What The Most Elite Dustoff Pilots Said When They First Flew The American UH-1 Huey 

What The Most Elite Dustoff Pilots Said When They First Flew The American UH-1 Huey 

July 1st, 1964 Vinh Long Province, South Vietnam. The radio crackles. Ground commanders are ordering Major Charles Kelly to abort his approach. The landing zone is too hot. Enemy fire is tearing through the trees. Kelly’s reply is five words. Then he goes in anyway. Seconds later, a single bullet strikes him through the chest.

 Between 1962 and 1973 pilots like Kelly flew roughly 496,000 medical evacuation missions in one helicopter the UH-1 Huey. They evacuated around 900,000 wounded soldiers. And when these elite Dust Off pilots first climbed into that aircraft what they felt wasn’t just relief. It was revelation.

 This is the story of what the most elite Medevac pilots in American history said when they first flew the helicopter that would rewrite the survival math of war. To understand what the Huey meant to these pilots you need to know what came before it. In Korea, Medevac helicopters were Bell H-13 Sioux aircraft. They carried wounded soldiers in Plexiglas pods strapped to the outside of the helicopter not inside. Outside.

 Exposed to the elements beyond the reach of any medic. The pilot sat alone in a bubble cockpit with almost no protection. By the early 1960s, the Army was using the Piasecki H-21 Shawnee in Vietnam. Troops called it the flying banana. It had twin rotors and could theoretically carry 20 passengers. But in Vietnam’s oppressive heat and humidity, it could barely manage nine.

The reciprocating piston engine, designed for Arctic operations, lasted about 200 hours in country instead of its rated 600. The H-34 Choctaw had the same problem. Its massive R-1820 radial piston engine could only deliver full power below 700 ft of altitude. Above that, you were gambling. Here’s the technical issue.

 According to the US Army’s official medical history, piston engines in these helicopters produced only 1 horsepower for every 3 lb of engine weight. They guzzled high-octane aviation gasoline. They overheated constantly. And they left pilots flying what one instructor at Fort Wolters called Hiller the Killer. The wooden-bladed Hiller H-23 trainer was so underpowered, it could barely hover in hot Texas weather.

This was the world Dustoff pilots knew in 1962. Then the Huey arrived. The UH-1 Iroquois, universally called the Huey, was the first turbine-powered helicopter ever deployed to combat. It didn’t use a piston engine at all. It used a Lycoming T53 turboshaft engine designed by Anselm Franz, the former chief engineer of the Junkers Jumo 004 jet engine from World War II.

That turbine produced roughly 2.4 times the horsepower per pound compared to the piston engines it replaced. It burned safer JP-4 kerosene instead of volatile aviation gasoline. And it completely changed what a helicopter could do. The UH-1H could carry six litters internally with a medic working on patients during flight. It cruised at 110 knots.

 It had a 320-mi range, and it could hover out of ground effect at 8,200 ft altitude. The H-34 could barely hover out of ground effect at 2,400 ft. On January 21st, 1968, during a test in the Central Highlands at 95° F, an older UH-1D with the standard engine could lift 184 lb while hovering out of ground effect. The same airframe with the new T53-L-13 engine of the UH-1H lifted 1,063 lb.

 That’s nearly six times more useful payload in the same conditions. The Huey also had something else revolutionary. Wide, twin sliding doors that pilots often flew with completely removed. Patient loading time dropped from several minutes to under 30 seconds. When you’re sitting in a landing zone taking enemy fire, 30 seconds versus 5 minutes is the difference between living and dying.

Major Patrick Brady joined the 57th Medical Detachment at Soc Trang in January 1964. He’d been flying the wooden-bladed H-23 trainer. In his memoir, Dead Men Flying, Brady wrote about his first time flying the UH-1B. Compared to our trainer, the wooden-bladed H-23, known as Hiller the Killer, this bird was a Rolls-Royce.

Brady went further. He described what flying the Huey actually felt like in a way no training manual ever could. In a chopper, and only in a chopper, man and machine truly bond. Anyone who has mounted a great and powerful horse knows the feeling. Feet on the pedals as in the stirrups, the cyclic and collective are the reins.

 Two hands full of power, then lean forward for a great ride. He wrote about night dust-off missions with something close to reverence. The cool night air made the turbine even more responsive. The darkness brought a strange peace that only combat pilots understand. Michael Novosel had a different perspective.

 He was 47 years old when he resigned his Air Force Lieutenant Colonel commission just so he could fly dust-off as a warrant officer. Novosel had flown B-29 bombers in World War II and Korea. Those aircraft had 2 in of armor glass in front of the pilot and half-inch armor plate surrounding the cockpit, the Huey had almost nothing.

In his official 1974 Army oral history, Novosel described the Huey’s lack of protection compared to his B-29. I had the most rudimentary type of armor that was here and there, but not everywhere. In front of me, I had absolutely no armor with the exception of the chest protector. Brady put it more bluntly.

 You were essentially sitting in a sack full of JP-4 fuel that ignited easily, but the power, the responsiveness, the ability to actually save lives instead of just transport bodies, that made it worth it. First coming here, I found some people who had actually flown with me and with Charles Kelly or family members.

Uh Bruce Zink is daughter’s here and of my great, Wayne Allred, raise your hand Wayne if you still can. And uh what a great thrill it is for me to meet some of the people who flew with us in in Vietnam. Great thrill. Hard for me to think of a greater day in my entire life uh than this day and what we’ve seen happen to those Dust Off crews.

But I thought I would cover why we are here today. Charles Kelly. He came to Vietnam in January of ’64 to command the 57th Helicopter Ambulance. Had five Huey helicopters with a specific mission to support and take care of only American forces throughout the whole country of Vietnam. The Huey was a magnificent bird designed specifically for medical evacuation then flying under the call sign Dust Off.

But there was no doctrine, no experience for its use in combat. All we had was a little bit from Korea and a little bit from World War II. The 57th Medical Detachment was called the original Dust Off. They sailed into Saigon Harbor on April 20th, 1962 aboard the USNS Croatan with five UH-1A Hueys. These were the first turbine helicopters ever deployed to combat anywhere in the world.

The call sign, Dust Off itself, was almost an accident. In 1963, the unit’s second commander, Major Lloyd Spencer, picked it out of an unused call signs book at Navy Support Activity Saigon. The reason was simple. The rotor wash on dry Vietnamese ground literally blew dust over everyone present. The backronym came later.

 Dedicated, unhesitating service to our fighting forces. Major Charles Kelly took command on January 11th, 1964. He instituted aggressive 24-hour a day night flying operations. He fought Pentagon brass to keep the red crosses painted on Dustoff helicopters when generals wanted to use them for cargo runs. Six months later, he was dead.

Shot through the chest while going into a hot LZ he’d been ordered to abandon. Those five words became the unofficial motto of every Dustoff unit that followed. The 57th Medical Detachment served 10 years, 10 months, and 17 days in Vietnam. The longest-serving Army Medical Department unit of the entire war.

They evacuated roughly 78,000 patients. Patrick Brady earned his Medal of Honor on January 6th, 1968 near Chu Lai while serving with the 54th Medical Detachment. Seven prior Medevac attempts had aborted due to heavy fog. Brady descended into a fog-bound valley flying sideways using his rotor wash to literally blow the fog away along a trail so he could see where he was going.

He made four flights into a second LZ where two helicopters had already been shot down. He returned to a third site with his controls partially destroyed by gunfire. He swapped to a replacement aircraft and flew through a minefield detonation that wounded two of his crew members. Final count. 51 wounded evacuated using three different helicopters.

 More than 400 bullet holes counted afterward. Michael Novosel earned his Medal of Honor on October 2nd, 1969 in Kien Tuong Province while flying with the 82nd Medical Detachment. He was 47 years old treating his glaucoma with eye drops between sorties. He made 15 extractions over 2 and 1/2 hours.

 He was forced out of the landing zone six times by enemy fire. An NVA soldier emptied an entire AK-47 magazine into his cockpit at 30 yards, wounding Novasel in the hand and leg with shrapnel and plexiglass fragments. He saved 29 South Vietnamese soldiers that day. Across his entire career, Novasel flew 2,543 missions and extracted 5,589 wounded.

His son, Warrant Officer Michael Novasel Jr., joined him at the 82nd Medical Detachment in early 1970. On consecutive missions, each man pulled the other out of a hot LZ under fire. The numbers tell you why this mattered. Between May 1962 and March 1973, Dustoff crews flew approximately 496,000 medevac missions in UH-1 Hueys.

They evacuated around 900,000 sick and wounded soldiers. In 1969 alone, Huey Dustoffs performed 29,114 evacuations. The medical consequence was historic. The proportion of hits resulting in death dropped from 29.3% in World War II and 26.3% in Korea to 19% in Vietnam. The killed-to-wounded ratio improved from 1 to 3.

1 in World War II to 1 to 5.6 in Vietnam. And according to multiple sources, including the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association’s analysis, fewer than 1% of wounded Americans died after reaching a hospital alive past the first 24 hours. That’s almost unthinkable compared to any previous war. But, Dustoff crews paid the price for those numbers.

Approximately 3,400 Dustoff crewmen served in Vietnam. About 211 were killed in action. 545 were wounded. That’s a one in three casualty rate. Helicopter ambulance loss rates ran 3.3 times higher than other Vietnam helicopter missions, according to the Army’s official history. Of the 199 medical department helicopters lost in the war, the bullets often clustered around the Geneva protected Red Cross painted on the nose.

The enemy knew exactly what they were shooting at. There’s one quote that captures what the Huey meant better than any pilot testimony or technical specification. Private Don Start was wounded and waiting on the ground in 1968. Years later, he described what hearing that Huey sounded like to a man bleeding out in a jungle clearing.

“Oh my god, yeah, that was just like the angels dropping down out of the sky. When you hear that, it’s just a wonderful feeling, especially being on the ground, wounded, and knowing help’s coming, and these guys don’t care if you’re taking fire or whatever they’re doing, they’re coming in.” That sound, the unmistakable whop-whop of the Huey’s two-bladed rotor cutting through the air.

That’s what saved lives. That sentiment appears over and over in patient testimony collected for the 2024 Congressional Gold Medal lobbying effort. When I heard the Huey coming, I knew I was going to be okay. General Creighton Abrams, who commanded US forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972, said of Dustoff crews, “Courage above and beyond the call of duty was sort of routine to them.

Every last man who served there knew Dustoff was there.” On September 26th, 2024, President Biden signed into law the Dustoff Crews of the Vietnam War Congressional Gold Medal Act. It took more than 50 years. The Huey didn’t make these men heroes, but it gave them the means to do what Charles Kelly decided had to be done.

When you have their wounded, you go.