January 9th Black Friday

Well everybody, so far in my flying career I have been relativly blessed. I've never had to fly in really crapy weather, I've never been shot at, and I have never had to experience any major emergencies while flying. On black Friday the majority of that all changed, luckly I wasn't shot at and I think that was because the weather was so bad no one wanted to leave their caves and houses to shoot at anything. We got called on a priority medivac because a first sergeant in Gardez dropped a seventy pound weight on his foot, so he had a torn metatarcel extreme swelling, and a bottle of pills to kill the pain. We were supposed to pick him up and bring him back here to get an x-ray. Well we started up and got clearance to take the active runway for take off. As we picked up to a forward hover at ten feet we were turning on to the active, and I immediatley got a Master Caution followed by the engine out tone in my helmet. It took about 3 seconds to figure out what was going on and I simply landed the aircraft on the active and taxied it out of the way so other planes could land. The engine stopped because it wasn't getting any fuel. I even had the boost pumps on luckly our Maintenance Test Pilot finally declared the aircraft unsafe and told sikorsky that they owed us a new aircraft. We immediatly switched to another aircraft and departed to pick up the patient. By the time we picked him up and got fuel the weather had deteriorated greatly. We couldn't get back of the mountains where we came through earlier so we went south still no joy. As we were landing back at the FOB where we picked up the patient it began to snow. So we turned on our Engine Anti-Ice and pitot heat. We took off again hoping to find a break in the weather, but we were turned around by HQ because they said we didn't have approval to fly anymore based on the weather. So we turned around to head back, about half way back it began snow heavily and visibility came down to about a half mile. In the process we lost sight of themedivac bird, because we turned to avoid some really bad visibility. I turned on our rotor de-ice and got a T/R de-ice fail caution, which means that the deice capability wasn't working on our tail rotor. The deice system on a black hawk basically works like this. It picks up unusual vibrations from the blades, this vibration is caused by ice forming on the surface. When it reaches a certain vibration it heats up the blades, and melts the ice enough to where the ice is thrown off of the blade from the motion of the blades. It repeats this process as necessary. If iced had formed on my tail rotor, I could have possibly lost directional control of the aircraft. With this being said I was a little worried, and I think I had a piece of the seat cushion sucked into my butt crack, because it was puckering. Luckly, we made it back to the FOB without incident and immediatly shut down. We ended up spending the night and returned the next day. All in all it was a pretty crappy day, it just goes to show that you never know whats going to happen the next day, and that weather in Afghanistan is very volatile. I love all you guys and miss you, stay safe I know I am trying to.

Morgan