Richard Berry

When you leave flight school you have about 210 hours of student pilot flight time. Most of us thought we were pretty decent pilots. We arrived in Vietnam and learned that everybody else thought we were dangerous.

But we learned quickly. If you use my flight records as an example, I logged my first combat flight time on May 11th, 1967. The rest of May and the month of June I logged 229 hours of flight time and the aircraft I flew in made an astounding 1122 landings. So that averages out to be about 4 1/2 hours of flight time per day, four or five landings per hour and you simply can't fly the aircraft that much without learning how to, how to fly it so we flew. And those are very typical. That's not unusual at all. You learn that your ability to fly was a whole heck of lot less than you thought it was when you, when you actually arrived. And many, many of the landing zones that we would land in, particularly on the single ship missions were not a heck of lot larger than the aircraft itself. They'd be just a hole chopped out of the jungle. And actually the entire four person crew had to work as a team in order to do that safely.

But one of the neat things about the flying I guess is it was challenging. We did a whole bunch of it. I would say that any slickA Huey helicopter with the seats removed so that a larger number of combat troops could be transported from the helicopter's slick deck.
< http://www.answers.com/topic/slick > pilot at the end of their tour could make a HueyThe most widely used military helicopter, the Bell UH-1 series Iroquois, better known as the 'Huey,' was used for MedEvac, command and control, air assault, and personnel and material transport.
< http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/man/
uswpns/air/rotary/uh1.html > just sit up and bark. I mean you had enough flight time in it and it was very difficult flying, challenging flying. You could really fly the aircraft to kind of the edge of its capability.