Huey UH1H Walkaround Gary Gingrich

[Music] hi my name is Eric Johnston and I'm an aviation photographer join me as a document all kinds of aircraft from big to small and cool to well really cool this video is proudly sponsored by Air models check out their excellent variety of resin and diecast aircraft models with over 400 commercial and military aircraft and helicopters available click the link in the description to see more from Air models hi my name is Gary gettin rich and this is the Mid America flight museum's latest acquisition it's a uh-1h model and I flew these in Vietnam for about a thousand hours of combat time and about another four thousand hours as an instructor for the Army Reserves this helicopter was the primary helicopter that the army used in Vietnam and it was quite the workout workhorse and to give you a little brief on preflighting it and whatnot starting out from the front I'll point out some differences in Vietnam the ones that we flew but this helicopter is as close to stock as any helicopter I flew in Vietnam that's what's so interesting about it this was a modification after Vietnam and I'm not sure whether anybody used these this was for mounting vertical antennas and I didn't see any like that in Vietnam I'm not saying they didn't have them or whatnot and the other thing we did not have in Vietnam was this wire strike it's like a knife edge blade there and up top to where if you did in and vertically when you were flying low hit a wire there's a good chance that that mechanism would break the wire so when you wrap around your rotor blades so that's something that came in after the war of course we didn't have any problems with running into wires in the war walking around here let me just open the door up what's so interesting about this helicopter when I say it's completely stock like we flew in Vietnam you see these H models around from time to time but you don't ever see them with the original armor seats that we had in Vietnam and as you can see it's armored here and you have this panel that after you get in you slide this forward and it gave you protection over here there was another form of protection we had it was called the chicken plate and that wrapped around your neck and it looked like a police officers a bulletproof vests that they have nowadays the only thing is it was made out of some type of cement which and it was this thick and if you were flying a lot of hours it was so cumbersome and so hard on you that I didn't use it you know a lot of guys wouldn't even think about flying without it but I didn't use it and it was just too tough on my neck so moving back along here if you can shoot inside here for ease of lightweight and whatnot the floor in this helicopter is made out of magnesium and that's good for getting strength and lightweight the bad part about it being magnesium is if you did get on fire that that's a ferocious fire a ferocious fire so that was the only drawback to that and as you can see this is configured to have two seats forward and then we have five seats across the bench here and then back here we called this the Gunners well and there's two seats here but we primarily ran a door gunner just one guy in this seat and we had the m60 mounted on this on stanchions to where the guy could run that m60 like this and turn it any way he needed to turn it and I'll tell you it was remarkable how accurate in such a short amount of time if you had a door gunner on here where you could circle a target and say there might be a very small like mortar crater and I'd take them out when they needed some practice and I'd circle that and it was amazing how they could put every round in a small mortar hole egg put every round in and we're like a thousand feet off the ground it's just amazing how quick of course they had the tracers to help them you know the tracer rounds one every fourth or third round however they set them up but these guys were tremendously accurate so if you did get to see your target you could really tear them up problem is in Vietnam a lot of fighting was in a jungle and you you you might see a muzzle flash or hear something shoot at you but you may not get a chance to see the guys on the ground now the NVA would run these 51 caliber sights and they would set them in a little bit more of a location where they could move those barrels around a lot of times you could see those so that was a little bit different but a 50 caliber can really raise a lot of hell with the helicopter even if you're 3,000 feet you know 3,000 feet you're away from the small arms you're okay you know but that 51 that could do a lot of damage well getting back to the pre-flight part though this is where we come in here and we pull us down to view our transmission level which I haven't looked at this one so I might as well look at it now and it's right where it should be there's a little light that pops on and there's a fill line and they have this right to the fill line so that's pretty good the doors are pinned back for summertime operation and in Vietnam we always operate it with the doors completely open and a nice thing about that is the max speed on this is 120 knots you can go on you can do 120 knots where the door is open so that's good if someone wanted they could take the front doors off but generally we kept those on so let me remove this pin here real quick this is where we put fuel takes about two hundred and nine gallons this single burn anywhere from 70 gallons to about 95 gallons depending on how fast you want to go faster you go it more you burn up and here is the engine compartment and what we'd look for on here in the engine compartment it's an engine oil which is right there up there a side gauge for that and just you're just looking you know we're not mechanics you know but we're just looking for condition and security just to make sure nothing's popped loose it's not like you can reach in here and touch anything it's too far away but a lot of the bolts have slip slippage marks on them where they put paint across it so you can tell if it moves but moving back here check the stabilator and well the only thing you'd be looking for here is there's some radical play in it just move it sideways and up and down and see if there's any vertical a lateral play yes it moves somewhat in flight depending on your speed but it's not anything that you move it's just interconnected with the controls it's not anything you can slew Blackhawk helicopters have one you can slew it back here is what they call a 45 degree gearbox and that's right here because the chef comes back and thing goes up 45 degrees to the other gearbox there's a fluid sight gauge there you check to make sure you got fluid there come back around here and if the blade was untied what I wouldn't do with the blade is I just grab the end and I move it back and forth a little bit to see if there's any play in a pitch change links up there I did this one yesterday and it's it's just solid all the bearings and links on this are just 100% up to tolerance there's no I couldn't find any play in anything yesterday once again the same thing on this side just check it a little bit for movement and this thing's tight as can be we have our battery for this helicopter and this this is just wiring for avionics and whatnot not much to see in there you look for a broken wire something like that some uese have the battery mounted back here on the other side where I was that other compartment that I was on the other side but this one has a battery mounted forward it's more a V Onix I think that's one of the gyros for the dashboard and you're just looking for condition and security of your cowlings come forward here the same thing you got a donor's gunner as well here and the stanchions are right here for that m60 where you'd mount the stanchions for it and it's the same as the other side hey once again when you're not taking any passengers you want to make sure that your seatbelts are strapped in so they don't flop around because you get going about 100 knots or whatever and if these aren't strapped in they can flop out and do damage to the side of a helicopter everything's pretty secure here overall condition at a skid you're looking for this helicopter has skid shoes on it which during an auto rotation when you touch down on pavement it tends to be real rough on us kids but they have these skid shoes that take all the damage to where you don't do any damage to the skids themselves same thing up here got the crash release on the door if you need to jettison the door if it wouldn't open you pull that pin it's a very simple operation and then sometimes you got to hit it with your elbow or kick it with your foot to get that thing the door to come completely loose I guess now we could go up to the top do the rotor head when I was 20 it was a lot easier to get up here and the rotor head basically what you're really looking for once again it's real important now about these slippage marks on bolts and cotter pins on the bolts as well so we normally start up here at this scissors assembly here and if you just grab on to this and move the shaft if there's play in that you would feel that immediately of course this era helicopter doesn't have any but we would check it anyway same here you kind of put your thumb up against the arm itself then try and move it back and forth and if you feel any feeling in your thumb you would know that there is a problem and you'd get a mechanic to come out and look at it with a feeler gauge and they would tell you if it's in tolerance or not once again here's another bearing and I'm wiggling in it and there just isn't it's got a little play but a tiny amount of play moving down here on this assembly it's called the dampener and when you move it all the way up there's you're not going to be able to get this on film but there's a pin in there and it gets jammed out and then you pull it down about four to eight seconds that pin should go in and this one's going in perfectly once again looking here for condition and security and slippage marks and whatnot and then we move down there's more bearings here and this is called the trunnion bearing and if there's any play you can feel it right here and there's also a little play supposed to be here if it's excessive you can feel it by wiggling it and everything here is a hundred percent secure very tight bearings then I go around the other side and do the very same thing very tight everything's very tight here these are controlled push-pull tubes here that are hydraulically controlled and back here we have a item called a short shaft and you check for grease coming up here because if that was to start leaking grease you might have a problem with it and that's about it you've got your air intakes here I want to make sure that they're not all clogged up a lot of times when people land in real grassy fields hay fields and whatnot a lot of stuff can get stuck on air and in the real dusty conditions like we used to have in Vietnam the dust could get through there and every so often they have to wash the engine out with it running they spray a cleaning agent in there as it's running and it would clean the engines out other than that that's about it for the rotor head ok full pre-flight procedure you'd come up and check all switch positions that you have circuit breakers we've got some non-essential breakers that we don't use and as he'll look out there and they're all pops you don't want electricity going to them if you're not really using that item this is lighting cockpit lighting and whatnot this is a this is a heater a bleed air heater on and then a rotating switch on that these are wipers hardly ever use the wipers maintenance you really get upset because the wipers would scratch the windshield even if there was a lot of rain on them of course this is a any collision light that it would be on for start and these are your navigation lights and he's keeping these on when he hits the battery he's in the habit of doing that then you'd move forward here this a main generator cut off it has a safety switch that holds it any on position so if you want to check that generator you'd go ahead and pull this down and then turn it off and he'd make sure this is this switches and a standby position and then you see on a load meter here that your standby generator is working and that was just a test to make sure it worked then you throw this one back on the main generator on and you'd see the main generator pick the load back up to know everything was functioning right there and then coming down through here this is an old army transponder just like we had in the war and this is a UHF radio that we use in war we use a lot of UHF frequencies in a war very seldom VHF frequencies and this is a civilian transponder they put in here because they're not using this transponder anymore and in this particular aircraft they have a VHF radio here and the ones that flew in Vietnam we had an FM radio Fox and Lakewood called it and it was a lot lower frequency but we use that to talk to the units on the ground tactically all the tanks and whatnot and the people you're talking to radio men on the ground they had Fox mic radios so you could talk directly to them and here isn't number two VHF so there's two VHF radios and this coming up through here for for starting the engine you've got an emergency governor position and what happens is you have an automatic fuel control governor on this particular helicopter to where once you're at operating rpm and you increase the collective it automatically feeds forget where some of the older helicopters you would have to increase throttle well this is fuel controlled where that doesn't need to be and that has to be in the auto position if you had certain types of emergencies you'd have to bring this back to the emergency position and then you would manually use the throttle just like an old helicopter with a twist grip only thing being is that when this helicopters in the emergency position the throttle is ultra sensitive so once again that would only be in a particular emergency and then you just come back up hydraulic control switch arm force trim on and what the force trim is is without the force trim on there's no feedback and it controls in a cyclic it's just completely loose and that's pretty much the way you want it when you're hovering around and flying it but if say you're flying and it's going to be a long straight and level type flight you go ahead and probably would use that for stream from time to time because when you put that on it kind of holds the controls exactly where they are when you actually put it on then there's a button up here that you can push when you want to move the control and wherever you move it to when you release it it'll generally hold it in that position it's not to be confused with an autopilot or anything like that it's just kind kind of like a little extra trim too or in fact hold the cyclic steady for you but it doesn't have any autopilot capabilities you have to monitor it all the time and move it back because it does tend to wander but it's better than having nothing as far as that goes and you check all your instruments a lot of times they put slippage marks on the glass so that doesn't move if that were the move then your green arc and red arcs would change so they have slippage marks on there so the tape is on the glass so you'll be able to see that you're in the green without anything moving you want me to turn the battery on and okay now what you hear there is a low rpm audio which would come on if your rpm on the rotor got too low and we have a reset on that we just turn that off because as we're starting the airplane helicopter we don't want to hear all that noise then after we get it up to operating rpm we flip the RL on and then the next time it comes on it would be truly because you have somewhat of a low rotor and this is the rotor right here basically two ninety four to three to ninety four to three twenty four and I think three thirty-nine was the max for autorotation we would roll this thing up right up to 6600 rpm on the engine and the rotor is turning about 310 315 right in there and then we'd back it down because when you go through trace translational if we'd back it down just a little bit maybe 25 it tends to pick up 25 so you want to operate at 6600 or a lot time this is a torque gage that's an 1 and this is your egt and that's very important for you want to make sure that the helicopter doesn't over temp when you start so now we're ready I'll turn the inverters on [Music] and we want to check the fuel this thing is saying and it's got 800 pounds of fuel in it so we want to run that down now we're pushing down through it it's not indicating anything but we want to see that once we do that we'll come back to 800 pounds [Music] and there it is so that's working then we set the throttle which I'm not going to do now we just roll it all the way open then we bring it back to a detent and then we're ready to hit the starter and start the aircraft so you pull the trigger and you're going to hold the trigger until it hits 40% at 40% you're going to take your finger off the trigger and it's going to continue to spool up because this throttle is set at idle detent and generally that's supposed to be 68 to 72 percent and once we get that then we hit the inverters again and we would get all these instruments here like oil pressure transmission and all that and one other thing we have here is our segment caution tests light and as different things that could go wrong and different advisory lights here and we just check to see if they're all working and they are and we be set and that would be I'm going to turn the battery off now and that would be the start then we would just roll it on up to our 6600 rpm and go do a clear left and clear right making sure that your everything is well in the green and what we used to do in the Army is we would say before takeoff 6600 rpm fuel check fuel pressure engine instruments normal and then we'd be ready to take off now in a real scenario in Vietnam we would be able to get this thing started we wouldn't go through all these other things you're flying a same aircraft every day so you know where the switches are we just hit that battery hit that throttle you'd have this thing ready to fly in about a minute and a half two minutes so that's the way we did it there and that was what we called the scramble and it just didn't take all that long when she got familiar with the helicopter to get it on off the ground I can tell you about a mission that I had one time in Vietnam my platoon leader got me out of bed at about 5:30 in the morning he said that we had a sister unit that was out in the field about to be overrun by the enemy and they had another squadron trying to to him and they were about a click away and he needed a helicopter to go out and see where he was and give him good vectors to where the other guy would be there was only one very big problem and that is the fog was all the way down to the ground it was zero zero and as it turned out this fog deck was about a thousand feet high and I said to the captain I just don't know how I'm gonna find those guys if I go out to the area of operation and it still got this thousand foot between myself and all the way to the ground and he says Gary look this is what you gotta do you got to take off go out talk to him see if you can do some FN FM homing form to get them together because the other guy's going to get overrun and don't spend a lot of time leave enough time to go fly down the Saigon shoot an instrument approach because we had an instrument approach of where I flew out of Quan LOI it wasn't a very low approach it's called an NDB approach but that didn't get you but to be within 400 500 feet of the ground but our NDB was never working so there was no way to come back on instruments want you to go off from where I flew at him so that was the plan go on out there and it sounds real simple on paper and support him as long as I could leave enough fuel to get down to Saigon to get an instrument approach so I go out there and I'm wondering what am I gonna do how can I help these guys I get this idea and yeah I guess I said you know what I'll see if these guys got any flares so the unit that was being attacked I asked him if he had flares in a unit that was trying to get to him I asked him if he had flares said he said yeah we both have flares I said send them up well here come two flares now it's real simple I just lined up down those two flares whatever it was zero nine five or whatever 0 9 5 4 a click and a half so waited 15 more minutes had them launch flares up again man you know 100 degrees waited 15 more minutes and they're making progress getting to this guy and you're going in a straight line to them now right only problem is we're to the point where we have to go to Saigon because I don't have any more fuel to do anything else so I said to them we're gonna have to break away and a guy says I gotta have 30 more minutes 30 or 40 more minutes I got to have it I won't get to them if I don't have these vectors 34 30 40 more minutes and I'm saying to myself I don't have enough so I got on my intercom to the crew I said here's a story those guys are going to get killed unless we can stay here we're gonna risk our lives and not be able to get back if we do stay here so we're supposed to break to go down to Saigon right now get an instrument approach but I'll let you guys have a vote we can stay and get them there and take our chances going back to quantum low maybe fm home over there makeup line descent see if we can get in or we can leave right now what do you vote every every man to the man said let's stay so we stayed and we probably stayed another hour and we got that unit to the unit that was going to be overrun and they were able to save all those guys there and they took the enemy out that had that unit surrounded so now they're there and we're going back to Kwan law and I go back to Kwan law and we had FM radios on the ground and the FM radio worked a little bit like a vor and that is when you crossed over top by the beacon you'd get it from go from to to from so I at least knew where our headquarters was because it was their radio so I flew over that and I had a good idea where the base was and I just did some time turns to come around and do a descent hopefully we'd break out well I did a descent and we weren't even close to breaking out because we're in the soup so I came back around a few more times made a few more descents and nothing so now I had to say the guys here's the deal we are had a 20-minute fuel like come on 15 minutes ago we have 5 minutes of fuel we're going to have to make this descent and it's gonna have to go till we see something or hit something so since your belts up this is where we're at so I made the time turn and I just came up in a left-hand bank and I was aircraft commander so I sat in your seat in a civilian world of pilot and command sits in this seat but in the army your co-pilot sat here and i sat there so I made a left turn and down through the fog I saw where we would land for fuel there were Square PSP pads about the size of what we're sitting on right now and I looked down there and I saw a fuel nozzle in a PS pee pad I just stood this UE on its tail lost all airspeed and came straight down and landed on that pad hello man we landed with about two minutes of fuel and the tower said where in the hell did you come from you know but it was good we got the job done those guys you know got back to our unit commanders and told him that we saved her butt and it was it was very fulfilling when you would do something like that but boy I tell you that was a real risky scenario anything I can say about it real I was 20 years old it helps to be 20 it really does and that's it and it also helped tremendously not to be married I was single I didn't have a wife I didn't have any kids so I could really afford to hang it out you know and that was very rewarding you

Channel: ErikJohnston

Views: 161,668

Rating: 4.9183459 out of 5

Keywords: Aviation, Aircraft, Airplane, Flying, Airport, Runway, Taxiway, Hangar, Walkaround, Tour, Pilot, Aviator, Wings, Prop, Propeller, Veteran, Interview, Trent Palmer, Flight Chops, Just Plane Silly, Aviation101, Mike Patey, Mark Patey, Baron Pilot, Flying Doodles, In The Hangar, Huey, UH-1H, Vietnam War, Mid America Flight Museum

Id: cPJqvM0cWp4

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020