One of the airports where Alex and I stopped on our way back up the East Coast was Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Came in just after sunset to this peaceful country fair-weather airport, 3100′ runway and no instrument approaches. Came back the next morning to find the plane covered in grass and five enormous Blackhawk helicopters parked just behind it. The helicopters were painted black and with almost no identifying markings. Some friendly Army folks from Fort Belvoir out for a training/sightseeing excursion to the Gettysburg battlefield. Here’s a photo of my airplane back-taxiing down the runway with the Blackhawks behind, courtesy of Robert Shick, CW3.
3 thoughts on “The Black Helicopters are real”
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Man, to me they look the same shade of green as any of the Black Hawks stationed in the medevac field across the road from my satellite station back when I was stationed in the US Army in Germany.
They’re nicer on the ground. I live under one of their flight paths up the Hudson and wow when half a dozen of them swoop overhead 200 feet over the treetops you feel it in your stomach and everything rattles.
Blackhawks rock. If you think they’re
enormous, check out a CH-53 (Navy/Marine)
up close.
Once asked a Marine 53 pilot what it was like
to fly one, to which he responded:
“It’s like sitting on your toilet, and
flying your house”.
But the coolest helo (or aircraft, for
that matter) is the commercial version of
the 53, with all, and I mean all, extraneous
weight stripped off, the Sikorsky Sky-Crane:
http://www.pro-photography.net/gallery/sikorsky