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#Huey helicopter gunship free#
Horizon Hobby, Inc., (Horizon) warrants to the original purchaser that the product purchased (the "Product") will be free from defects in materials and workmanship at the date of purchase.2 Authorized Limited Warranty & Limits of Liability International It’s amazing how many places I considered being besides there.1 Authorized Warranty Period (Date of Purchase) I would’ve been very happy flying the brigade commander up there at 5,000 feet, or Westmoreland to his apartment in Saigon. I think this was my first as a command-ship pilot, and I was for survival. Mason, who today is helping to develop a documentary about Vietnam helicopter flying for PBS, describes an air assault in Chickenhawk: “But it probably wouldn’t happen again because we wouldn’t have a situation where we would have total air superiority.” The Army and Marine Corps still practice air assault today, but only in conjunction with overwhelming fire support, and often while using Global Positioning System navigation, infrared terrain following, and night-vision goggles.īut for Huey pilots like Mason, troop insertion meant low-tech visual navigation to tiny landing zones over roads and other landmarks in a vast expanse of jungle, mountains, and hills, sometimes with only door-mounted machine guns for protection. Modern adversaries are likely to be much better equipped than the Viet Cong-a few shoulder-fired missiles would stop a Vietnam-style air assault mission (flown at high altitude before spiralling into the landing zone) very quickly, says Robert Mason, who wrote Chickenhawk, a recollection of his experiences as a Huey pilot in Vietnam. Arriving in formations so tight that the rotors of neighboring helos overlapped, the slicks moved troops and equipment to the battlefield with unprecedented speed. The Army centered its airmobile operations around Vertol CH-47 Chinooks and Hueys, referred to as “slicks” because they lacked external armament. The large-scale transport of troops to the battlefield by helicopter in Vietnam rendered World War II-style airborne operations, which relied on paratroopers dropping into hostile areas, obsolete-only one major parachute assault was conducted during the war.
More Hueys were downed in Vietnam than any other type of aircraft. Between 19, one Army helicopter was lost for every 7.9 sorties-564 pilots, 1,155 crewmen, and 682 passengers were killed in accidents alone. military would soon be flying the rugged and versatile helo, as would the air forces of South Vietnam, Australia, and Cambodia.īut the cost of the helicopter war was high: The Army lost 2,249 to hostile fire-more than half of them Hueys-and 2,075 to accidents the Marines lost 424 to all causes. Later, when the Department of Defense began using the Air Force naming standard, the letters were swapped and the helicopter became UH-1, but the nickname Huey stuck. When the HU-1 went to Vietnam, it shed its given name, Iroquois, and took a moniker derived from the letters in its designation. Among its peers, which included the aging, piston-powered H-19 and H-21, the HU-1, with its strong and reliable turbine engine, quickly earned a reputation for dependability and proved itself the best equipped helicopter to execute a new and mobile style of warfare. In Vietnam, the military helicopter graduated from an underdeveloped promise to a formidable weapon. Today the Huey remains the most identifiable symbol of the Vietnam War-in everything from movies, where the noise of its rotors instantly sets the scene, to Broadway, where its silhouette represents the war on a Miss Saigon marquee. Load it with casualties and it was an air ambulance.Įnduring.
Hang rockets on a Huey, grease-pencil an “X” on the canopy to aim by, and it was a gunship.