They went away young and came back older. The Bell UH-1 Iroquois “Huey” helicopter played an outsize role in that experience.
Drafted to fight in Vietnam back in the mid-60s and now at retirement age, five local veterans decided to go for one last ride.
“It was something on my bucket list, before I leave this earth,” Tim Mathison said of the ride Saturday, Sept. 21 from New Richmond Airport down along the St. Croix. Coming from different service backgrounds but converging on their experience with the Bell UH-1, the five taking the hour-long trip to and from New Richmond Airport were Mathison, Tim Kowalski, Frank Lewanovich, John Dingle, and Ron Smith. Of the five, Mathison, Lewanovich, and Dingle graduated together from St. Paul Park High, back in 1965, while Smith graduated in 1963.
Pilot in Command (PIC) for the Saturday helicopter trip at New Richmond was Sam Hammarback of Huey Helicopters, who studied aviation at the University of North Dakota after graduating from River Falls High School. A veteran of the Army Reserve named Jerry Chapman took the co-pilot’s seat for Saturday.
Asked how he learned to fly helicopters, Chapman said he was drafted into the Army, “and they taught me how.”
A storm preceding Saturday’s flight, Hammarback gave the rundown once the hangar doors opened and the helicopter was outside.
Telling those assembled that they were expecting cold weather at altitude following the storm. Hammarback recommended closing the helicopter’s sliding doors, “unless you have strong objections,” he said. The decision was made to leave the doors open.
“That’s how it was,” one veteran said.
Fitted with passenger seats for those taking flight Saturday, the Bell UH-1, bought from Northwest Helicopters for $700,000 before refits, had belonged to the Sacramento Police Department and been used in X-Men movies, Chapman said.
Flight itself can be complicated—even more so with a helicopter as compared to a fixed wing aircraft—but rests at its foundations on an object’s forward thrust and upward lift overcoming its weight (the pull of gravity) and drag (air resistance). Applied to a Huey UH-1 that translates to the main rotor blade controlling lift and a top mounted engine giving thrust, with roll, pitch, and yaw (directional forces) controlled by a complicated and interconnected control system, the back propeller controlling direction left or right.
Starting Saturday, from New Richmond, the Huey Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter flight took off at 11 a.m., achieved lift and then headed down the runway for a trip along the St. Croix before returning an hour later from the opposite direction, the winds having shifted and a storm rolling in. Welcome home!