Well, since John started recycling my war stories under the "everything old is new again" premise, here's an old one that's new -- it never appeared in Flightfax because real life intruded before it got published.
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Sometimes I think that every Army aviator old enough to remember reciprocating engines has a little tale about an emergency procedure that didn’t quite address the problem or had an emergency for which there was no written procedure. I met CW5 Roger W [those who know, know] (Flightfax, July 1998, “Crew Commo: UH-1 lesson learned”) last year and got the soup-to-nuts version of his own “crew-modified” emergency procedure--care to guess what happened to me about a month later?
It was a perfect night for honing NVG skills in the AH-1F--nice and dark, with just a hint of urban haze. It wasn’t quite so perfect for conducting NVG Refresher Training, though--which is what I was doing. At about 800 feet on climbout from our helipad, the Master Caution, Alternator and Rectifier lights decided that I had been heretofore underworked and cheerily made their presence known. “Aha--this takes care of Task 1068!” [note: Task 1068: Describe or Perform Emergency Procedure] I thought. My backseater (after a subtle hint or two) correctly identified the problem and performed the appropriate emergency procedure--alternator switch OFF, then RESET, then ON. (No big deal, unless the alternator doesn’t come back on line; in that event, it’s a “Land ASAP” situation due to the alternator’s location--it’s mounted on the transmission main case, and a dead alternator will produce a goodly number of unpleasant things, ranging from FOD’ed tranny gears to an in-flight fire.)
You’re absolutely correct! Not only did the alternator not reset, but white smoke (definitely not NVG-compatible) and a smell like fried socks decided to join the party immediately after I made a diving 180 to return to the helipad. The haze inside was rapidly compounding the haze outside and I had a fleeting thought about inventing the recovery procedure for inadvertent interior IMC...
By this time, Flight Ops had exercised the Crash Plan and the race to terra firma was nip-and-tuck between a smoking Cobra and the CFR foam truck. We won, but not by much (that truck is fast!). The seal on the alternator quill had blown, so hot oil had been spraying into a hot electrical component, and an armament bus had toasted itself in the tailboom electrical compartment--lots of smoke and stink, but no fire, as we (a fireman, a mechanic and yours truly) discovered after I popped out of the cockpit and scrambled to open the transmission cowl (yeah, I peeked first--just in case) while my backseater shut the aircraft down.
“Well, jeepers, Tuttle--you could’ve saved yourself considerable emotional turmoil merely by following the emergency procedure for cockpit smoke and fume elimination,” you observe.
Well, sir-or-ma’am, just what is the AH-1 Dash Ten procedure for that particular situation?
“‘Vents--open,’ of course,” you reply.
Correct, again! Just one teensy problem with that--and our mechanics are still scratching their heads over it--because, in complete violation of all the laws of physics, the smoke and fumes were entering the cockpit through the vents...
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