The New Yorker: Getting bin Laden

How much training time would that pilot have gotten on that new helicopter?

 

It wasn't a new helicopter. It was a helicopter they'd trained with for years; it was just modified.

It doesn't have anything to do with training. That's a rookie move you learn how to avoid in flight school. Avoid steep approaches, fast descents and approaches with the wind at your back.

 

How close did that helicopter come to turning this into a Jimmy Carter debacle?

 

Clear from story that it was an assassination and not a snatch operation.

Hope there is a follow up with more about the survivors. Wonder if Hamsa will ever turn up. One rumor was that he escaped from compound during the raid.

 

That was a great read. I'm generally somewhat skeptical of the "Ra-Ra U.S. Heroes" type stories after Tillman and Lynch, but it was still a damn good read and, hopefully, an accurate account.

The writer acknowledges where there are discrepancies and unknown parts of the story.

 

Yeah, that was awesome, tbf.

 

Settling with power is an aerodynamic phenomenon from which helicopters suffer because they pull air down through a rotor system.

At high gross weights, high density altitudes and high power settings (because they're really heavy), helicopters can begin to "settle in their own downwash." They begin to develop higher and higher rates of descent until the rate of descent is so fast that the air is actually flowing UP through the rotor system, rather than from top to bottom. This causes a vortex ring state around the rotor blades, rendering them pretty much useless.

Have you ever seen the jet wash from an airplane? Those "air circles" that form as a plane lands and the tires create smoke? When helicopters get slow enough -- between 16 and 24 knots, or below "effective translational lift" -- they begin to actually operate in those vortices. If we sink too fast, all that rotorwash is basically shoved back through the rotor system and it screws up the airflow, causing you to develop faster and faster rates of descent. A pilot can correct this problem by simply moving out of the air column, either forward or laterally. But pushing forward on the controls is probably the last thing someone who's trying to stop would do.

That make any sense?

As for the 160th comment, those fuckers are always balling up aircraft and killing people. They think their shit doesn't stink. Well, guess what, assholes. It does.

 

Re-watched Blackhawk Down over the weekend. Hell of a movie.

 

"We've all been shot soldier. Just get in the truck and drive"

 

That one's been pretty much banned around here.

 

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