That’s my recollection as well. The explanation for the relative wind at 30 degrees was that if less than 30 the wind over the flight deck would be more turbulent from passing around the superstructure.
An ex-Navy shipmate told me 30/30 was a rule of thumb for helo ops, 30 kts at 30 degrees relative.
You probably didn’t have one of these either in 1977:
yea - no
actully we carried the helos - so they knew the weather sucked when they took off, probably didn’t get any better while they were gone, and looked pretty much the same when they came back.
On a more serious note - I don’t want to give the impression we were cowboys back then with the “you have to go out - you don’t have to come back” moto tattoed on our chest.
But in our time we were pretty good at evaluating risk versus the mission. We had decent equipment, knew it limitations, and were well trained. We would certainly get closer to the edge for a real SAR than we would for a flight to ID ships to board. But we were pretty serious about needless or imprudent risks.
We were sailing through Unimak Pass on a 269 foot wind-class icebreaker and taking heavy rolls. Our HH-52A’s would hover over the flight deck and wait for the ship to come UP to it. As soon as the deck hit the landing gear the airedales would jump in it with tie-downs. And they had to do this twice. Fun times in the old days.
The chart table on the CGC Confidence was in the aft corner of the wheelhouse and I had a good view of the helo when it landed.
Never saw helo ops in extreme conditions but when the ship was pitching it was my observation that the helo pilot would match the motion as the flight deck heaved up and down while slowly decreasing the distance to the deck, landing when the deck came up to meet the helo as chaplainDarrell has said.
The video on the other hand it looks as if the helo was just staying clear until the ship’s motion was at a minimum.
Don’t know but we may have been doing it just to keep the Air Station Kodiak crews qualified for ship operations. The ship stayed within pitch/roll parameters.
4 posts were split to a new topic: CG Cutters - Helo Ops
pretty obvious the helo operations we experianced in the Coast Guard were/are quite different the 50,000 operations @Ausmariner has experianced