Santa Ana Flat Hatting

After I returned stateside from Vietnam, I was assigned to HMMT 302 at MCAS Santa Ana which was located next to El Toro Marine Airbase in southern California. One of my duties was to be an in-flight maintenance test pilot performing system checks on H-46 helicopters that had just received some form of repair. The repair might have been due to a minor sound or vibration that made a pilot nervous enough to “down” the aircraft and require a maintenance check, or it might be the full testing of a bird just out of complete overhaul. Test pilots always took the repaired aircraft up first to insure it was ready to be placed safely back into regular service.

For our test flights, we had a section of airspace assigned to us from 1500 to 10,000 feet along a narrow path north of El Toro between the airbase and the low mountains on the eastern side of the Los Angeles basin. In this space, we were allowed to perform any maneuver necessary to demonstrate that the helicopter had been properly repaired and was now ready to be returned to the flight line. This might mean testing any or all of the bird’s hydraulic, electronic or control systems. When we weren't flying test hops, our mission was to take pilots just out of the Training Command (newbies and FNG's) to those same mountains for some “real world” training and try to prepare them for the flying they would experience in Vietnam.

Southern California is essentially desert, and the heat on the mat where we parked the helicopters could be blistering. Some days, the smog from L.A. would be so thick it would burn your eyes when you looked west directly into the wind. On those days, I yearned for the crack and boom of those 4 0’clock summer thundershowers that always cooled the afternoons and scrubbed the air clear back home in Florida.

Pre-flighting an H-46 requires climbing and crawling around the fuselage and going over in detail with the maintenance crew the tests you were going to carry out in flight. Maintenance flights always required a more detailed pre-flight, some taking 30 minutes to an hour. A normal preflight can be done in about 20 minutes. There were days when I would have to pre-flight and test ten aircraft in temperatures that reached well over 100 degrees. On days like that, the thrill of flying abandons you. It was a hot and greasy job and that’s when it felt too much like real work. So, sometimes, just to get a break, I would finish my testing, leave the test area and fly over to those mountains just to see what I might see and feel what I might feel.

Even though the H-46 Sea Knight is required to have two pilots in the cockpit for normal operations, test flights were typically flown with only one well-experienced pilot and a crewchief. I was always amazed that even though some of the crewchiefs were not much older than 18, they were given full responsibility to maintain those machines. They were skilled and truly dedicated young men you trusted with your life, and did so readily. On those hot grinding afternoons, I’d occasionally invite my crewchief to join me in the cockpit. Sometimes I'd give them the stick and let them fly the aircraft. Giving them the controls always brought a wide grin of excitement. On other occasions, I'd just tell them to strap in and hold on, and we’d go “flathatting.”

Flathatting is strictly forbidden but it's why pilots fly. It is flying on the edge, defying calculated danger with nothing but your own talent, training and judgment. Out of Santa Ana, flathatting in an H-46 meant flying at maybe 50 feet above the terrain at maximum cruise speed which, I think, was around 150 knots (which is maybe about 180 MPH. Not sure now) ... maneuvering between mountain peaks and whipping along turning valley floors, pulling up sharply to clear mesas feeling the pull of the increased G's, then dropping power to idle and going weightless to return to the valley floor, “splitting the needles,” meaning your engine was no longer powering your rotors and only the downward force of descent and the upward force of air through the rotors were keeping them turning fast to enough to maintain flight.

During those moments, my heart would swell at the way the huge powerful bird would respond to the lightest touch of the stick and collective and the excitement of flying would return. Any fear would be ignored and I would think, this must be how the great-winged, soaring birds of the mountains or the predator hawk in chase of its prey must feel. During those moments, I would feel release and my spirits would soar with them once again.