Oshkosh 2023 Live. Huey N14SD, Hughes TH 55, and Bell H13. Major Patrick Brady, Vietnam Veteran

foreign is a sliver a ribbon of a country on the South China Sea it's bordered by China Laos and Cambodia until 1954 it was part of French Indochina that's when Ho Chi Minh the Communist and nationalist leader defeated the French and sent them packing back to France Ho Chi Minh then looked to unify the country under his rule a Geneva Convention agreement put a hold on that and split the country in two similar to what had happened just a year earlier in Korea the split was supposed to be temporary but a planned election never happened the North State Communists while the South backed by the United States won a democracy in the late 1950s President Eisenhower started sending military advisors to help the South defend itself President Kennedy continued to send in more troops and by 1963 16 000 American fighters were in South Vietnam in early August 1964 two North Vietnamese attacks on U.S ships in the Tonkin Gulf were reported the second attack never happened but President Johnson used the report to get broad military powers for himself to expand America's combat role in Vietnam by the end of 1965 almost 200 000 American troops were in the South by 1969 the total had jumped to 543 thousand America's combat role lasted another eight years it was fought from the air and on the ground often in deadly jungle fighting more than 58 000 Americans were killed more than three hundred thousand were wounded not counting those who were mentally maimed of the total population of both Vietnam's 40 million people estimates indicate as many as one million Vietnamese died another 3 million Vietnamese were wounded now we go to Vietnam after I get out of flight school I had about a oh a few hours at Rucker in this bird when I got to Vietnam I couldn't even start it but the beautiful thing about this we got turbine engines and when you pull up on the collective there's none of this [ __ ] you pull it up it synchronizes it keeps the RPM constant and it's powerful and the Huey would do anything we asked it to do it was like like going from a Model A to a Rolls-Royce when we came out of the the old motorcycle grip helicopters the h-19 the h-34 the h23 h13 and we went into this thing it was Just Like Heaven so I got checked out in combat missions I couldn't start it when I got to Vietnam but I could fly it this is the most combat experienced aircraft in the history of Aviation with all those fixed-wing things all over the place never done nothing never been nowhere and this bird's Been Everywhere done everything I think it had like over seven million hours of combat time seven million hours 16 million sorties or something so it was it was risky and uh but very very effective there was not a battlefield operating system in combat in Vietnam more effective than this bird not artillery not infantry nothing did its job better than this bird in Far saving lives oh [Music] [Music] welcome ladies and gentlemen I'm Ed mcaloney and we've got another War birds in review and a special one uh this afternoon it's going to be a little bit abbreviated unfortunately due to uh some time constraints with the veterans parade um and as long as I said the word veterans I'm going to ask right away um how about veterans uh veterans stand up if we've got some veterans in the crowd please thank you very much for your service [Applause] and speaking of veterans our our guest of honor here today's uh it doesn't get any better than this for me today uh this morning we had uh Willie riskell and Duke Cunningham up here two Navy Aces um and uh and a former fighter pilot it was it was spectacular and then this afternoon who do we have here but a Medal of Honor recipient and uh you've seen his introduction on the uh uh on the video um and indeed uh Major General Patrick Brady um 6 January 1968 as I remember was the uh the date that you uh you rescued I guess is the best word to put it 51 uh people out there and you went through how many helicopters three three helicopters and he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his gallantry in action so sir I say thank you thank you so much [Applause] and and if you want to take a close look afterwards you'll see that metal around his neck you don't see very many of those out there at all today's program we're going to talk just one-on-one for a little while um he obviously was involved heavily with the aircraft to my left the Huey uh-1 um and uh Dave Schmitz is Dave Schmitz out there somewhere right there that's his aircraft thank you very much Dave we appreciate that very much and uh and and and yeah uh we'll be talking about it a little bit probably not going to get a chance to do a walk around but if he'll be available afterwards and people want to ask some questions I'm sure um that would be nice um the other two little birds over here I've got uh Patton berry Hamrick um right there thank you very much again uh I'm not sure how much we're going to be able to talk about I'll say right now they look really really clean um and and beautiful um so thank you very much for having those there but the meat of the mission today is going to be Major General Brady and and and kind of what he did in Vietnam and how things evolved from Korea and how we got to uh the yui to specifically a mission called Sir dustoff um and go ahead and and give us a little bit of a history from uh from the Korean War uh things were a little bit different we moved into Vietnam and we had some different requirements different aircraft and uh and he was one of the guys who who made it all happen well I never I'm never allowed to start talking without giving some tribute to the military wife I've said uh from Forever that Adam's Rib was the greatest investment in the history of mankind and a lot of you know what I'm talking about I'm looking out there to see if there's any military wives but thank God we had them while we were gone we could do our job we didn't have to worry about what was going on they went through a lot more than what we did in my judgment the kids the schools the sports the everything now having fulfilled my wife's Wish by opening everything I say with tribute to the military wife they could be a pain in the ass and I can remember coming home we traveled a lot and I'd come home and she get on my case about being gone so much and so finally in frustration I said dear you need to get a hobby and so I came back after a trip and said did you do you have a hobby and she says yes I do and she was a city girl I was a country boy and I said all right what's your what's your hobby she takes me out in the back and says I'm raising chickens and I said really and they're enough sure enough there's two roosters in one hand and I said dear I think you missed the point she said no you missed the point one of those roosters travels a lot [Laughter] but I'm dead serious about the wives we could not have done what we did without them now this this was the bird that they used in Korea age 13 the problem with this was that the pods well there was a lot of problems with this the patient was put on a pod on out on the outside of the aircraft on the skids they didn't fly much at night uh they didn't land on the on the battlefield they were kind of a back call from the from the age station and sometimes the patient would wake up in that pod and uh guys who flew these missions tell me that he thought he was in a coffin and so you can imagine what that would do to you if you woke up and thought you were in a coffin so the guy's got a land out in the middle of nowhere to reassure that the patient that no he's not in the coffin and he's going to be all right and then we get this one and as you heard in the video do we have Vietnam Vietnam veterans here we got a lot of them or a few of them anyhow God bless you guys [Applause] I mean this this is you know we're surrounded by a bunch of fixed-wing weenies here the guys are I mean they I can remember playing golf with a very famous fixed Wing guy fighter pilot this this upsets him when I start telling these stories and uh very famous for having flown 100 combat missions give me a break we're playing my partner was Mike novacelle and if you go to Fort Rucker today that Fort is named Fort novacelle great young pilot he actually flew in World War II he was overhead when they signed the peace agreement who he and I are playing with this famous fighter pilot from the Air Force who flew 100 combat missions between us we had 5 000 combat missions so needless to say we would remind him of that when he was bent over an important putt but this this was such a beauty that if you were shot in a jungle in Vietnam your chances of survival were greater than if you were in an accident on a highway in America that the unit that I was in my second tour we don't have time to go through how it develop developed but uh I've got a book and we'll be selling that book the next couple days dead men flying it'll tell you the whole story of Charles Kelly who who it cost him his life but he saved dust off which was the greatest Battlefield Lifesaver in the history of man over one million souls in Vietnam rescued by dust off men women children enemy as well as friendly we made no exceptions and we carried a bunch of scout dogs as well but in the unit that I was in a 40-man Detachment we had six of these birds at any one time there were only three of them flyable now we had a bunch of young worn officer aviators they would land on stumps and they would hit trees and then we had 117 percent of aircraft were shot up every month so a three flyable aircraft 40 men detachment in nine and a half months they rescued 21 000 patients we flew day and night all that time and uh every other dust off unit in Vietnam was doing exactly the same thing we were doing there's never been survival like it in any battle in the history of mankind and thank God if if it had not been for this bird we could not have done it it was so quick it was so powerful that it would pick up just about anything that that they put on it but we had to learn how to land on the battlefield during the during combat and we learned the hard way it took us a while we lost a lot of aircraft and factors treat there were three times as many dust off crewmen wounded as any other kind of crewman over there so it was we were very busy all right I got I gotta say first it took eight minutes I knew it was going to come sooner or later I'm a fixed-wing fighter pilot okay and he's a helicopter pilot I'm a real pilot it didn't it didn't take me long and he's also a major general I'm a retired Brigadier General so hey you win sir that's all I can say but um in that regard you know the the evolvement from um from from this Korean War to the missions that you flew and as you said hey in in Vietnam you were able to fly at night you were to fly in in bad weather um how did that evolve what were the the techniques and I understand that you had a lot to do with some of those techniques yourself yeah this this is uh that that the difference is I said we had the land and we had to land on the battlefield oftentimes Under Fire so just a very very simple thing in the early days uh most of our patients were Vietnamese and so when you would go to an area nobody spoke English and I sure I still remember this day what I would communicate to the Vietnamese guys chaudia on pop smoke now oftentimes the guy on the ground would pop smoke and you're in confined areas in the jungle rice paddies and so they would say dust off Yellow Smoke and you look down there and you see four or five yellow smokes and so we knew that the other guy was listening to us and we had some bad experiences as a result of that you would go into the wrong smoke so finally we thought this is this is really dumb let's do it this way let's say pop smoke I'll identify the color and so then they would throw their smoke and we would say uh if there were several smokes down there we say I got yellow smokers that you and they would say yes come on in very simple thing but very important as we went along there's nothing there's nothing more important than Aviation than Communications you got to be able to communicate in a way that not only you understood but there is no way in the world you can be misunderstood it gets a lot of people killed because they are misunderstood now initially the approach was like from Flight School you know downwind crosswind final 500 feet a minute into the area well that's you're sitting duck and so the one approach when I first got there that was kind of like a death spiral they come up over the area if you're 20 if you're 2000 feature out of the range of 30 caliber if you're at 3 000 feature pretty much out of the range of 50 caliber those were the two things we had to worry about RPGs the Air Force guys had to worry about 20 millimeters and and things like that thank God we did not have to deal with those but 30 caliber especially 50 caliber would knock you out of the air with with first for sure so this was the approach they called it a death spiral you had come down it was the only place you knew was Secure was right down at that Outpost so you would come up 3000 feet kick it out of trim drop it about four or five thousand feet a minute and then you had to round that sucker off at the bottom and that could be a trick the last thing you want to do is flare it because then you would go into a float and you'd be sitting at about 50 feet and you'd still be a Sitting Duck so I was out flying one day and it was not a good day the first thing that happened we lost our servos and I was a young pilot if I'd had known you know it's very hard to fly a helicopter without servos it took two of us on the controls to control that thing but we could have flew on it flown it back to Saigon but we were having a hell of a time holding that thing together and we found a grass strip so we took it into a grass strip they brought us another helicopter and we went back for the patients that were after the first time and they were in a tree line like this the enemy is we didn't know was mixed in with the friendlies and we did our flight school approach and when we're going into the area my co-pilot gets shot so I have to take him to the hospital and the aircraft is damaged I get another aircraft the patients are still there so we got to go back and get them I'm thinking damn I do you know I just don't want to go back in there because the enemy are mixed in with the friendlies and and it just wasn't a good deal but I remembered on the approach with him away from the pickup site was rice paddies with burns like this and the pickup site was here and there's trees here elephant grass so the key was to put your eyeballs in the enemy socket and try to imagine what you could see if you were him looking at you and I thought here's what I'm going to do I'm going to go a couple miles out away from the pickup site drop down on the deck and kind of hide behind those Burns as we go into the area get in there and turn the tail boom Into the Fire you always did that so that the bullets didn't come through the windshield they go through the transmission and the crew is was Secure and we got in there just doing that they called it later on a snake approach and uh the we had gunship support they got shot up but we didn't we got in there we got the patients and we got them out so that's a new that's a different kind of approach as opposed to this yep how about armor you know you know you're talking about bullets flying by and all that stuff how much armor and did you wear vests the whole time you were there uh no we had uh first tour we had a flat vest a 30 caliber will go through at one end of the flat vest and through your body and out the other end so it was not protection the second tour we had a sliding uh some kind of plastic that would stop a 30 but it would not stop a 50 caliber now we had our pistol that we always carried and we would put that right there and you could probably figure out why we did that and uh other other than that uh you had we call the chicken plate which would kind of fit into your armor but the ones when I went back the second time with the young people the one the thing was killing our people more than anything else was night and weather and we were in the mountains this tour of night and weather was really a hazard as I said killing more of our crew members than the enemy was and I'm scared to death because they got a bunch of young Pilots they all graduated in flight school on the same day every one of them thought they were hand-picked to fly dust off every one of their names started with an s so I got a group of Pilots right there brand new helicopters and I'm scared to death I'm praying every day what they're going to kill themselves in weather trying to get to the patient so I got a call one afternoon a few weeks after we got there in the mountains and a kid was on a mountain top and he was bit by a snake and those snakes in Vietnam you know they you know you just want to lay down so you don't hurt yourself falling they were pretty deadly and the CL The Outpost was in the clouds so the zero zero down about 1500 feet clear in the valley and so I knew that if I went into that stuff if I got in trouble or Miss oriented there was no nav age no nothing like that and as you Pilots know that if you don't have that kind of help you don't know if you're upside down or right side up but I knew that if I got in trouble I could fall off into the valley and I would break out and be bfr again so back around a couple times they're screaming at me dust off he's going into convulsions and I said to the crew and they're getting nervous I said I'm praying like crazy you know God why are you doing this to me show me away and so we came back around again and I started up into it and disoriented the wind blew me sidewards the window was down and I looked out the window looking for a hole in the jungle to go in I'm sure we're going to crash and guess what I can see that top of the rotor blades the disc of the rotor blades and I could see the top of the trees so I knew I was right side up and so I stopped this thing boom turned it sideways and then we went up the mountain like that you can see 20 feet in that stuff and that's all you have to see as long as you got two reference points we went in we got the guy who got him the hospital I think he lived use the same technique on the day that I got the medal and from that time on day weather never stopped us low valley fog you got about 500 feet it's like a snow bank and there's a lot of fighting going on in that stuff we would use the same technique find a trail riverbed or something into the pickup site come to a hover over the area and then just follow it down through the through the stuff into the pickup site so that solved the daytime about night you know I mean these days you know we've got night vision goggles and we've got all kinds of stuff that we can use you guys flew blacked out and we flew yeah you flew you absolutely flew black out at night and we never used a landing light because it would expose the guys on the ground the first mission I flew in Vietnam I just wanted to go along the guys had a night Mission and I said can I just go along and see I'd been in country about one day they said you're I had to ride the water bucket in the middle because there's no room it was a b model it's a lot smaller than this one and we had all our lights on rotating beak in the outside lights everything into the area were like a Christmas tree and coming out they just filled us with holes and so I thought damn you know regulations say You're supposed to have your lights on but you don't have to have you know that's stupid so from that point on we flew blacked out we dim the console lights because in a bank the people on the ground can see that but if you're completely blacked out you can hear it but you can't see it and so they would be shooting all over the place at night tracers uh but but we felt completely secure because we knew they couldn't see us now the weather was another issue and I was I was sitting on a Mountaintop I told in my book I I call these things the two epiphanies the The Epiphany where the good Lord showed me the two reference points and then this one I'm sitting on a mountain top in the middle of a battle in the middle of a storm and uh some of you who have been there it's just kind of beautiful because you got the artillery and you got the tracers and you're just sitting there and we're perfectly secure and we're loading the patients and I looked up at a mountain and the clouds were about down to here and they were dropping flares from about seven or eight thousand feet the Air Force and so that stuck in my head I could see the silhouette of that mountain with those flares and so a couple weeks later we had a call from the 101st and they got a bunch of wounded they're out in the valley and it's in the middle of a tropical storm the aircraft had all been grounded and so I start out and trying to keep under it following rivers in I couldn't do it it was just like ink windshield going rain beaten against the aircraft we'd keep a guy I would keep a light in front of me and the guys in the back would lay on the floor and watch for lights behind us and then when it just turned ink we had to turn around and then I remembered that mountain and that flare and I knew how I was going to do it so we went back we got it we had a deep model Huey that didn't have a transponder I got a better aircraft with a transponder and I went to about mountains were about five thousand feet I gave myself about a thousand feet got radar control to guide me out to the general area of the pickup site and uh told the Air Force which were about at 9 000 feet dropping the flares I says keep the flares going we're going to try it so we would circle around the flares going down through the Mounds we could see we could see the mountains and then when we got to a certain point we would use the FM Homer to to get into the area to pick the guys up now it took a while to train the Air Force you know how that is you get it about 1500 feet and the lights would go out and so with this thing you just stop it and straight up no itos I mean just freaking straight up because any direction you went you're going to hit a mountain and so then they got in sync with me and we did it we made four trips in there that night we got everybody out and uh from that time from that time on night weather never stopped us so we got the day weather solved we got the night weather solved and as I said we're able to rescue 21 000 patients [Applause] impressive absolutely impressive how about close calls I I read somewhere you had over 400 bullet holes in uh in the the helicopters that you were flying um and you just told me that your your uh co-pilot got wounded how about yourself anything close you know well yeah I had I had eight or nine co-pilots and crew chief wounded in my helicopter I got the the worst I I think the easiest metal I've got was the the Purple Heart we had we had no I'm serious because we had a a1e go down in the actually two of them went down to the delta and they were on fire and flat terrain we took off after them and I flew up over the top of this one A1 eastburn and the son of a gun had landed right in the middle of a quad 40 50. That's 450 calibers it's like a hose with fire coming out of four different hoses and they blew the top off the helicopter and the windshield the flex the plexiglass from the windshield hit me in the co-pilot in the face at night we didn't wear a visor most of the time in the day we would wear a visor but at night we didn't have the visor on it hit us both from the face we had to set it down and the uh so we found a a dirt strip out there we set it down and then they mobilized a whole bunch of helicopter guys from sock train to come get us but because we got hit in the face with that stuff and we had it in our eyes we had to go see a flight surgeon and if he had to go see a flight surgeon then you then you had to uh they gave you a purple heart so that's that you know I was only down a couple days or whatever so that was uh other times you know when you have people shot next to you and things like that that's close but I never got shot that was the worst uh the worst thing that the closest I ever came and thank God we're able to get that thing on the ground wow all right um we've got a little less than 10 minutes but I wanted to touch base on um I don't know if we want to call it an advertisement but I know you're highly involved with a a museum and it's called the Medal of Honor Museum and I wanted to give you an opportunity first I want to thank you for uh wearing the shirt over there he's got an American Airlines shirt uh military and Veterans initiatives uh Department took care of it and they they still pay me a a retirement so I appreciate that very much and I appreciate them bringing you here and home but in regards to the uh the museum that you're in charge of where is it how long has it been uh going on yeah and I'll let you describe it yeah they didn't have a helicopter t-shirt so I had to wear this thing the uh no you know they say every so-called Hero at last becomes a boar and so the Medal of Honor Society those of us who are members of the Medal of Honor Society and in order to keep from being borers we have a character development program we've been going out Across America for 15 years at least and when when I joined this Medal of Honor Society all they did was party we would go to a different city because we were like the American Legion or any other veterans organization we had our reunions but we just party and when you party with guys like happy Boynton Commando Kelly scooter Burke Chief I mean these guys were world-class Partiers so we would leave a city with nothing but a hangover so one year we went to Philadelphia and the mayor there said a guy named ed Rendell at the time said would you guys like to go with us at midnight on a drug March through the ghettos of Philadelphia so eight or nine of us said yes we'll go so boy we saw some really weird things at midnight in Philadelphia they had police with us and everything it's the next day we go into a high school and there's a medley do we have to go through a metal detector to get into a high school now most of us had not been out in civilian life we spent our career in and we decided then that we have got to leave these things with something other than a hangover so we started a character development program and for the last 50 years we've been wanting to build a museum and finally thanks to some great people in Arlington Texas particularly the Jones family the people who own the Dallas Cowboys they have started you can see it online it's coming up it's almost built but it's going to be it's going to be different than most museums it's not going to be a bang bang Heroes thing we're going to focus on the values side of Valor and we're going to we're going to show young people we use the metal the celebrity of the medals to teach people the importance of Courage sacrifice and patriotism courage is the key to success in life it's the only way we're all born equal not in terms of ability or opportunity courage we can have all the courage you want you can't use it up key to success in life sacrifice love and action capacity for sacrifice very very important in your life and patriotism there is no future of our country and strength is the essence of peace Patriots are the essence of our strength we've got to raise people that love our country and will support and defend our country get more difficult every year and I'll tell you a war story about a great Patriot but this Museum you know who is the first person to fly across the Atlantic non-stop who is the first person to fly in the clouds with the gyro opening of the Skies who started the the the park system in America who started the CIA who found the city of uh in Colorado Springs all these things what do they have in common they were Medal of Honor recipients so they were they did so much more after they got the medal than they did to get the medal we know this medal does not make us special but it does allow us to do special things and Veterans don't believe that life has no meaning unless it's live for the benefit of future Generations so this museum is going to do that it's going to focus on the values courage sacrifice Patriots and we want a young person to walk in that front door he's going to see so-called Heroes they're not going to be wearing capes they're going to be wearing dog tags and that person is going to walk out the back door knowing that he can be a hero he can be a great Citizen and he doesn't have to go to combat to do it and that's the major purpose we'll have an educational program there will cover all grades and it'll it'll also deal with corporate America so this is going to be and it'll cover all Wars all services all branches from the Civil War right up to the to the present so it's going to be a a museum unique across the world in terms and so I'm excited about it I want to get that that's that's the last thing on my bucket list I got to get that done sir you're here for a reason and and that's one of them and and I thank you for your example and what you're you're trying to accomplish at this point you've already accomplished a great deal obviously but uh but yeah we're we're all here only for a a brief moment if you will and uh and yeah I truly do appreciate those efforts and I'm I'm convinced that it's going to happen there there's no no question all right we have four minutes um and I'll open it up to questions and then then the veterans parade happens next so uh we got some questions here go ahead oh dead mic nope oh so we have a backup yes we do we have a plan B see what I told you guys about Communications [Laughter] yes sir at our Legion post up in Appleton Wisconsin or um post Commander was a helicopter here and he was an enlisted pilot how many list of parents did you have over there no we didn't have any enlisted Pilots we had warrant officer aviators teenagers I had to deal with teenagers warrant officers and uh they were the they were probably the greatest Pilots we've ever produced but not enlisted they were warrant officers okay we got one right here already um I was one of those pilots from the 114th that night down at Canto where you come in with Ernie Sylvester with the top out and you mentioned scooter Burke uh he was in the 114th in the original group went over in 63. was he a medal of honor winner later on yeah scooterberg got the Medal of Honor in Korea where he uh I think single-handedly killed about 80 or so Chinese and an attack in uh in Korea he wasn't a Vietnam guy uh he later was very important guy in the Pentagon he ran what they called the snake pit which was the liaison between the military and the Congress you didn't do anything unless you went through scooter now having said that the guy was a world-class Drinker too and I've had many bad occasions where I was trying to keep up with this guy was he a helicopter pilot no no he was not a pilot he was a he was a Ground Pounder okay all right other questions out there no well we got one at the very top up there a couple of them up there do we have any uh Vietnam helicopter Pilots here yeah there's one two three four five six outstanding all right go ahead what was your average time from pickup to getting to the field oh all right that's that's an important thing the uh they call the golden hour so if a guy is wounded and you get him to a hospital in that golden hour he's he's more than likely going to live and so we had guys with double amputees we had a lot of amputations in our area because of there were so many minefields and so the average time in my units from the time the guy was shot until we had him in an operating room was 33 minutes wow so he's we had beautiful system hospitals Hospital ships Etc and he was going to he was going to live as I said uh no matter how sucking chest wounds belly wounds whatever amputees as I said a lot of them but 33 minutes was the average time in my unit from the time the guy got shot and we had him we were off the ground in this thing in two minutes you can't do that with other helicopters this thing could get off the ground in two minutes [ __ ] if you go to a Blackhawk that damn thing could take 10-15 minutes to get off the ground I mean give me a break all right we got one more here I think that'll be about it Joe I want you to tell us more about these uh helicopter crew chiefs the machine gun is the cape cheer sweet butts alive well we didn't have uh parachutes in our helicopters our crew chiefs were our parachutes and uh now I wish I could tell you a story I could tell you stories about fruit Chase Medics all day we don't have time but the best trained soldier I've ever been around in my life and I think most of them were trained at Fort Rucker in those days now Fort Nova cell were the crew chiefs and if you read my book you'll see what these guys did not only in combat but what they did in building an area for us so we had a place to sleep place to eat and stuff like it they we got to Vietnam they pointed to an open field next to a helipad and said that's your home and so these guys could do anything plumbers Carpenters I don't care they could do anything and best train best trained soldiers that I've ever been around and if you if you get my book you'll see that I've got some quotes in there from some of the great crew chiefs I served with not working all right I think I think she's giving me the hook here I think yeah that's it but before she does that I'm just gonna sit there and say General thank you for so much for putting up with a fighter pilot for the last 40 minutes it's hard yep I I agree but thank you sir for being an example and and what you've done you bet okay General Brady uh you are going to be our uh lead Jeep today to lead all our veterans down to show Center thanks to American Airlines for uh the Honor Flight today and for sponsoring the parade and uh General Brady and all you veterans in the audience we invite you to join the parade down to Boeing Plaza at the general Brady thank you so very very much for your flexibility today and all of your service we we appreciate it very very much let's walk over to the jeep thank you I got a Tom [Music] I guess I was fairly apprehensive the whole time that I was flying in combat and and I guess there's good reason to feel that way I'm there to cause a lot of damage and a lot of harm and therefore they would like to damage me and I was 25 years old at that time foreign [Music] was really a thrill I must have done well in actual combat because at the time I was just a lieutenant Junior grade which is a first lieutenant in the Air Force and so I may have been the very first lieutenant Junior grade to go through Top Gun [Music] [Music] that was the dream of a lifetime come true I had wanted to be an aeronautical engineer and a test pilot just like my dad from the time I was 10 years old [Music] scs2 s27 was my was my third launch and it was only the second launch after the Challenger accident well I will never forget we maneuvered the arm and Mike Mullane was my arm operator so he moved the arm over there and we brought up the television image of the right wing and I looked at what I was seeing and I said to myself we are gonna die [Music] to be an airline pilot there was mandatory age 60 retirement I was a NASA astronaut until I was 50 years old and so I looked at the situation and I had known a number of Southwest airline pilots and they were just like me they were flying because they loved to fly [Music] [Music] well there's a lot of piloting that goes into it a tremendous amount of piloting that goes into it because you're going to wind up passing other airplanes you're you're going to get in a duel with another airplane that's fairly closely matched [Music] so there's a ton of satisfaction from from doing that and hey let's just talk about the racing itself it's fun to fly low but it's dangerous [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: DroneScapes

Views: 4,446

Keywords: bell huey helicopter, uh-1 huey, Bell H13, Hughes TH 55, patrick brady vietnam, vietnam veterans stories, Major Brady, aviation, airplanes, aircraft, air force, history, documentary, documentary channel, dronescapes, Patrick Henry Brady, vietnam veterans interviews, vietnam veterans, vietnam veterans reunited, uh-1 huey vietnam footage, bell helicopter history, history legends, History documentary, vietnam war, vietnam war footage

Id: eMbuvweq_Gs

Length: 46min 13sec (2773 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023