If you’ve flown long enough you learn that, although all crews are “safe”, some crews are safer than others.  A mix of experienced and inexperienced crewmembers is usually best since half of the crew is watching the other half to glean knowledge from the old guys and the other half is in “instructor mode”.  It’s a dynamic mix that results in great attention to detail and enhanced alertness.  The opposite ends of the scale are where you have to be a little more careful.  It’s obvious that a crew made up of all inexperienced crewmembers could be problematic but, conversely, a crew made up of all highly experienced members can be just as tricky.  If you’re not careful it’s easy to get lured into the false security that the other guy must know what he’s doing because he’s been doing it for so long.  I know I’m preaching to the choir for you flyers out there, but I’m not sure your average layman will understand.  Anyway, I found myself on a crew made up of members that fall into the latter category.

I was, at the time, the chief of Stan/Eval.  The aircraft commander was the Wing Commander, the navigator was our highest time nav, former AATTC instructor, and the engineer was a flight examiner.  You couldn’t ask for a more experienced crew.  And, on this particular mission, for good reason.  It was after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the US was trying to cash in on the “Peace Dividend”.  Our enemy was vanquished and the world would be at peace at last.  We can see how well that worked out!  But I digress.  To meet what we saw as the new paradigm, the Army was downsizing and consolidating.  To that end, a Special Ops unit in New York was being decommissioned and we had volunteered to help in the ceremony to celebrate their long and distinguished history.  We were going to drop them on their final jump mission and then attend the formal ceremony retiring the unit.  Kind of a big deal and a lot of pressure to get the mission off on time and on target.  High visibility and lots of DVs.  The kind of scenario that can quickly go sideways.

You always hope that the weather is either beautiful or total crap.  It makes decisions easy.  Sadly, that’s rarely the case, and that morning was the worst case scenario.  The weather at the airfield was marginal, at best, with 3 miles of visibility and ceilings ragged at 1500ft.  Along the route the weather was even more questionable with limited information available.  We looked at the low level route we were scheduled to fly and decided that we could delay our takeoff for awhile, hoping the weather would improve, and shorten the route to just enough time for the jumpers to run their checks and for us to get our checklists done.  We sat down with the charts, eliminated some legs, cut off some turns, added new points and headed out to brief the jumpmaster.  There were over 40 jumpers in the back including all of the senior leadership of the unit being decommissioned.  They all wanted to be a final part of their units history.

At our scheduled departure time, the weather hadn’t improved at all.  But it was, technically, VFR so off we went, hoping for the best.  It didn’t take long for us to realize that the weather observer at the field was, shall we say, an optimist.  We almost immediately found ourselves “scud running”.  For you non-flyers, that means flying just below the bottoms of the clouds trying to stay as high above the ground as you can without popping into the clouds.  Not really legal by the regulations!  Trying to stay out of the clouds was just the tip of the iceberg.   Because we had shortened the route it meant that we had multiple checklists to run, I had to backup the nav, I had to get in contact with the Drop Zone Officer, and I had to work two other radios to advise New York center and the control tower of the progress of the drop.  We reached the IP (Initial Point, the last point before the drop) on time and, because we had shortened the route, had to make a huge 150 degree turn.  We were now 15 miles from the drop, about 5 minutes.  When we rolled out of the turn, I looked at my chart and I thought the heading on the INS was 5 or 6 degrees off of what I thought it should be.  When you make a large turn, if your angle of bank isn’t constant, it’s easy to roll out either wide or inside and that can have a large effect on your heading to the next point.  I didn’t see it as a problem and by that time I was concentrating on getting clearance to drop and worrying about what I saw ahead.

The biggest danger in scud running is if the bottoms of the clouds start getting lower or if the elevation starts rising.  You find yourself in a squeeze play and that’s what was happening the closer we got to the Drop Zone.  The Wing Commander in the left seat was concentrating on staying out of the clouds and not hitting the ground, I was trying to get the Drop Zone Officer to give me some idea of the weather ahead, and all of time we were getting closer and closer to terra firma.  We ran the slowdown checklist, lowering the flaps and opening the paratroop doors.  There were very few ground references from which to navigate, but the INS showed us right on course.  We should have seen some farms along the way, but I was only seeing more and more forest.  Finally, a mile from the drop zone, with nothing ahead but clouds and trees, I said, “Let’s get out of here, no-drop, climb!”.  The pilot started an immediate straight ahead climb and, since flaps were already at 50%, did it at 150 knots.  I began retuning the radio to New York center but was interrupted by the flight engineer who said’ “What’s up with the radar altimeter?”.  I looked down and noted that we were climbing at 500′ per minute, but the radar altimeter was decreasing rapidly through 1000′.  The terrain along the route was pretty flat and rolling and the only high terrain was 5-6 miles west of the drop zone and it was a huge sheer cliff that the locals used for parasailing.  I checked our heading.  It hadn’t changed, but instruments don’t usually lie so I pulled back on the yoke, but the throttles to the wall, and asked the AC to slow to 130 knots.  We all watched as the radar altimeter finally stopped decreasing at 168′.

It was a very quiet flight back to the airfield.  The jumpers were disappointed, but the ceremony went on.  They would have been much more disappointed if we had splattered the aircraft on the ground.  But I was still confused.  Had the radar altimeter malfunctioned or had we really been that close to the ground?  I sat down with the nav to review what had happened.  In our hurry to get the mission off on time and make the whole thing work, he had entered the wrong coordinates for the drop zone.  It was a 6 mile error which headed us directly at the massive cliff to the west.  I hadn’t checked his entries prior to takeoff like I should have and when my spider senses went off after the big turn I had ignored them because I was busy with other things.

Lots of lessons learned that day.  You need to have a clear idea of when to say, “enough is enough”.  You need to never take things for granted.  You need to trust, but verify.  You need to speak up when things are going right.  You need to listen to that “still small voice”.