NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, Md. – Lt. McMillan Hastings and Lt. Ethan Hahn attempted a near-impossible feat of flying – landing their MH-60R Seahawk on a moving destroyer in a fog that brought visibility down to practically zero.
Compared to the acres of deck on an aircraft carrier, the flight deck of an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer is only slightly larger than the circumference of a Sea Hawk’s rotor blades and margins are tight. When adding low visibility and a pitching deck, safely landing on a destroyer is among the hardest jobs for a helicopter crew. The conditions for the landing would make it a “suicide mission,” the pilots said.
But the pair calmly landed on the flight deck as easily as on solid ground, as the superstructure of the destroyer emerged just feet in front of the helicopter. Then, they left the simulator.
The difference for Hastings and Hahn was they were using Adaptive Shipboard Guidance and Recovery Display (ASGaRD) – one of two prototype landing aids for low-visibility landings under development at Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division.
In the last decade, the Navy and Marine Corps have had 15 Class A helicopter accidents in low visibility, resulting in 36 deaths.
The new systems – ASGaRD and Low Speed Precision Control – would not only make landing a helicopter safer, but it might also allow pilots to make landings they could not previously do.
Landing a helicopter on a ship in such low visibility settings, as demonstrated by test pilots Hastings and Hahn, is a flight that pilots would not undertake currently because of the risk, they commented.
“I find that landing in low visibility environments to cruiser or destroyer at night are probably the hardest thing that [I] could ever do in an aircraft, and this system allow[s] me to do that easier, faster, and from my perspective, safer than I could ever hope for, with how I would do this in the fleet,” Hastings with the “Blackjacks” of Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (HX) 21 told USNI News.
ASGaRD is focused on landing helicopters on ships and uses cockpit displays to provide pilots with visual cues to assist with landing, although it does not interfere with the pilot’s flight, according to NAWCAD.
A helicopter has a more dynamic system than a fixed-wing aircraft, and landing one on a ship is completely different than landing a plane on a runway, he said.
“What I like about it is it really brings a lot of additional capability to shipboard landings, especially currently, there’s just not a whole lot of instruments, landing systems that are capable of getting a helicopter onto the deck of a smaller ship,” Hahn, a rotary-wing aviator with Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 1, said.
Although ASGaRD is not yet ready to be installed in helicopters, ideally it would allow pilots to better land helicopters on ships, said aerospace engineer Jacques Hoffler. It can be used with any ship on which an MH-60 Romeo can land.
ASGaRDadjusts for two difficulties pilots encounter. One is ship motion, Hoffler said. The system can give pilots an indication as to when it’s safe to land based on the ship’s movement.
The other is low visibility or a degraded environment. A ship is hard to see about a mile-and-a-half out, so ASGaRD would again tell pilots when it is safe to land-based on distance, Hoffler said.
“It does not touch the flight controls or the aircraft flying characteristics in any way,” Hoffler said. “That is still completely left up to the pilot. What it does is provide guidance and cues to the pilot on how to control the aircraft, but the pilot is still 100 percent in control of the aircraft at all times.”
Without the ASGaRD system, it takes a crew of three people to make the helicopter landings at night, Hastings said. One person to fly, one to find the ship and focus on altitude, and one to direct speed.
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