tell what your height is but what you can't tell is what your relative movement to the ground is and you also can't tell if you know 20 yards in front of you there is is a 3000 foot granite cliff face but with ian stanley below him on the ice tid does have a way to get his bearings okay the flight simulator at royal naval air station called rose in a cornwall mike tid's about to make his first helicopter landing for six years so we're going to take that down my biz looks fine yeah that ian stanley is going to give him a few problems i'm just going to crank the vis down a little bit uh mike yeah okay a little bit of light snow there i'd say my business probably a couple hundred yards at most not a lot to see at the moment do you want to try a landing from there yeah tid's looking for something on the ground to give him the reference point he needs and here's his chance let's take a patch over here between the trees that's pretty good isn't it you've got references there yeah i've got some references on the way down tid keeps the same tree in his right hand window when the rotors kick up a cloud of snow he uses the tree to get his bearings there you go life is a bit easier when a great big tree to look at yeah it does help good landing excellent unfortunate glacier conditions are far worse both troop carriers make it down but the pilots are fighting for control the wind was such that it was moving us across the surface of the glacier which when a you're trying to unload troops and b you're trying not to fall into crevasses um can be quite disconcerting really the sas face a 15 kilometer march to the argentinian position on the coast the troops cannot be identified for security reasons the visibility was down to zero because the blizzards were flipping up ice from the glacier it was colder than anything i'd ever been in when i checked my weapon it was totally iced up but sas mountain troops are trained to operate in hostile conditions the end of the day they seem to have the right kit they had skis they had mountain and arctic warfare equipment and they should know what they're doing they'd walked a few yards you know and they were disappearing into the the swirling snow and the mist and i remember the the face looking up and the wave and then we went that was the job done that's what we're concerned we're very happy to get off the glass here and very happy to get back to the ship but behind them the sas are going nowhere ian stanley and his team haven't heard the last from fortuna garcia as night falls the sas faced the ferocious reality of winter on south georgia in the gathering storm the temperature drops to minus 20 celsius winds reach 185 kilometers an hour hurricane force it was so cold that i couldn't think straight i could even feel the pain in my teeth and we were all looking for signs of frostbite hampered by deep crevasses the sas cover less than a kilometer they try to make camp but the tents are ripped from their frozen hands shivering in bare sleeping bags they're rapidly sealed in a shroud of snow in relative safety aboard ship even the helicopter crews are struggling to sleep we were so worried about the the rising sea not only very choppy water but also very very long and high swell we're being rolled around in our bunks the ship was pitching around really really violently by first light the situation on the glacier is desperate the sis have no defense against frostbite and hypothermia no one wanted to admit it but we were struggling to survive let alone get up the glacier and onto the objective the troop captain admits defeat their only chance of survival to go out the way they came in these were very high quality soldiers ones we needed for the falklands and we knew the situation they were in we knew it was desperate we had seen it first hand what the conditions were like and we didn't need any convincing to go back up there to tell you the truth it was only going to be us that took them off all three helicopters head back to south georgia this time in the fury of the storm on the second day the winds were infinitely more violent and they were more unpredictable as well co-pilot stuart cooper describes the scale of the challenge this was the site that greeted us as we came towards the front of the glacier and you can see there's some small waves on the picture here which give an idea of scale then you look up and you realize you're looking up a very steep front to the glacier and as we flew in that was what faced us ian stanley faces a climb of nearly 300 meters with a single suspect engine the violent winds could smash him back into the sea the crew are on maximum alert stuart cooper knows the slightest mistake could be fatal if you're too close to a cliff you will get pushed down it's it could be incredibly dangerous as the aircrewman in the doorway my uh major responsibilities really was to watch the tower rotor because you don't want the tail rotor even slightly touching something because it will throw you into a bit of a tailspin 26 years later pilot ian stanley squeezes through a narrow pass in freezing mountains near loch lomond the rotors are just a few meters from the mountainside stanley must look out for sudden changes in wind speed right now stanley's hitching a ride on an updraft warm air rising from below this means he can use much less engine power we're pulling around about 80 at the moment on cold mountains and glaciers the most dangerous wind strikes from above cold air is heavier than warm air so it falls at high speed down any steep slope this is called a katabatic wind on the face of a glacier a helicopter is in constant danger of these sudden downdrafts the pilot must be ready to fight back with maximum power this is true of any sort of very steep cliff or hillside depending on the winds coming from if you've got an enormous updraft you can find yourself in a situation with no power on at all then he might change and you'll suddenly have to take a great big handful of power to arrest the rate of descent you've got to fight against them all three pilots ride a roller coaster of rapidly changing winds the downdraft put humphrey's single engine under maximum strain what was going through all of our minds so i said oh idea i wonder what's going to happen if the engine stops now you know where do we go from here we've never seen anything like it looking at a solid wall of ice and going higher and higher and higher up into the cloud not top of it but at last they make it over the face ian stanley leads the formation with chris parry's radar seeking out the route ahead they soon locate the sas barely advanced from the original drop zone after 26 hours on the ice even special forces troops are desperate to escape mike tid had got his guys in quite quickly he could see down the glass here he could see her way off and because they were there he was ready to go as flight commander stanley makes a fateful decision and he thought well there's a good window of opportunity here you know i shall grab this and he asks can i go i can see my way off and i said yeah okay there you go in these ferocious winds visibility comes and goes in seconds and i headed off down down the glacier and i guess i got about half a mile uh down the glacier and then the wind just kicked round as it does there kicked around by i don't know 30 40 degrees or so and all of a sudden i was into instant snowstorm mike tidd is in total whiteout with no radar you were looking out over nothing it was like sort of floating in space tail hit crashed down onto the uh onto the the ice i remember lying near my straps thinking mrs titt's not going like being a widow as the sudden squall dies away stuart cooper looks on in horror i remember a few expletives being uttered in the cockpit as we watched this in slow motion almost they rushed to check for casualties cooper grabs a unique snapshot the engine's still running so there's still some steam or exhaust coming out from that area the crew are still in the aircraft the guys are still in the back and the door hasn't actually yet been opened and as you can see the the other members of the sas from the other helicopter are coming over to render assistance myself and ian stayed in the front of the aircraft because that's why i had time to take a photograph we could do nothing else other than just hold on to the controls and wait because uh to to leave or let go of the controls or leave the aircraft would have been suicide because the wind was so strong anything could have happened the only injuries are minor cuts six sas mike tyrd and his crewman squeeze into ian stanley's helicopter bless him he said god you're a messy bugger he said aren't you i said you've left your windscreen wiper on and i said if you can find the switch you go and turn the bloody thing off the other 10 sas pile into the second troop carrier the pilot ian georgeson knows whiteout could strike again at any moment with no radar georgian must stay on stanley's tail all the way off the glacier but in the simulator mike tidge shows it's easier said than done ian stanley plans to make the conditions as bad as fortuna glacier as we head up the valley what we'll do is we'll just produce the visibility down steadily and probably increase the turbulence a little bit to make a little bit more hard work regressively for you thank you there she goes that's the biz reducing that's better that's a bit more like the real thing to maintain visual contact tid must keep within just three rotor lengths all right fred now stanley does his worst hold that heading there and we'll we'll reduce the visibility a bit further okay and increasing the turbulence if we can do that [Music] it's getting a bit more realistic now isn't it yeah this is better i mean all i've got is him to judge scale and distance [Music] it's a total white out that must be what he had [Music] 30 knots on fortuna glacial ian georgeson becomes the second victim of whiteout at the very moment when i put my head round into the glass bubble of the window on the the side of the aircraft i i saw him plowing to the ground the wreckage rapidly disappears from view already overloaded ian stanley can only head back to the ship it had gone horribly wrong at that stage of the game and i must admit i was i was feeling it a bit just going over in my head if we could have done something differently 12 men are missing possibly dead somewhere on the glacier what we were really concerned about is that the aircraft had crashed and everybody had been killed we just didn't know what had happened we knew it it crashed into the glacier and i came up on the radio to the ship as soon as we were clear and said we're heading back we've got so many people on board but i have to tell you we've lost our two chicks in georgetown and his team were really good buddies of mine i felt as i'd been kicked in the stomach but their worries proved to be short-lived there was a call up from the ops room on the on the tactical intercom to say they'd managed to make radio contact with um within georgetown and co and that they were all alive with the temperature at minus 20 celsius and falling the downed men take shelter in a helicopter life raft already freezing the sas troops face another night on the glacier [Music] harry and stanley go back to the drawing board humphrey is now the only helicopter left for the job in the entire south georgia task force we thought we'd actually run out of lies the day before and we wondered whether we had any lives left for another mission up on that glacier another rescue attempt means enormous risk they must somehow pack 16 men in an aging helicopter built for four we decided we'd give it one more go before it got dark [Music] i wrote a letter to my wife i includes my wedding ring a lot of things were going around in my head what had happened to the two other aircraft the fact we were a single engine helicopter old aircraft i'd seen the conditions and um just in case just in case stanley plans to come in high the best vantage point for the surge but now he's above the cloud layer hoping against hope for the clouds to part and uh as we came over the top of where the glacier would be i don't know what it was but we looked down and there big hole in the cloud a red dinghy could look down through some of the cloud through what we call suckers gaps it's where gaps appear in the cloud you go for them of course and it closes up as you're going through it that's why it's called a sucker's gap we just thought here's a chance let's go for it and then we dive straight down through the hole and land it alongside them it's only a sucker's gap if it closes up as you go through it it's an inspired piece of airmanship if you take your chances to save weight the crew must persuade the sas to abandon their kit they wanted to bring their bergens as well yeah that's right from northern ireland this has been with me for 12 years yes i prefer this to my wife was one of the comments well i just made that i said okay you can keep your weapons but you just make sure you unload them well getting 12 guys into an anti-submarine west 63 is rather like the competition to get how many people you can into a mini and a certain amount of cooperation is required to get all these people and these are big guys in most cases we just kept cramming them in wherever we could find a space and i reckon about four of them sat like that here yeah four or five standing or sitting behind me here we cram them in there somehow and i remember them all being up this side yeah and then two behind me as well and in fact one was holding on to me because there were so many people in i couldn't find anywhere to hook my harness onto the four crew 10 sas and two downed airmen squeeze in around the vital radar gear humphrey is now more than 600 kilos over the maximum takeoff weight but ian stanley knows the wind for once is blowing in his favor the fact it was windy and it was cold was to our advantage well i mean the fact we were a ton overweight when we took off i remember thinking at the time we discussed it of course we actually had to wait for some of the wind to get up before we could actually lift in safety humphrey drags its tired old bones aloft for the first time in almost 30 hours the sas can draw a warm breath i'm sure i could smell burning half a dozen of them lit up their cigarettes and i'm thinking hang on we're sitting on a half a ton of aviation fuel here and these guys are lighting up i said to the pilots can you smell burning but even the pilots are feeling the tension the greatest danger is still to come landing back on deck the standard procedure hover alongside then match the up and down rhythm of the deck before timing the landing at the ship's highest point heavily overloaded stanley fears his single engine will fail at the worst possible moment you need more power to come alongside the ship because you're using it to stay in tune with the ship before you land with all those ses guys in the back we were thinking if we did ditch over the sea or any of us going to get out of this because it would be a real bum fight inside to get out and the wessex three didn't have a great record for staying on the surface once you ditch now where the invariably rolls over yes and with the number of people who are in the back i wouldn't have put any confidence in everyone getting out to be honest the nightmare prospect ditching in the freezing south atlantic this is the royal navy's underwater escape unit the dreaded dunker where air crew are trained to act first or die chris parry and ian stanley are about to experience the ordeal of a deck landing gone wrong a flooded helicopter in near total darkness rolling into the deep [Music] it enables you to answer questions about yourself i got one have i got the bottle for it it's one of the things you have to answer in wartime as well have i got the bottle off south georgia this would be a freezing storm tossed sea hopefully is an instinctive reaction to to get yourself out but whether you'd survive in the sea is a completely different map i think four minutes and you'd be dead not much more than that the lives of sixteen men in the hands of one pilot ian stanley is about to relive the sas rescue with his first deck landing for 23 years joining him again chris parry the team that flew humphrey back to hms entry right just like the old times skinny eyeballs moving around a little bit getting back up to speed again approaching antrim humphrey's packed passengers steal themselves for landing on the heaving deck i knew that it was going to be a bit of a heavy landing or as ian liked to call it a more of a controlled crash i just need to increase the rate of the bank on this one and you've got to bear in mind that quite a few of those scs guys had already been in two crashes that day and they're in the third aircraft now does lightning strike three times i reckon some of them must have been thinking if the engine fails stanley must ditch in the freezing sea god forbid if one wheel goes over the side of the deck the aircraft is gone her on the deck slammed the brakes on and we were there quite a relief well for a first one for eight hours spa yeah no problems at all with that enjoyed that so did we by saving the lives of 16 sas and four fellow airmen stanley's crew averts a shattering blow to british morale and at that stage the game it sort of dawned i must have dawned on me well that was jolly exciting it's not we have any more of that to know let's do something very boring it didn't happen and it didn't happen humphrey and its crew go on to play a crucial role in the war with argentina two days later they're back in the anti-submarine business they fire the first shots of the south georgia campaign depth charges disabling a vital enemy vessel british ships are now free to bombard the argentinians into surrender they make a famous signal to prime minister margaret thatcher in downing street the white ensign flies alongside the union jet in south georgia god save the queen what happens next thank you very much and congratulate our forces and the marines 26 days later humphrey joins the full-scale invasion that finally brings the falkland islands back into british hands but the success of the entire war began on south georgia with one helicopter and its crew afterwards you might say my god that was frightening but you know just the ability to get on and do the job is i think is absolutely testament to training but i think the chemistry was absolutely right between the four of us it was an extraordinary leadership personally it was extraordinary i i think all of us could say it was extraordinary you're absolutely right [Music] you

Channel: DangerTV

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Keywords: helicopter wars, helicopter wars full episode, helicopter wars full episodes, helicopter wars full episodes online, helicopter, wars, danger, dangertv, danger tv, Danger, DangerTV, Danger TV, dangertv special forces training, special forces training, special forces, training, military training, military helicopters, special forces helicopters, special forces military training, us army special forces, us army special forces training, us army, us army training, white out, whiteout, fly

Id: GwbhhmDqCn4

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021