as well as being surrounded by 100 ft tall trees of a triple canopied jungle. When you sank beneath the canopy you lost your vital headwind and got the RPM warning beeping - just to add to your angst. The Sqn boggy was always no 13 into a 12 acft pad. Overpitching and hitting like a bag of ****e was always on the cards.
I'm afraid that exposing the aircraft to undue risk due to poor airmanship through a lack of performance planning is not appropriate in the 'new age' and probably never will be again. Losing a CH47, Tiger or MRH ain't quite the same as losing a Huey, politically or financially.
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Unfortunately the L13 engine in the Huey was prone to a very variable performance. No two aircraft would have a definable or consistent performance for a reason I'll explain below - so unlike ops in PNG or OZ, a TOLD card was pretty much a useless predictor of nothing useful - performance-wise.
The problem in SVN was always that ops into burnt pads gave aircraft a sticky ash compressor coating that degraded performance non-linearly. At the end of the average day, for the high mission numbers, you'd be finding it very difficult not to overpitch and bleed RPM, having lost up to 15Tq. After each day's flying, most aircraft were automatically scheduled for a large drink of walnut shells down the inlet that evening. Next day it was the same power-erosive process of performance degradation. That doesn't happen so much in sandy desert environments. Sand tends to burnish compressor blades.
We never had the option of saying "sorry" - that we'd "only be able to take 7 troops because of full fuel" on the first lift. Nothing gung-ho about it, just that the battalion commanders were calling the shots to the CP and they were issuing the tasking. But admittedly, we were a "can-do" outfit.
Notwithstanding all that, in over 1000hrs in country I never broke any airplanes. In fact few were broken in the time I was there (if you discount a few engine failures - Kiwi Ken Wells, Tony Casadio, Ken Vidal, Rowley Waddlewood etc)
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