Army Aviation Greening (pt 2)

02-14-07 Day 2

(yes, Valentine's day... away from wife *sob*)

We went out to Hanchey Army Heliport inside Ft. Rucker at 0930 and met CW3 Baynes who is a mechanic who has served 3 tours of duty in Iraq. He walked us through the maintenence hangers for the OH-58D Kiowa and the AH-64D Apache Longbow. He answered our questions for a while, and it was pretty neat to see those aircraft all stripped down and stuff.

Then we went outside to the flight deck and met CW4 James C. French and got to climb inside both the Kiowa and the Apache. yeah, thats right. I sat in a 70 million dollar helicopter today. and I played with the sensors and everything. I didnt fit very well into the Apache, but it was still very cool.

We then packed up and went to Knox Army Heliport at 1300 where they have all the CH-47 Chinook's. Same deal: met with the pilots and got to climb in and around the aircraft and ask them all sorts of questions. Again, very cool.

At 1430 we piled back into the cars and drove to the 110th Aviation Brigade's Night Vision Classroom. Major Fox then sat us down in a classroom with black carpet, black walls and black ceiling tiles and instructed us on the basic design and fabrication of current military grade NVG systems. And then we turned out the lights and got to play with them for like 30 min. Probably the best part of the trip so far. Crazy fun. VERY dark room (like, you cant see ANYTHING) turns into very sharp green picture.