When did that helicopter crash on the flight deck of the guided-missile cruiser USS Wainwright CG 28 happen?
I was just looking at the photos of that crashed helicopter that have been available for a very long time on the memorial website established for the Wainwright.
I remember very well when it happened because I had once worked on the flight deck of the guided missile frigate USS Taylor FFG 50 and as one of the ship's crew standing there on that small flight deck with that big helicopter coming in to land a few feet in front of my face I was well aware that something like that could happen and those big helicopter blades were really spinning around. One of the guys who worked on the flight deck on the Wainwright was part of a crew that maintained the ship's gyroscopes of which the primary gyroscope was in the compartment I was the supervisor of and I remember talking with him about it because he had been on the helicopter deck when the crash happened.
So tonight I was trying to remember something about the date of that crash. I know that the crash was during our Mediterranean deployment in late 1989 and early 1990. I recall that we left Charleston South Carolina a very short time after Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston SC and we were going on that deployment to the Med.
I distinctly remember that we made a port call just after the helicopter crash and I was distinctly aware of how we were arriving in port with that crashed helicopter hanging off the flight deck and I wondered why we were doing that. As I looked at the photos again I thought again about why that helicopter, which happened at a time after the summer of 1989, was left hanging off the flight deck so that anyone who could see our ship arriving would see that crashed helicopter. Then I started thinking that the reason was so that moving the helicopter while we were still out to sea would not cause more damage to the fuselage of the aircraft. I don't know. That sounds like a good reason. I used to work for the Boatswain's Mates on the USS Taylor FFG 50 and I bet we could have moved it all the way up on the flight deck without causing more damage. I had been on deck to chain down the helicopter for hundreds of flights on the USS Taylor FFG 50 and there were a lot of helicopter landings on the USS Wainwright CG 28 and that was the first time I knew of that we had an aircraft mishap on the flight deck. That crash happened just a short while after the summer of 1989.
http://www.usswainwright.org/photoalbum/89MedCruise/pages/helo2.html
Some pictures of 89 Med Cruise
http://www.usswainwright.org/photoalbum/89MedCruise/images/helo2.jpg
helo2.jpg
