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of training U.S. Naval aviators in the armed Huey to take over the responsibility for "Market Time" operations. For some time the U.S. Army armed helicopters had been giving fire support to Task Force 116 in their mission of waterway and off-shore surveillance. Now the Navy wanted to train its own pilots and borrow some of the Army's precious armed helicopters to do a Navy mission that no fixed-wing aircraft could do.
On 25 July 1966 a joint U.S. Army-U.S. Air Force-Vietnamese Air Force conference laid down the plans for the Army to train the first ten Vietnamese pilots in the UH-1 helicopter. This was the beginning of a long range plan to expand the capabilities of the Vietnamese to conduct airmobile operations completely on their own.
Finally, the 1st Aviation Brigade was given the mission to familiarize a limited number of Korean Army pilots and mechanics with the UH-1 helicopter. When you add these requirements to the requirement to conduct an in-country familiarization course for all new Army aviators as well as the day-to-day commitments to actual combat, it is easy to appreciate the dilemma of the senior aviators in spreading their thin assets.
In most battalions, each new aviator was given a check ride to ascertain his knowledge of the unit aircraft and, if necessary, was given additional training in this particular type. He was then placed in the copilot seat regardless of his rank and received a theater procedural orientation flying administrative type missions for 25 hours. After this step, he was allowed to fly copilot during actual combat assaults and, when the aircraft commander felt he had sufficiently demonstrated his proficiency, only then was he allowed to fly as first pilot.
Because the Army aviator was anxious to perform as many possible tasks as he could, it became common in the Republic of Vietnam for aviators to fly over 100 hours a month and 120 hours was not exceptional. This amount far exceeded the limit that had commonly been accepted as safe over an extended period of time. Fatigue was inevitably linked to a higher accident rate and commanders at all echelons were alerted to detect signs of pilot fatigue within their own units. The 1st Aviation Brigade established a policy on aviator fatigue which provided close supervision by a flight surgeon of any aviator who exceeded 90 hours of flight time in a consecutive 30 day period. Naturally, flying hours alone were an inadequate measure of this problem: one must consider the intangibles of landing in a hot landing zone versus a "milk run"