An Cosantóir

28 'CHICKENHAWK' AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT MASON so this thing settles out of the air and the guy (IP) says: "you're over controlling it!" He says: "watch me". He picks it up and you can't see the cyclic moving at all. He says: "with this aircraft, if you over control the cycle, you'll dump all of your air pressure and it won't fly." That's how underpowered it was. Of course it was summer, so it was worse, but I got very good at flying this machine and it was very good training for flying the Huey in overloaded conditions, which was almost all the time! LG: That leads me to my next question. After flying this aircraft, you are being introduced to the Huey. How did it feel to switch over for a young pilot? RM: It was beautiful! I'd been flying the H-23 and H-19 and for one thing, they were just old helicopters. The Huey was brand new. The first one I flew was D model and that's the one I ended up flying in Vietnam. It felt, I actually used this phrase in the book; it felt like falling upwards. When I pulled the collective for the first time it so effortlessly sat up in the air… I was really impressed by it. And the sound - the beautiful sound of the turbine when compared to the awful noise of the other engines - was just amazing. I loved it immediately. Anyone who ever flew a Huey loved this machine. The last time I flew it was five years ago and it was so easy, so natural to take off after 47 years without flying a Huey. I picked up in windy conditions and I started looking around to see if the IP (instructor pilot) was flying it, because it was too God damn easy! It was like nothing! The Huey helicopter is the easiest helicopter in the world to fly! It's so stable, it's so beautiful and the design allows it to take off and hover, despite the wind loads from all other directions, it automatically compensates for that. It's a really marvellous system mechanically speaking. I know that new Hueys don't use the stabiliser bars, but back then they did, and they were just amazingly stable machines and very, very powerful of course. LG: Tell me more about learning to fly the battle formation. I remember reading in your book when you had overlapping rotors and getting so close, that you were using another pilot's panel as a guidance. I remember that you were not too happy with it at the start. RM: In flight school you never get that close. As a matter of fact, when I was in the flight school, they weren't teaching that type of flying at all. It was being considered dangerous to bring the helicopters tight in, with the rotor blades spinning an all, so I learned to fly formation in the Cav. The guys I flew with in the 1st Cavalry were nuts about flying in a formation to get into the tight LZs. At night time, they were flying especially closer because if you get too far apart, you will lose the track of your position and it'll be dangerous. So, they came close enough that you could hear the tail rotor of their ship. You can see the red lighting in the cockpit inside their helicopter, that's how close we were! And we maintained these tight formations, especially at night, just for safety. It took me a while to get used to it because it's intimidating to get another person's rotor blades with your rotor blades, and they are going the opposite direction (laughing). After a while I got very competent with it to a stage that, when I became an IP (Instructor Pilot) in Texas, I was teaching pilots formation flying as we had learned. LG: I think that this has to be one of the most-asked questions, but I have to ask it. In your book you recall being interviewed by a Japanese TV crew. They asked you this silly question that I want to revisit 55 years later. What is it like to fly into the bullets? RM: Well, I guess you go into some sort of shock because the tactics in the 1st Cav were to land ships on the ground, in the LZ where the combat will be going on. This was the 1st Cav assault technique, and we would have gunships coming in beside us. They would put the fire on the LZ and we had our own guns, which can be used by the gunners if they saw an obvious target, but on the initial approach, you had tracers. You can see tracers coming towards you and a lot of them were the US tracers, because they (NVA) had plenty of American ammunition. The first tracers I saw were red and later we started noticing green, but anyway my instinct was to tighten my stomach. We're both on controls in case one of us gets shot, and we get closer and the tracers are getting v Roberts huey helicopter after landing in a paddy field

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