Army Grounds Helicopters At National Guard Base

September 08, 1992|By FRAN SILVERMAN; Courant Staff Writer

WINDSOR LOCKS — George M. Gernand stood in front of the 18-foot-tall, 19,000-pound Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter at the Army National Guard base and pointed sentimentally to a spot on the front of the cockpit.

"Am I going to suffer some nostalgic pains?" he wondered aloud. "I've got 13 years of my life invested in this. She's always done what I asked her to do."

The helicopter and the rest of the fleet of Skycranes were grounded by the Army this summer and will be replaced with new Boeing Chinooks within the month.

Gernand ran his hand briefly over the spot where the name of the plane was written on the cockpit, took a deep breath and then launched into a story about how the copter arrived in Connecticut.

In October 1979, seven of the 11 Sikorsky Skycrane helicopters that had arrived at the Army National Guard Base near Bradley International Airport eight months earlier were wiped out by a tornado.

Hoping to build the fleet back up, Gernand went looking for some replacements. He found one in a hangar at an Army base in Fort Eustis, Va. The helicopter was being used by mechanics-in-training, who year after year took it apart and put it back together.

Gernand wanted to bring the copter back to Connecticut. He was told by the crew chief at the base that he could take it, if he could get it to fly.

It took 2,900 man hours to get the copter back in shape, but he and a crew of nine mechanics did it. Elated, Gernand took the Skycrane for a test flight. With him on the test flight was the crew chief at Fort Eustis, January Phelps, who had never flown in the Skycrane before.

"She was so happy just to see it fly," he recalled.

Phelps gave Gernand permission to take the copter back east. But before he left, he christened it "George's January," after their two first names.

Gernand went on to fly more than 700 hours in his helicopter on

missions for the Army, Coast Guard and Air Force.

Now, George's January sits on the base, its propellers silent, its cockpit empty. The Skycranes, which were located at seven bases across the country, are now the property of the Army Aviation Air Museum in Fort Rucker, Ala.

Maj. Torvo Nei, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau at the Pentagon, said the Skycranes were being replaced because they are no longer cost-efficient. The Chinooks are faster, more fuel-efficient aircraft, guard officials said.

Designed in the 1950s by Igor Sikorsky, the 88-foot Skycrane with two 432-gallon fuel tanks can hoist objects with a 100-foot cable that is tucked under its mainframe. The helicopter is referred to by Army officials as the aerial equivalent of railroad freight cars. The Skycrane can hover over a site like a wasp, release its cable and grab hold of anything that doesn't exceed 25,000 pounds. In the 1960s, the type A model of the helicopter became the workhorse of the Vietnam War, delivering command posts, communications centers and mobile hospitals.

The Skycranes at the Bradley base, type B models, have flown more than 1,000 missions, ranging from putting out fires in state forests to transporting the parts of a B1 Bomber at Griffis Air Force Base in Rome, N.Y.

In April 1984, a Skycrane at Bradley set a lift record when it transported a 24,600-pound water-filled buoy -- more than the empty weight of the craft -- to a beach area in Portsmouth, N.H.

Requests for help have come from nonprofit groups, military groups and the Air Force. Once the guard was asked if its Skycranes could help remove a beached whale off the shore of Brooklyn, N.Y., but it wasn't able to help out on that mission because of prior commitments.

For the past eight years, the choppers have been helping the Coast Guard replace lighthouses along the eastern coastline. In Maine alone, the Skycranes from Connecticut carried more than 560,000 pounds of building supplies and automation equipment to six lighthouses.

In February 1989, the Skycranes were sent to recover the cockpit of an F-111, a supersonic fighter bomber, that had crashed into the woods near Kirby, Vt., during a training mission. The instruments in the cockpit were top secret, and the Air Force had posted police officers to stand in the snow and subfreezing temperatures to protect the aircraft. To recover the cockpit, the Air Force had considered cutting through the trees and brush.

"They were looking to cut the woods which would have taken three weeks. I had it [the cockpit] in three minutes," Gernand said.

The Skycranes at Bradley flew their last mission on June 13 when they went to Long Island to move a weather station to a repair area and lifted two 19,000-pound buoys into the Atlantic.

Just four Skycranes remain at the base now along with two grounded choppers, whose parts had been used to repair the Skycranes when the Army stopped making parts for them. Wrapped in white sheets, the grounded choppers sit at the edge of the base, their insides gutted.

Lt. Col. Albert A. Rubino, the facility commander, said he is not sorry to see the Skycranes go.

"It's like if you had a brand-new car and it breaks down, you can bring it to the dealer. But if you have a 40-year-old car, you have to go to the junkyard to get parts," he said.