February, 1981 issue of Air Progress magazine
by Fred Phillips (60) VOLCANO PILOT
Sunday morning at the Yakima Firing Center was clear and calm, and I regretted that I would not be flying. My unit, the Attack Helicopter Troop of the Washington Army National Guard, had just begun its two weeks of annual training, and the day's schedule only called for a few classes, some routine maintenance, and a continuation of the softball rivalry between the pilots and ground crews. At least it would be a good day for softball.
About 9:30, the phone rang. The Executive Officer answered, listened intently for a moment, put down the receiver, and calmly announced that Mt. St. Helens had erupted.
The western half of the sky was already black as I walked out of the classroom. The leading edge of the ash cloud had a weird, scalloped appearance, lightning flashed at several strokes per second, and the whole thing was moving toward us at about fifty knots. Maintenance, classes and softball were quickly forgotten. We decided to evacuate the helicopters.
My crew and I completed the preflight and starting checklists in record time and had just begun the runup checklist when the first traces of ash landed on the windshield. Within a few seconds, the sky turned completely black. Some of the helicopters began to shut down, while others were taking off, directly from their parking spaces. With no time for a calm analysis of the situation, we decided to take off, and the checklist hit the floor.
As the aircraft cleared the ground, the entire windscreen was blanketed with ash, eliminating our forward visibility. After a few seconds, we outran the leading edge of the cloud, but the ash stuck to the helicopter. I somehow managed to avoid the other aircraft and keep things more or less under control by flying the instruments while Mike Cairns, the other pilot, poked his head out of the side window and gave directions on the intercom. I looked behind us and saw another helicopter with the same problem. One of the pilots was reaching out of the door and trying, without success, to brush the ash off the windshield with his hand.
Eleven of our aircraft had been unable to take off and were stranded in Yakima. Twelve of us, the lucky ones, flew north around the cloud, stopping at Wenatchee for window cleaning and at Gray Army Airfield for a standard pilot's lunch of Pepsi-Cola, two Twinkies and a Butterfinger bar. While the helicopters were being refueled, I listened to the news on the radio and learned, for the first time, that many people were missing, since most of the roads and bridges leading to the mountain had been destroyed by the blast, mudflows, and massive flooding. Our leader, bless his heart, told us that we had been ordered to fly to the mountain, find the survivors and bring them out. Although none of us had ever done any volcano flying, we were in high spirits. It was going to be interesting, and fun.
The flight from Gray Field to the Kelso airport takes about forty-five minutes in a Huey. I spent most of that time staring at the erupting mountain and wondering whether the best thing to do would be to simply get as far away as possible and land. Unfortunately, that was out of the question. Volcano flying techniques would just have to be learned quickly.
After topping off the tank, a gentle climb out of Kelso took us into the foothills of the Cascades, a series of pleasant green hills, punctuated by small streams and an occasional mountain lake. In the distance, the dull, grey mountain, with its monstrous plume of brown ash, seemed oddly out of place.
As we crossed a small ridge, the world came to an end. The volcano's blast had flattened millions of trees, as far as the eye could see, stripping them of foliage and bark, and laying them in neat patterns, like so many toothpicks. The valley that had held the North Fork of the Toutle River, renowned for its excellent steelhead fishing, was filled with mud, half a mile wide and a couple of hundred feet deep. The entire area was covered with several inches of fine volcanic ash; colorless, lifeless. It was eerie, like flying in a black and white movie.
About a hundred people had been working, camping and sightseeing near the mountain when it blew up. Most of them, maybe sixty, had been killed instantly. Mike Samuelson, our flight engineer, was the first to spot some of the survivors. There were three of them, walking along the remains of a logging road. They were waving, obviously happy to be found, as we circled and looked for a place to land. I found a small spot where a switchback in the road had been cut from the side of the ridge and began a normal pinnacle approach, slow, with approximately a ten-degree angle of descent. Unfortunately, the rotorwash arrived before the helicopter and, at about seventy-five feet above the ground, the landing site disappeared into a cloud of ash. The go around was an instinctive, full-power, white-knuckle affair, but it worked.
As we watched the dust cloud drift slowly down the hill, Mike Cairns and I decided that we had to try it again, since the survivors would probably become casualties if they weren't picked up. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Samuelson looking at the three people through the cargo door window. Quietly, he came over the intercom, saying "It's okay with me. What the hell."
To get as close to the hillside as possible, before the rotorwash began to pick up ash, I made the second approach flat, and a lot faster. This time, we were only about thirty feet away when the landing site disappeared. Suddenly sweating, I held the controls steady for a moment, lowered the collective and felt the Huey land hard, slide a few feet and stop.
While the rest of the crew trotted up the road to find the survivors and bring them back to the aircraft, I stepped out to have a look around and noticed that the landing area was a lot smaller than I had realized. The helicopter was facing into the hill, with about five feet of clearance between the front of the main rotor and the remains of a large tree which had been stripped and broken in half by the blast. The tail boom extended out into space, beyond the dropoff where the road had been cut into the hill. I stared across the colorless landscape, watched the mountain erupt one more time, and regretted that it was too late to ask for the day off.
About that time, the crew returned with one woman, two men and two dogs, who had been camping with friends when the volcano went off. Afterward, they had found some of their companions dead, but told us that others, including an injured man and an infant, were still alive. Although they were burned, dirty and exhausted, having walked through the ash for several hours seeking help, they were willing to show us the way back to the campsite.
Mike and I planned the takeoff carefully, very carefully. With a dead tree and a hillside directly in front of us, we couldn't bring the helicopter to a hover in the blowing ash, make a pedal turn, and depart in a normal fashion. We invented a new maneuver, a maximum performance instrument takeoff, backwards. When I rolled on the throttle, the ash came up, and the visibility went down, exactly as expected. As the helicopter left the ground, I applied slight back pressure on the stick, continued to raise the collective and watched the attitude indicator, listening to Mike call out the torque meter readings. At fifty pounds of torque, the red line, I froze the collective and, after a second or two that seemed like a week, we broke into the clear. I turned the controls over to Mike and thanked him for giving me the torque readings during the takeoff. He chuckled, and mentioned that the needle had been climbing so fast that he had simply shut up when it passed through the red line.
At fifty feet and thirty knots, the survivors' trail of footprints was easy to follow, leading us along the ridgeline and down the hill, into the bottom of the Green River valley. I raised another National Guard pilot on the radio, told him what we were doing, and asked for help. A few minutes later, he reported that he had picked up the trail and would catch up as soon as possible. I checked the gauges, noting that we had slightly less than an hour's fuel left in the tank. Plenty of time for another daring rescue.
The volcano was in no mood to cooperate, however. The air was becoming very hazy when we rounded a bend in the valley and saw the footprints disappear directly into the side of the ash cloud. Mike held the helicopter at a very high hover while we stared at the dirty brown cloud and debated our next move. Since none of the other search aircraft had attempted to penetrate the cloud, it was unknown territory. We didn't know how bad the visibility would be, whether the engine would continue to run or, most importantly, what the damn thing would do to our bodies. On the other hand, the ash on the ground had not hurt us, the Lycoming T-53 turbine was capable of operating for extended periods in dusty conditions, and the people we were looking for probably could not survive too much longer. We decided to hover into the edge of the cloud and check it out.
At first, the visibility inside the cloud wasn't too bad, about half a mile, but it definitely got worse as we flew slowly up the river. My eyes began to water, and the exposed skin on my face tingled, but I still don't know if that was caused by some primordial chemical released by the volcano. More likely, it was just a natural physical reaction to being extremely scared. The engine continued to whine as if nothing at all was happening. Thank you, Lycoming.
We found the campground in the bottom of a small canyon, where the river was joined by a large stream. Most of the trees had been peeled and uprooted, but a number of the trunks still stood, branchless, ready to snag a rotor blade or tail boom. Visibility was a couple of hundred yards, at best. A close look revealed the remains of a cabin where the injured man had been earlier in the day, but no signs of life. The only possible place to land was an ash covered one-lane bridge, well guarded by side railings and half a dozen dead trees, and obviously too small for a Huey. I was keeping a close eye on the fuel supply, since we were down to 450 pounds, about forty-five minutes, and the Kelso airport was twenty-five minutes away. The thought of spending the night on the side of the volcano didn't appeal to any of us.
Jesse Hagerman, the pilot who had been following, hovered onto the scene in a Bell Jet Ranger, which is quite a bit smaller than a Huey. After a look around, he began an approach to the bridge but his rotorwash agitated the ash, as expected, resulting in a quick, vertical go around. We started to fly farther up the canyon, hoping to find a clearing or a wide, shallow spot in the river, but turned around and blinked in disbelief when Jesse announced that he had landed on the bridge. When the ash cleared, there was the Jet Ranger, perched sideways, with about two feet of clearance between its nose and the railing, with most of the tail boom hanging off the other side. Later, Jesse said it was skill, but he was wrong. It was zero-visibility madness. I know; I was there.
He shut down and, with his observer Randy Fantz, began walking and crawling through the blown down timber, looking for survivors. Meanwhile, our fuel supply had become a major problem. We couldn't stay much longer, but leaving our friends out of touch on the ground was an unpleasant alternative. Using the military emergency frequency, I contacted a Coast Guard helicopter which, fortunately, had direction finding equipment on board.
Between conversations with the Coast Guard, Mike and I pondered our remaining problems. To get out of the ash cloud by following the river downstream would force us to fly low and slow, using almost all of our remaining fuel. We decided to climb through the cloud on instruments, taking up a heading for Kelso when we broke out on top. If we didn't have enough gas to make it as to the airfield, we could at least fly beyond the blast area, find a road or clearing, land, and wait for another helicopter to pick us up.
Finally the Coast Guard helicopter materialized out of the murk. At the same time, Jesse used his portable survival radio to tell us that he and Randy had found the injured man, who had a broken hip but was otherwise okay, and that they were carrying him back to their aircraft.
I took the controls, got on the instruments, and climbed into the cloud. Maybe the mountain had finally given up, I don't know, but the air inside the cloud was smooth and we broke out, uneventfully, at 6,000 feet. The rest of the flight was downhill, all the way to Kelso, where we landed with fifty pounds of fuel, five minutes, if the gauge was accurate.
It was dark by the time we shut down and delivered our passengers into the waiting swarm of microphones and flashbulbs. Within a few days they would be celebrities, appearing live on the Today show, and on front pages all over the world. For us, it was fill up with gas, fly back to our hangar at Gray Field, clean up the helicopter, unwind with a couple of beers, and fall into bed at 1:00 am. After all, we were scheduled to get up at dawn, go back to the volcano, and do it again.