Deploy The Apollo Floatation Collar – Belay That!!!
I marveled at the SpaceX capsule's splashdown today, with four astronauts aboard. It has been decades (well over 50 years) since I watched an Apollo splashdown on television. I was commissioned in the Navy in October 1969, and my television-watching days ended several months earlier. It was not until my family joined me in Hawaii in early 1971 that I had time for family and friends again. I was a member of the Blue Sharks of VP-6.
In late 1971, I was on a monthly rotation of ten days in the Philippines, ten days in Vietnam, and ten days in Thailand. This was my first deployment in support of Operation Market Time in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.
We routinely flew twelve-plus-hour missions locating, identifying, rigging, and photographing all vessels over 1,000 gross tons with particular interest to Soviet Bloc vessels heading to Hai Phong. We were also tasked with finding and tracking infiltrator trawlers heading to the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam.
A typical duty cycle found us standing watch one day, the Ready Alert (one-hour response time to be airborne), and a Mission Day flying the Yellow Brick Road, our slang for the tracks that we flew in the South China Sea. It took an hour to arrive on-station when flying out of Cubi Point, PI, and just a few minutes when flying out of Cam Rahn Bay, VN. The missions out of Utapao, TH took us just under an hour to be on-station in the Indian Ocean
The Ready Alert days were varied. Sometimes, we would back up a mission that had been aborted. On other days, there might be a ship that had declared an SOS or other ad hoc emergencies (man overboard, for example). Yes, I had one of those, and we found the guy after he had been in the water for over twelve hours, another blog about that mission down the road.
The Apollo Floatation Launch was one of my strongest. Once all the mission birds were done flying, the Ready Alert crew generally rested well and got ready to fly a mission the next morning. However, a couple of hours after midnight, we got the call—Launch the Ready! It was not unheard of, but it was not normal.
Our P-3 had been preflighted twenty hours earlier, and we only had to get our flight gear, our mission briefing, and take off. This mission involved a Sikorsky HH-3, Jolly Green Giant helicopter. It was flying from Vietnam to the Philippines, had mechanical problems, and crash-landed in the South China Sea a couple of hours after taking off.
The crew had been rescued, and the sense of urgency surrounded a briefcase with super-secret gear left aboard when all had departed. The helicopter was still visible from the surface as it floated just a few feet below. The rescuers watched for a while and then departed. They never saw the helicopter sink. Was it still afloat, albeit just below the surface, or had it sunk?
The powers in charge felt so strongly that they had to know that they launched us to find the slightly submerged helicopter, loaded an Apollo Flotation collar into the C-130, and kept it on standby, awaiting our determination. The summer thunderstorms were plentiful as we cruised 200 feet over the surface with a radar and visual search, hoping to find something.
Our luck was answered in spades! One blade of the tail rotor was sticking out of the water, and we found the still slightly submerged helicopter not far from its last known position. We alerted the world, climbed to a more comfortable altitude, and awaited further instructions.
The C-130 had taken off and was heading our way. The plan was to drop parachutists and the Apollo floatation collar on a low pass near the helicopter. They would carefully unwrap the collar and gently surround the Jolly Green to stabilize it. Then, a diver would go aboard and determine if the super-secret materials were still there and retrieve them.
Unbeknownst to us and the C-130 crew, a Navy ship appeared on the horizon and steamed over to our location. We descended to watch. We did not have secure communication with the ship and did not know what his mission was. We alerted our Command and waited. Two small craft were launched and headed towards the helicopter.
The C-130 was overhead now, and we were preparing to evacuate the area to ensure the safety of his planned drops. At about this same time, as the C-130 was descending, a sailor on a small craft tried to lasso the tail rudder. I was busy clicking photos as we called for an abort on the C-130 and continued to watch the activity in the water below.
The small craft appeared to want to tow the helicopter to its mother ship. However, that little jostling of the tail rotor and lasso caused the helicopter's buoyancy to become unstable. Within one minute, the helicopter was gone forever, with a lasso still tied around its tail.
The small craft’s craft small crew just looked at us as we made a final pass and told the C-130 what happened, and suggested he was done for the day. We alerted our Command and began heading home shortly thereafter. It would have been nice to watch a real-time Apollo Floatation collar drop and affixed to the submerged helicopter, but it was not to be.
Today, I relived those memories as I watched the SpaceX recovery ship MEGAN retrieve the SpaceX capsule. There was no Apollo Floatation collar, but I imagined how it could have happened as it did routinely over fifty years ago. I never found out what happened to the ship and crew that interfered with our mission that day. Some things were above my pay grade.