The Night Stalker They Couldn't Shoot Down | Alan Mack | Ep. 447

Summary

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Cleared Hot Ep. 447: The Night Stalker They Couldn't Shoot Down – Alan Mack

Date: May 11, 2026
Host: Andy Stumpf
Guest: Alan Mack (Retired 160th SOAR Night Stalker, author of Razor 03 and Chinooks in the Dark)

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Episode Overview

This episode plunges listeners into the world of military special operations aviation, specifically the high-stakes missions of the 160th SOAR, “The Night Stalkers.” Andy Stumpf sits down with veteran pilot Alan Mack, whose experiences range from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq to developing training and survival protocols for military aviators. They discuss what it takes to survive getting shot down, the culture and evolution of the 160th, the realities behind notorious missions, and what happens when the best-laid plans fall apart in the field.

Alan shares gripping war stories, delves into tactical and technological evolution, reflects on the aftermath of famous incidents like Extortion 17, and dispenses sage advice for aspiring pilots and operators.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Medal of Honor for 160th SOAR Pilot: Significance & Aftermath

• Discussion opens with the recent Medal of Honor awarded to a TF160 pilot, a first for the unit and for a Chief Warrant Officer 5 (CW5).
• Alan Mack outlines the process and rarity of living Medal of Honor recipients, especially pilots:

  “Most are given posthumously… It’s quick. And he’s the first CW5 to get one as well.” [01:39]

• The realities of injury and the likelihood that this pilot won't return to combat due to wounds, but might continue contributing as an instructor.

2. The Realities of Combat Aviation Armor & Survivability

• Early in Afghanistan, Night Stalker Chinooks flew with armor removed for performance, only to reinstall lightweight armor at great cost to capacity.
• Alan Mack describes the patchwork nature of helicopter armor, the trade-offs between protection and mission performance, and the use of quick-fix armor in critical spots (e.g., transparent panels by the thighs):

  “You get soft armor, which isn't much, and the chest plate isn't big enough to cover all your vitals.” [04:24]

• Tactics for minimizing personal vulnerability (e.g., “if I wasn't on the controls, I put my arms like this…”).

3. Battle Damage, Emergencies, and Skill Mastery

• Alan recounts his infamous shoot-down during Operation Anaconda and the chaos that followed:

  “You just… work the problem, and mechanically work your way through it.” [12:26]

• Loss of power, hydraulics, and electronics: flying “by the seat of your pants and your ears,” assisted only by a partial backup attitude indicator.
• Use of field expedient fixes (pouring hydraulic fluid by hand into the system to regain controls briefly):

  “As soon as he did, I could move the controls again. I was like, alright, guys, we’re going back.” [20:04]

• Notable Quote:

  “Never quit flying the aircraft.” – Alan Mack [24:45]

4. Training Evolution: From Pre-9/11 to Modern Combat

• Alan and Andy discuss dramatic changes in SOF aviation before and after 9/11—missions, redundancy, and mindset.
• Shift towards realism and failure in training scenarios (e.g., aircraft deliberately “shot down” and crews left to evade/recover for days):

  “We were doing stuff that nobody else was doing… The contingencies were always something we could deal with. But in ‘98-’99, we got a commander who was big into realistic training…” [41:24]

• Stress-inoculation, high consequences, and lessons learned the hard way—translating into combat effectiveness:

  “You just have to do it… Once you’ve done it a couple times, it’s no big deal, but it’s no fun.” [48:24]

5. Case Study: Extortion 17, Conspiracies, and Aviation Tactics

• Alan addresses persistent conspiracy theories around Extortion 17, clarifies aviation realities and the “fog of war.”
• Directly addresses family/fan questions:

  “The first of all, it was a 47D… There was no voice data recorder on those things, only the echoes and the golfs…” [69:04]

• Factors at play: platform assignment, crew unfamiliarity, mission urgency, environmental choices, tactical pitfalls (e.g., choosing a direct valley approach under fire versus less predictable routes).
• On enduring rumors:

  “Occam’s Razor, right? The simplest… If you’re a group of bad guys and you’ve got the Rangers…what’s going to come, you know the Americans are going to send?” [79:48]

6. Flight Tactics and Technical Deep Dives

• Detailed breakdowns of helicopter landing profiles (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie dust approaches), loss of visual reference, and why Night Stalkers excel at difficult insertions.
• Training and pragmatic skill-building—e.g., pinnacle/one-wheel mountaintop landings, multi-engine rotorcraft handling, air refueling hazards, mission-specific technology evolution.
• Notable Event:

  The innovation of digital flight control systems and how new tech can both save and dull “stick and rudder” skills:
  “Would you say that decreases stick and rudder skills?”
  “It does, it does… But when you need it, is when that stuff goes away—like battle damage.” [141:24]

7. The Culture and People of SOF Aviation

• Crew composition—strong preference for ex-ground operators as pilots (Rangers, SF), impacting cockpit culture and mission mindset.
• The value of humility, chemistry, and adaptability in high-performing teams:

  “You might not have the two best guys in the cockpit… but maybe that okay guy is super cool under pressure…” [51:03]

• Maintenance and support crews as the unsung heroes of special operations.

8. Memorable War Stories & Lessons

• Pulling off an instrument approach to a fogged-out landing zone in Iraq without ever having seen the site beforehand.
• Iconic “one-wheel” landings in Afghanistan—balancing massive Chinooks on tiny ridgelines.
• The importance of always leaving yourself an out (especially in mountain flying) and never taking your backup gear's security for granted.
• On training new pilots:

  “The big thing is two things: always leave yourself an out…and never quit flying the aircraft.” [111:23]

9. Technology, Future Platforms, and Institutional Memory

• The search for future SOF aviation platforms (V-280 Valor), adoption pains, and software customization.
• Ensuring lessons learned aren’t lost—fielding new airframes company by company, with embedded knowledge transfers and after-action reviews.

10. Life After the Regiment

• Alan reflects on transitioning from decades of high-intensity service to civilian life, family, writing (Chinooks in the Dark pending fall 2026), and public speaking.
• The ongoing Night Stalker Foundation work, supporting veterans, and maintaining the legacy of the 160th.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On being shot down and fighting through emergencies:

  “You can only do what you can do. And afterwards, if you survive, then you can…what I think for the rest of your life: 'I can’t believe that happened.'” [25:47]

• On the legacy of support crews:

  “Maintenance guys are the unsung heroes. No movies made about them…but without them, none of this works.” [150:30]

• On the satisfaction of medevac (“KAZVAC”) missions:

  “Assault, when it works out, is satisfying because the plan worked. But KAZVAC—you’re saving somebody… that’s the most rewarding.” [164:43]

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Detailed Timeline

| Timestamp | Segment | Summary | |------------|--------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–05:30| Medal of Honor pilot discussion | Impact, process, rank, and meaning in the community | | 08:49 | Chinook pilot injuries & flight status| Rehabilitation, flight training and medical oversight | | 11:51 | Operation Anaconda shootdown recap | Detailed step-by-step of surviving a shoot-down | | 24:45 | “Never quit flying the aircraft” | Alan's survival mantra | | 34:26 | Pre-9/11 vs. Post-9/11 evolution | How training, mindset, and operations shifted | | 41:24 | Realistic training and stress inoculation| Early “fail” scenarios, prepping for real loss | | 69:04 | Extortion 17 deep dive | Myths vs. reality, platform/certification, urgent requests| | 81:05 | Tactics for hostile/complex landing | Approaching hot LZs, “always leave an out” | | 104:20 | Fogged-out exfil under instrument | Landing Chinooks blind in Iraq | | 119:07 | Alan’s new book & lessons | Chinooks in the Dark, evolution of stories and focus | | 141–144 | Advanced landing tech and dust approaches| Evolution of tactics, tech, and why old school skill matters| | 164:43 | Most rewarding missions: KAZVAC | Saving lives—why medevac is most meaningful to Alan |

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Additional Highlights

• Technical Deep Dives: How crew chiefs and pilots communicate for external loads, landing with one wheel, approaching terrain in brownout and whiteout conditions, and emergency procedures when systems fail.
• Aviation Humor: Playful inter-service mockery, admitting the unexpected value of unique Army warrant officer rank insignia, and banter about civilian Blackhawks (and their maintenance headaches).
• Legacy: Alan’s reflections on the Night Stalkers' culture, the types of people who thrive, and why leadership and chemistry matter as much as technical skill.

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Resources & References

• Alan Mack website: alenc.com
• Alan’s books: Razor 03 (out now), Chinooks in the Dark (Fall 2026)
• Night Stalker Foundation: Link

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For More: Catch Alan’s previous appearance for an in-depth debrief of Operation Anaconda and the mindset of a Night Stalker Pilot. [Ep. 253]

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in special operations, aviation, leadership under pressure, and the real stories behind the headlines. It’s a riveting, candid, and surprisingly humble look at the men, machines, and missions that shape American SOF history.

Transcript

[Alan Mack]

Okay, I got the red smoke.

[Michael]

Sun runs north and south.

[Alan Mack]

West of the smoke.

[Michael]

West of the smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Give it to me.

[Alan Mack]

I mean it.

[Michael]

You ready, Michelle? You ready to do this?

[Alan Mack]

Let's do it.

[Michael]

Dude, I know where we have to open. Okay, well, what was it a month ago? Medal of Honor awarded to a TF160 pilot. Correct me if I'm wrong, that is the first 1/60 pilot who has been awarded a Medal of Honor.

[Alan Mack]

It is.

[Michael]

What the hell happened?

[Alan Mack]

I don't know.

[Michael]

Of course you know everything.

[Alan Mack]

It's a secret.

[Michael]

It is not a secret. It sounds like they got their ass shot off on the way in. Don't they release the citation in and of itself, or have they not really released much as to what happened that day?

[Alan Mack]

I think this one went a little out of its norm. I heard rumors of this thing about a week or two out, and I was like, no, no, no, they can't give them the Medal of Honor yet. They've got to go through a process. It was fast because there are some guys. Carl Meyer, for example, is a little bird pilot in Mogadishu who. They're trying to upgrade his Silver Star to a Medal of Honor. Okay, so. But, you know, it's a process, but,

[Michael]

you know, even getting awarded the thing in the first place, I. Most of the time, if you go to the funeral for the. Unfortunately, people may not know this. Most are given posthumously.

[Alan Mack]

Exactly.

[Michael]

They're probably going to have a Silver Star or they do cross something along that line at the funeral. And about a year later to. I would say, honestly, two years, it gets upgraded.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

So it's quick.

[Alan Mack]

And he's the first CW5 to get one as well.

[Michael]

First off, nobody even knows what a CW5 does. Nobody. There's. Nobody even knows.

[Alan Mack]

I still go into military installations now with my retired ID card. And I go to Air Force Base one time, and they had, like, the supervisor come over, and they're looking at it like, this is valid. He's real. And I'm like, of course I'm real. What the hell? We've never seen a W5 before.

[Michael]

No. I mean, have you ever seen one outside of the aviation world?

[Alan Mack]

No.

[Michael]

Okay. I mean, I've seen warrants exist in the SEAL community. And I'm going to be totally honest. I know how to recognize a warrant officer's collar device, but if you were to ask me which one, it was between one to five, I can't Answer.

[Alan Mack]

Well, the army, it's easy. It's just dots. Yeah. W1 is one dot, W2 is two dots. Yeah. And you get up to W5 and we have the coin slot. So it looks like you put a quarter in there. Okay. So you know, you're never going to see one though. No, there's like four or five. Well, you can watch this episode and you can see.

[Michael]

There you go. So what? Okay, this guy gets the medal of owner.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Are they going to let him fly anymore? I mean, let's be honest about the impact this has on your actual career.

[Alan Mack]

If he fly. Well, first of all, he's got some extensive damage to his leg. Yeah. So I think.

[Michael]

Wasn't it both, I think, I don't know small arms for it sounded like at least if not anti aircraft fire.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Well, it goes to show you that the enemy has a vote. Right. So no matter how well it's playing plan, no matter what way you come in, no matter how you jam comms or any kind of stuff, there's some

[Michael]

guy, it's tough to jam lead.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And he was in a 47.

[Alan Mack]

Correct.

[Michael]

Do you guys. I know your seats have some kemblar in them, but other than that, are you just kind of there?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, there's not a lot of armor. I mean we had. In the very first days of the war, we took all the armor out because it was too heavy to get over the mountains. And then General Brown made us start putting it back in and then, you know, with it goes the penalty and cargo capacity. So you generally don't put in much on armor in there. And just before I left, we got transparent door armor. So it's about this thick, you know, about inch and a half thick. That's a panel about like this. And it just goes right here by your thigh so you can look down. Okay. And see because otherwise you had a.

[Michael]

Basically bulletproof glass.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. But it's only down here, so it protects your legs, which is where he got shot. So he must have got shot through the front, you know, through the, the chin bubble.

[Michael]

Or if they really wanted to, like if you were to put in everything in the armor package into 47. Are you guys pretty encapsulated up there?

[Alan Mack]

No, that's what I. The only thing. The only thing is you can get what's called a NEO kit for a non combatant evacuation. Yep. And that fills the back up.

[Michael]

You know it doesn't help you up.

[Alan Mack]

It doesn't help. No, it doesn't. And you know, it just helps you get civilians in the back, it's like,

[Michael]

what are you quietly saying here? We're going to protect the area of this helicopter that matters the most? Like.

[Alan Mack]

Well, you know, it's. It's funny because, you know, the chest plate is only like this. You get soft armor, which isn't much, and the chest plate isn't big enough to cover all your vitals. And. And whenever I got in a situation where it was a hot infill exfil, I. If I wasn't on the controls, I put my arms like this. Yeah. To try to put my. My arm bone so if something got shot, it wouldn't rattle around inside my chest cavity.

[Michael]

Good luck with that, sir.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Luckily never happened to me, so.

[Michael]

So let's say he wasn't ending his career, which I have no idea where he was. He was, as a W5. He'd been in for a while.

[Alan Mack]

Yes. He's a flight lead. Yep.

[Michael]

And so he probably became, what, a W1 when he switched over from whatever he was doing in the military first to aviation. Is that because that's the track, right? You guys have to be warrants.

[Alan Mack]

Yes.

[Michael]

Okay, so you've been flying for a while because how many years is it between W1 to 2, 3, 4, and 5?

[Alan Mack]

To make W5, you're talking almost 20 years.

[Michael]

Okay. So he may have, anyway, been kind of seeing the. Over the bridge.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Actually, he. You know, it's funny is I don't know him well. Yeah. And. And he came on, I was like, wow. I. I think I know him, you know, but I mean, I've been gone a while. Yeah. So I get my phone out, and sure enough, he's in my phone. And the last assignment I had in the 1/60 was I ran the training platoon, Green Platoon, and he was one of our students. And that's the last. So that was 2011. 2012. So. And he was a W3, I think, at that point. Okay.

[Michael]

I know some guys who were awarded the Medal of Honor. I meant to meet a single person who I'm going to say is proud of it, even though that's not the right word. They're not thankful that they were awarded it. Because almost every story is horrific to a nature that's hard to understand. I'd say a lot of them involve the death of people very proximal to them, close friends, just horrific situations. But the ones who stay active, they're active, but maybe not charging a machine gun nest anymore. They use them for a slightly different purpose. Today's Episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. I tell you what, I just got back from the grand opening of their headquarters on the western edge of Missoula. And what a fantastic evolution. Thousands of people were there. They were waiting all night long. They were getting a tour of the knife building facility. That was the opening of their Black Rifle coffee shop there. A lot of people there from Black Rifle, obviously all the staff from Montana Knife Company. But do you know why everybody else? Not by everybody. Do you know why they were all there? They were supporting the brand that Josh and Brandon and so many others. Let's not forget Jess, Joss's wife. They have helped make what they have built there is spectacular. There's no reason that people would spend, and I mean thousands of people would spend the night in line or show up at 4 o' clock in the morning for something that sucked. And let me tell you, that place didn't suck, nor do their knives. They have so much stuff going on right now. And I'm gonna give you a little spoiler alert. They're working on. I don't know if I'm just gonna go ahead and release it now. They're working. Folding knife. Yep, that's right. I said it. I'm sorry, Josh, if I wasn't supposed to. My bad, Brandon. But it's coming. It's not here yet. What do they have? I'm looking at steak knives online right now. They do a blade drop on Thursdays and Saturdays. They have stuff that is completely in stock at all times. They have chef's knives, they have skinning knives. They have knives for cattlemen. They have apparel. It is crazy what they have built. And I'm looking forward to them outgrowing their facility that I think they thought was going to house them for years. And I'm going to give them about six months before their experience expanding out of it. But vertically integrating, bringing almost the entire creation process underneath one roof, bringing jobs back into America, bringing jobs into Montana, increasing the quality of life, the pay for those people in the Montana, the western Missoula area. It's phenomenal. It is difficult to get one of their knives when they're the newer ones or their limited releases. So head over to montanaknifecompany.com check out what they have to offer and just realize on those release dates, you need to act quickly on. Honestly, I recommend going on there and buying like a sticker or a patch so they have your information saved so you can action it as quickly as possible because otherwise you are going to be left behind. And it sucks. This has happened to me many times. I had a knife taken out of my cart because I was manually putting in my credit card information. Don't be that guy. Learn from my mistakes. Montanaknifecompany.com Trust me, you won't regret it. Back to the show.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, I kind of doubt. Based on his time in service and his age and the extent of the injuries, he probably would never do another combat deployment. But it doesn't mean he couldn't end up, you know, and so at B doing the training, one of the guys that was shot on Anaconda again in Chuck, he got hit in a femur and took him about two years to get back on flight status. And we had to take him out with the flight surgeon, let him watch him, you know, fly. And because you and I were talking earlier about how easy a Chinook can be to fly, you know, when everything's.

[Michael]

I was mocking that. It doesn't have a tail rotor. I've never flown one. And I was just talking. Let's be clear.

[Alan Mack]

Honestly, it is.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

If everything's working, it's a dream to fly.

[Michael]

Why that beginning of that sentence, though, is a real interesting.

[Alan Mack]

Because not everything's always working. I mean, you know. You know, I always talk about, you know, has your phone ever bricked up on you and you got to reset it? You know, I mean, the aircraft does that, but, you know, I turned off all the augment systems and made him, you know, work his work, the pedals.

[Michael]

And the flight surgeon wanted to see that.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Interesting. You figured they could just give them some type of other physiological test.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, I mean, that's the easiest way to do it. And. Because, you know, Chuck is the guy that gave me my flight of out the flight lead, you know, I didn't take it easy on him, if you know what I mean.

[Michael]

Why would you. If you turn off all the systems, like you said, Is that thing a little bit more of a bucking bronco?

[Alan Mack]

Oh, yeah.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

That's a challenge. Yeah.

[Michael]

What gets difficult about it? Well, other than the fact it's a ridiculous piece of machinery that is probably trying to break itself into pieces the second you turn it on.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, it is, right? I mean, the blades go opposite directions, you know, so there's no torque, but. But the, you know, there's no hitting hole. There's no augmentation or dampening. Yeah. So, you know, I'm trying to. This has been years since I've had to explain this, but, yeah, you know, you move the cyclic and you can just let it go. Typically. Well, in this case, you're just constantly, you know, turning butter, you know, and it's. It's trying to do something like this. So if you've got somebody that's really good in the aircraft, you would never know, really, that the AFCS is off. Yeah, Like, I used to practice all the time when I got shot down in Anaconda. We lost all of this, all the systems and generators, and I was flying it like that. And, you know, I did dust landing on the side of a hill. AFCs off. But that's because I practiced it all the time. And there are a lot of other guys do the same thing, you know.

[Michael]

Do you remember? I mean, I'll reference people. Michael, look up the episode the first time that Alan was on. I think it was 2:35. It was in the 2:30s, and we talked about Anaconda pretty specifically. But so if people want to hear that full story, I would reference them back to that episode or whatever Michael's about to tell us which one it was. 253. 253. I think there's a three and a five in there somewhere. Inverted them. Correct me if I'm wrong, you guys basically pitch over the top after absorbing a couple RPGs. Just a lovely Sunday, or whatever day it was. And that was. And that was the event where Neil went out the back.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, correct.

[Michael]

Didn't you lose all hydraulic power as well? And then some. Just in my mind, I imagine him just having a cup like this and just a little funnel.

[Alan Mack]

That's pretty close. That's about as close as you can get. There's. You know, kids today wouldn't understand what an oil can used to look like. Right. You used to, you know, pop a hole in it. Yeah. And pour it. Right. Well, that's what he had, is three cans of hydraulic fluid back there.

[Michael]

I don't feel like that's enough.

[Alan Mack]

It's got a. The reservoir is about the size of that thing, and it's got a little tiny T handle, you know, and he's just like the throw, and it's like that. So he's just pumping like crazy because it's really meant just to top off the system, not to fill it.

[Michael]

Do you remember what your headspace was as the aircraft essentially started shedding serviceable systems? I mean, do you remember. Were you scared at all, or were you going back to, here's the problem, work the problem, and just mechanically working your way through it?

[Alan Mack]

That's exactly It. I mean, you just. You know, there's a saying. Never, never quit flying the aircraft.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And everything went at once. First of all, you know, it's just

[Michael]

like, you know, as the RPG went through because. Didn't hit a battery or something.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. The RPG went through the left avionics compartment and through the left ammo can. So the ammo can, you know, sprayed a bunch of stuff in the back. Yeah. Did some damage to some of my crew chiefs. Big explosion. And it just went out the other side because all the doors were open, so there's no real overpressure. And then, you know, when it happened, you know, the. The MH47 is all glass, right. There's no. Even.

[Michael]

Back then, they were all glass.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael]

There's a conversation to be had about steam gauges versus glass. I have flown both, and I've only flown rotary with steam gauges. And I've actually. Most of my fixed wing time was with glass. There's. This is a real argument for both, actually.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Yeah. And especially with the helicopters, the analog. The thing that's nice about them, you know. You know, your aircraft, does it have a. A mass moment in the gear?

[Michael]

Yeah, it's one of the main things you check.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Right. So in the BK 117, which was the predecessor to the EC 145, it was analog, and you can move the cycle while you're sitting on the ground.

[Michael]

That's how I do it.

[Alan Mack]

And it would just go.

[Michael]

So what I'll do is, before I take off, I look over at the mass meter and I trim it out until it keeps dropping down, until any movement I make moves it up. And then, you know, you're going to have a great liftoff. Because if you don't do that, hypothetically, not that I've ever tested this, you give it a little bit power and you're like, oh, boy. Well, you're not paying attention and the thing wants to go. And you're like, oh. And then my instructor is like, hey, dip shit it. Before you shut it down, trim the mast indicator to all until it's, you know, back well in the green. I'm like, oh, okay. It's almost like you've done this before.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Well, the problem with the glass is that it's so much more sensitive. Right. So you just. And you don't know which way the anthem's going. You know, the newer ones have a. Have a circular mass moment. Right. So it gives you a line that tells you where.

[Michael]

Oh, interesting.

[Alan Mack]

Where to move the cyclic. Yeah. But in the. The original, which we flew at West Point, it just. It's linear and you don't know which way to move it. You know, you just start moving. It's worse. That's better. So it could be a challenge.

[Michael]

So you say this is the same thing my instructor has said as well, Many times. Like, it actually, if even, funny enough, my skydiving instructors, they're like, listen, if you're going to die dive fighting and meaning, like, deploy your handles, cut away, go, like, don't. Don't go in on a skydiving jump with any of your handles in the pockets. Like, work the problem until the problem works. You from that RPG hit and you guys pitched over, how long do you think it was until you actually were wheels down on the ground, though?

[Alan Mack]

About three minutes.

[Michael]

Holy cow. 180 seconds of what I'm going to describe having not been there. Probably some pretty intense moments.

[Alan Mack]

You know, I mean, because, you know, the RPG hits. Yeah. And then everything goes black. And, you know, you're talking about everything

[Michael]

you're looking at is just like, all

[Alan Mack]

the TV screens go black.

[Michael]

Awesome.

[Alan Mack]

And the noise that accompanies those, like, you know, in your. Just your desktop computer.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You can hear. Oh, crap. But yet the engines are still running.

[Michael]

Do you have any steam gauge indicators up there that are like. Like a. Even a backup, like airspeed?

[Alan Mack]

There was a backup, what we call the Esus.

[Michael]

There was.

[Alan Mack]

So it's funny, though, because the Esus, it's a. It's a B.F. goodrich. It's about this big attitude indicator.

[Michael]

Perfect.

[Alan Mack]

And it did not have rotor RPM on it. It did not have engine indications. It just had speed, vertical speed, altitude.

[Michael]

And for people listening, those first two things he mentioned are pretty important when it comes into emergencies.

[Alan Mack]

After, After. After this incident, because I was the senior 47 pilot, I was able to get those added to it. So now you get these two little squares in the corners that represent the engines. One's, you know, green. It's running red. It's not.

[Michael]

So you went from all the data you needed to tell the complete 47 to black and literally flying by the seat of your pants in your ears.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah. And. And so the crew chief in the back, only one of them was still plugged in.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And the other two were. I guess they were plugged in, but they were kind of like, you know, rattled from the RPG blowing up.

[Michael]

It's fair.

[Alan Mack]

So the guy in the back's like, you know, taking fire in a cockpit. Go, go, go. He Took off. And that's when Neil fell out of the back as we rotated.

[Michael]

Would you. Were you guys on the ground or were you in a.

[Alan Mack]

We're on the ground. Okay. So there's all kinds of, you know, you see all kinds of stories of what happened. They were at a. On the ground. Yeah. Hit. We were still. Engines were still rolling and everybody was still on board. So I picked up, dove down the hill to. And I thought because the engines were in reversionary, which is like a backup mode, so there's some droop that happens and you can hear that droop. You know, you go to pull power and you're not what you want to hear. No. And so I thought I lost an engine and because at that altitude, that weight, you're not going to fly single engine. So that's why I dove. Yeah. And the other thing is the Dishka started opening up on us. This about a 50 cal, kind of 14.5.

[Michael]

Michael, go ahead and Google image of Dishka for people's viewing pleasure. I would not want to be on the receiving end of one of these things. At what distance? 100 yards.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, yeah.

[Michael]

Oh, my God.

[Alan Mack]

And so by diving down the hill, you. He couldn't get a. A beat on us. And I'm trying to gain air speed.

[Michael]

Oh, my God. So that Often seen in the back of.

[Alan Mack]

Is that one on the left, the

[Michael]

tri mounted, often seen in the back of a Toyota Hilux.

[Alan Mack]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Michael]

Don't laugh, Michael. I'm dead serious. Google.

[Alan Mack]

I know you are.

[Michael]

Google Dishka Toyota Hilux. And prepare to see pictures from Afghanistan.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Probably Iraq too, if I'm being honest.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah, there you go. Plenty of those things shooting at me. But they. So we dove down and then this is when the crew starts kind of coming back to me. And they're like, hey, we. We lost a guy in the lz. I'm like, no, nobody got off. Get a headcount. And they. I'm just totally not believing that, you know, Neil fell out the back.

[Michael]

And at this point, the helicopter's flying normal. Ish. At least.

[Alan Mack]

Well, we're still in the dive. Yeah. And the creature's like, like, sir, both engines are running. You're okay. You can level off. Right. So I'm like, okay. And what I don't know is that the crew chief on the ramp tried to stop Robertson. He falls out the back and he's hanging from his gunner's tether. Right. So his toes are tickling the trees as I'm diving down, trying to what

[Michael]

would you estimate your angle of bank was or nose down?

[Alan Mack]

It's probably 20 degrees nose up.

[Michael]

I'm gonna say it was 45. I. I mean, I feel like it was aggressive. 20 degrees nose down is aggressive.

[Alan Mack]

I put it. I mean, 30 is kind of the limit, you know, that you're supposed to like. I would demonstrate that in training.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Here's 30 degrees nose low.

[Michael]

And I'm like, that's probably a very wild cockpit visual.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Because you're looking as you're looking out the window here, you know, the trees and the ground are rushing up. We're several thousand feet up.

[Michael]

Yeah. When you're in that dive, how far would you. Or how high would you say you were? AGL?

[Alan Mack]

No more than 50ft.

[Michael]

Okay. So you're basically terrain, flying it down.

[Alan Mack]

Because I'm trying to avoid the dishka now. Yeah. So reasonable. Two things. Trying to keep my rotor RPM up. There's enough speed because I think I lost the engine. And then when the crew chiefs tell me, no, it's. It's working, I was like, all right. You know, so I start pulling the power back in. We start to level off. I was like, all right. And then now they're explaining to me, you know, we lost a guy.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And I was like, oh, crap, we got to go back and get him. Right. So now I gotta climb back up, turn back. And as I'm in the turn, I level off one time, and then I can't move the controls again. And now we're headed straight level out over the main battle, which is out over what they call the whale, which was a big terrain feature, and it was so surreal because I was just looking around. I can't move anything.

[Michael]

Like, they were locked in position.

[Alan Mack]

Yep.

[Michael]

And that was because of no hydraulic.

[Alan Mack]

No hydraulic fluid. So, you know, the best example is you're in your car back when the. When the key was in the steering wheel. Yeah. If you took the key out. Yeah.

[Michael]

Your toy locked in place.

[Alan Mack]

Right. So my co pilot is like, well, maybe mine work, you know, so he's trying to move it. I swear he must have bent the cyclic. But, no, it didn't move. And then I was like, well, sorry, guys, we're. We're done. And.

[Michael]

Oh, that's not a radio call you want to hear. I mean, imagine if you had been flying as opposed to out into the open, you had continued the turn, and you were going back towards ascending terrain, you know, and.

[Alan Mack]

And, you know, the funny thing is, is years ago, like, when I was a W1. We would sit around and go, what would happen if you did have a dual hydraulic failure? Would you just keep going? Would the aircraft go out of control? Would you just climb until you ran out of lift? I don't know.

[Michael]

There's a lot of what ifs there.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, but it just, it just was going, you know, straight level and all of a sudden the controls kind of come back alive in my hand. Right. And what I didn't realize is the crew chief in the back like we were talking about, he poured a little hydraulic fluid in there. And as soon as he did, I could move the controls again. I was like, all right, guys, we're going back. So we turn again and now I'm lined up. I'm about two, maybe three miles out, long final, and we're coming in and the controls stop again, you know, because you're always moving the controls. So I figure the leak was on the return side because if it was on the pressure side, it just were, you know, one big pink M cloud.

[Michael]

That makes sense.

[Alan Mack]

So every time I move the controls, I squirted out a bunch of fluid.

[Michael]

So I had, as it moved, whatever it was moving. Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So we had about one minute per can of fluid. Right. And he had three cans. Now, I didn't know that is, this is how it was playing out. So we're, you know, determining this as we go along. So it locks up again. Now I realize, well, now we're just going to crash on the, you know, at 70 miles an hour. You know, that is not, you know, it's a snow covered lz, the enemy's up there. And then they come, come back again. Right. He poured another can in. And now I realize, okay, I got another chance here. But I can't land on the top of the hill because we'll never get off. And I've still got people on board. I get, I'm responsible for my crew, I'm responsible for the rest of the seals. So my Chalk 2 is going to have to get him. That's Razor 04. But we didn't have any radios, so you had to figure out that. But anyway, I turned left toward the valley where the big battles going on. And I set up a rate of descent of about 300 foot a minute. 70 knots.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

And the idea being if I get to the bottom and they lock up again, maybe you survive that. If you don't run into something because it looks pretty flat. And then my co pilot starts reading out, all right, 70 knots, 340, you know, rate of descent. I'm like, how are you getting that? And he taps on the. In the center of between 20s. He's like, holy crap.

[Michael]

The one piece of information, you guys.

[Alan Mack]

Because I was, like, so focused on just. Just flying. Yeah. That I didn't. The rest, you know, your peripheral vision. And as soon as he did that, my peripheral vision came back.

[Michael]

Let's not forget you're on night vision goggles as well, which kill peripheral vision to begin with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we should add that.

[Alan Mack]

But, you know, this is it. But the thing is this, you know, I did a. I was a talking head on a couple of news programs when that helicopter hit in D.C. and, like, night vision goggles are terrible, you know, and it's like. No, I said if you. When you. You just move your head.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You know, I mean, even now, I find myself driving down the road at night scanning wires.

[Michael]

I've flown that airspace in D.C. in day and at night, and people think that night vision goggles give you an incredible advantage. There are so many lights in that particular area. I would argue you might be able to see better with them flipped up.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. As a matter of fact, since we used to do so much urban training on the 160th, you know, you got to the point where sometimes if. If you were really in the city, that one pilot might flip his goggles up.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And the other one didn't. But if not, you're just constantly looking. Yeah.

[Michael]

You're cheating out the side, looking at the side.

[Alan Mack]

You know, and this is the one thing that, you know, the more experience you have. As I was explaining on the news program, it's like this guy had a thousand hours. The instructor pilot. That's not a lot of time, you know, for his unit. That's a lot of time. But, yeah, in the world of night vision goggles, that's not a lot.

[Michael]

No, but.

[Alan Mack]

No. Yeah. So anyway, we're, you know, doing that, and we come down the bottom, and this is where I said, never quit flying the aircraft. Because when we got down toward the bottom and the visual acuity started picking up and I could see the terrain kind of undulating. Where I wanted to land was like, where you are. And all of a sudden, we had an uncommanded slide to the right, but I could not move the cyclic to stop it, so I tried all the other controls. I hit the pedals. Things swung around in the direction of the slide. Now I'm going straight at a hill. And then I couldn't move it again. And as we hit the terrain. I just dropped the thrust, and the aircraft just settled.

[Michael]

And that was all the hydraulic fluid you guys had left.

[Alan Mack]

That was it.

[Michael]

Three minutes.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. All of that occurred, which is funny because Slabinski, you know, we get on the bottom and he's like, we're going back right now. And I'm, like, plotting our position on the map, Mike, to where he goes to the top of the hill. We got to get our guy. I'm like, it's way over there. Yeah, it's 10 miles away. He's like, no, no, it's right here. He's like, no, that we. We've been flying for three minutes at, you know. Yeah, 70, 80 miles an hour, man.

[Michael]

That is. I have such limited experience in the rotary world. And even when you know that they're going to introduce whatever auto rotation, whatever it is, right. Like, you're focused on the problem and, you know, it's not even a real problem. I can't imagine all of the things that you are describing, let alone legitimate risk to your life and everybody else's life. And you're just up there working it.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. I mean, what can you do? I mean, this is like, you know, Sully, right? And he loses the engines, ends up in the Hudson. You can only do what you can do. And afterwards, if you survive, then you can. You know what I think for the rest of your life, I can't believe that happened.

[Michael]

Or.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Or I should have done this or I should have done that.

[Michael]

If you would have been able to go back in to where you had just gotten shot out of, how would you have approached that? Would you have come in as fast as you could and just slammed on the brakes? How would you have. Because you know you're going to be eaten. Yeah, Everything that they have.

[Alan Mack]

Because the follow on aircraft, Razor 01 got shot down. Same exact spot as me, minus about 25ft or so.

[Michael]

Yeah, we'll call that the same spot.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Because he was. He was on the upslope, whereas I was on the peak and was able to go down the downslope, had he been hit a little bit further, he might have been able to do the same thing I did.

[Michael]

But how? So knowing that you would have been going back into that the first time you went in, you probably could have taken your time assuming if. Or if you were thinking in your head, like, maybe this isn't occupied. From what I've heard people say, they realize. They're like, oh, wow, there's a trend system. And so they realized it was but how would you have approached it if you could have gone back in there?

[Alan Mack]

Well, part of the problem at the time is the miniguns. Right. It's a little electric Gatling gun 762. Shoots about 4, 000 rounds a minute.

[Michael]

It's pretty amazing.

[Alan Mack]

There's two settings if it has electricity. Yeah. Right. So at the time they were AC power. So with no generators there's no guns. So there's no self defense. Yeah, you know, we would just take the abuse of guns, you know, RPGs probably at this point. So we all would have died up there.

[Michael]

Would you have come in steeper, flatter? Would you just try to pancake the thing back on the diesel?

[Alan Mack]

Considering where I already was and the

[Michael]

aircraft damaged, let's say you had one that wasn't damaged.

[Alan Mack]

Then I would come in low and pop up kind of like an oil rig.

[Michael]

So protect yourself with the terrain as much as possible and then just try to get it down.

[Alan Mack]

And that's how Razor04 got in there. When he redelivered them back in as he. He came in initially kind of high and the AC130 was supposed to put down pre assault fires and they did not. So he went around and came back and this time he came in low and just sort of popped up. Popped him in there. So he kind of snuck up on him.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You think? How can you do that with a Chinook?

[Michael]

It is hard to play hide and seek with the Chinook.

[Alan Mack]

I used to do it at West Point with the cadets. Right. So I used to fly the jump team. And so I'd come in, you know, I could be there at 3 o' clock or whatever. And it was at EC145. And so I'd come in from different directions using the wind and the terrain, and I'd pop up on these guys and almost every time I catch them by surprise. Yeah. And I'm like, see a helicopter? You heard me? Yeah. Could you tell where I was coming from? No.

[Michael]

God. Especially in mountainous terrain. And valleys too, where you're just sitting there looking completely the wrong direction, convinced that it's the right one. Michael, I just realized the upper lights aren't even plugged in. You didn't even do your job down there in that one over there. Plug the upper lights in.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, okay. Sounds good.

[Michael]

No, the ones over there.

[Alan Mack]

Great. Now we have to start over. Look. Oh, oh.

[Michael]

What do I even pay you for? Yeah, I don't know.

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[Michael]

I looked up there. See that, Michael? Decrease. Would you like a pay decrease?

[Alan Mack]

I deserve one.

[Michael]

God, that is so wild to me. I think I said this the first time that you were on, too. I had no understanding and appreciation for what you guys were doing up there most of the time. Because I. Engines, turbines, specifically, if I don't have a job, they put me directly to sleep. Like, if I'm doing a C130 jump, I am unconscious by the time they are even taxiing. Because you're just out.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And some of the best naps I ever had were actually in the back of Chinooks after the crew chief told me I couldn't get in the truck. But I did get in the truck, and he was just like, whatever, man. Do what you want to do. Like, if we're gonna go down, we're gonna go down. Like, just let me just. Just reclining the seat. You guys are. You guys are doing a lot up there. I'm amazed there hasn't been a Medal of Honor citation up until. What was that last month?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, it sounds like he deserved it. You know, I mean, quite an operation, you know, to do that off the ships, you know, which is interesting when you. When you go back to the formation of the unit. You know, the reason that Desert One. The failure at Desert One, was because they didn't use. Well, there's a couple reasons, but they intended to use Chinook helicopters instead of the 53s, and they didn't because they thought that the hardest part of the whole operation was taking off from a ship. So that's why they wanted naval aviators.

[Michael]

Why you point the thing into the wind.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, they wanted naval aviators for that. And then when the Delta guys figured out the Navy guys couldn't fly over land, you know, they said, oh, we'll take the Marines. That's the next best thing. And then the Marines, you know, they weren't really any better. They're used to, you know, Ship to shore, ship to ship, you know, that kind of stuff. Whereas the army pilots are used to the down low over the dirt.

[Michael]

Didn't the helicopter, did it go into

[Alan Mack]

a fuel bladder or another aircraft flew into a C130. So they were on the ground out. Yeah, yeah. So they picked up I, from what I understand from a guy that was there, he said the, the ground guide had the wands, you know, like you see at the airport. Right. Yeah, he's, he's given the helicopter the thing to come up to a hover and they're going to take off. They've already aborted the mission. Right. Because they're not enough helicopters. And then the guy left the wands on, stuck them in his back pocket, one in each pocket, and walked into the C130. And the only visual reference the helicopter pilot had was the wands way. So he stayed with the wands and just went right into the aircraft. It blew up, killed a bunch of guys.

[Michael]

Oh my God.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, not something. I mean, not.

[Michael]

Heard that.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And I got that from.

[Michael]

And if you want to brown it. And that's all you can see, a hundred percent, you're following that.

[Alan Mack]

And it was a guy in the plane, one of the Delta operators who jumped out like the door, I guess, and you know, on the side of the jump door. Yeah. And he thought that they were under attack, so he pulled the pin on a grenade and jumped out of the thing. Right.

[Michael]

I like this story so far.

[Alan Mack]

Well, here's, here's the best part. Right. So what did he think he was

[Michael]

being attacked by a Decepticon?

[Alan Mack]

He didn't know he was asleep. Like he's talking about, right. So he's, he jumps out, out, he's still got this grenade in his hand. And they all rally up and they jump on another 130 and they're going to get out of there. And he goes up to the Sergeant Major, the Delta Sergeant Major, I used to know the names, I don't know anymore. But he goes, hey, Sergeant Major, I got this grenade. And he's like, yeah, put it away. And he's like, I don't have the pin. He's like, oh, right. So they took duct tape and just wrapped the. His hand around the grenade.

[Michael]

I mean, that does work. You could just.

[Alan Mack]

And when they got, when they got the Messer, they, you know, they found a pin.

[Michael]

Holy.

[Alan Mack]

Took it out. Yeah.

[Michael]

If people really knew how moderately high speed the high speed people were like, nobody would think like. So you tell me a Delta guy woke up out of a dead sleep and thought the move was, I need the pin out of this grenade which is going to have the effective range of your throwing distance.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

And grenades are heavier than baseball. So we'll say if you're a stud, 35 yards.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And I have the story. But you know, I mean I got this. I assume one of the guys that was completely.

[Michael]

As the way you told it. That's how I want to imagine at

[Alan Mack]

least, you know what. At least the gist of it. You know, he got on the plane with a grenade with no pin. Yeah. And they just taped his hand up.

[Michael]

Good for him. I bet he was having one hell of a dream. I would like to talk to him about what dream he was having because I feel like that played into his decision.

[Alan Mack]

Somebody's husband's home.

[Michael]

How did flying for you guys change from pre 911 to post? Because our world drastically shifted.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, ours shifted tremendously.

[Michael]

I mean we were from the conventional SEAL side. I remember doing river and stream crossings out at the desert training facility on these siphons. Not even real water features. I mean slanted concrete on the sides that you're like clawing your way up to try to get up as you're, you know, just covered in water and like, you know, classes on. Here's how you can stow a line in your. In your backpack so as you're going across the people can pay it out. Everything was maritime. I mean we foot in the water 100 of the time. I mean my first gear list to Afghanistan had a dive mask on it.

[Alan Mack]

Wow.

[Michael]

Which I took by the way, because I can follow instructions. I did not take it on the subsequent trips, I'm going to be honest. But the way that buildings were cleared, it just, it was so. The combat experience was so hypothetical. I remember there was one man at around Team 5 who had been one of the snipers that was supporting in Mogadisha. I was the only guy that I was aware of that had seen any combat experience. And you want to talk about a guy who could walk on water. Like if he told you to do something that you were going to do it. But I look back at the way we were training and it was so. And not negatively so, but it was. And not intentionally so, but it was rear view mirror based. We did some, you know, some urban type stuff but. Oh my God. Comparative to what it became. I'm just curious what you guys world look like the day before 911 and the day after.

[Alan Mack]

It was significantly different. Especially when it came to how Many aircraft we would use, you know, because the 160th guarantees, you know, things. Right. I'll guarantee I can get you on time at your target minus how much, though? 30 seconds, which is really a minute.

[Michael]

I prefer 15, but I mean, that's fine.

[Alan Mack]

I mean, you could do zero. It just didn't make sense.

[Michael]

I've heard it all the way up to 60. 60 of, like, all of that's fine.

[Alan Mack]

But the. But the thing is, we're always guaranteeing that we'll give you what, whatever we've told you. Yeah. So there's always a spare or two, you know, whatever or redundancy built into the plan in some form or fashion. When we got to Afghanistan, and we ended up having to put two teams in the same night, October 19, 2001, the aircraft going to the higher mountain had to take three Chinooks, not two, and we only had four, which meant that I had to go by myself, you know, and they sent two DAPs with me, but they. They couldn't get up in the mountains.

[Michael]

And daps for people listening are basically weaponized Blackhawks.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, those are my favorite. Favorite gun platform.

[Michael]

God, I love it when you just see him starting to. You're like, yes, somebody is so right now.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And you know what they would do when I'd go off into the mountains is they would hang back in the. The lower terrain. Yeah, right. Trying to get shot at. So they could.

[Michael]

They're being fishermen.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah. It was like, all right.

[Michael]

So they made that call, I would imagine, based off weight and balance when they separated that, or just the ability for the aircraft to achieve the altitude with the load.

[Alan Mack]

Because they were going. They were going to about 22, 23,000ft. I was only going about 12.

[Michael]

How high can those shinooks go?

[Alan Mack]

I've been to 25.

[Michael]

Could you do an out of ground effect hover up there?

[Alan Mack]

I don't think so.

[Michael]

You think you could do an IG hover, though?

[Alan Mack]

In ground effect hover, Maybe. Okay. You know, depending on the temperature.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And how heavy you were. The thing is, the aircraft did have some armor in it. You know, the gunners had armor.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And the cockpit. We took it all out. But you still had some in the floor. Okay. You know, but did it change the

[Michael]

way you guys flew? Like, how much urban stuff were you guys training on? Pre 911 a lot. Even like the way you guys were flying in. I mean, I. It is insane the places I have been put specifically in a little bird. Whether it is just precision on the Roof, which I feel like guys were practicing that.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, we've been kicked out of every major city in the country a couple of times, you know, from the black helicopters, you know, landing on the skyscrapers.

[Michael]

I've linked up with my old squadron once I was back in San Diego and they were up in la and they're like, hey, you want to come ride the little birds? Or I'm like, sure, whatever. They were setting car alarms off, they were so low. But if you think about it, LA is probably the best town to do that in because everybody's like, oh, they're just. It's a SEAL team CBS show.

[Alan Mack]

LA is huge. Yeah. You know, and they've got helicopter routes, which is what makes it nice. Right. So, you know, you're following these, the drainage ditches and the homeless encampments. You know, when a Chinook comes down.

[Michael]

Yeah, but I think you guys were taking their tent from one side of the encampment and helping them maneuver it to the other side.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, I've moved tents, yeah. A couple of times in Afghanistan, you come into a far up and the, you know, one of those a frame tense is there, and it just picks up and comes over towards you.

[Michael]

And I can always tell people who haven't been around helicopters because as they see it coming into land, they maneuver slightly towards it as they're getting their cell phone out. And I go the other direction and take a knee with my back to. Because I've been nuked so many times by the rotor wash. Actually, the closest I've ever been to probably supermanning off a building was a fast rope underneath the 47. And like, okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run from under the 47 out to the edge of the building. And then the rotor wash catches you about 10 steps out, and then you're

[Alan Mack]

like, feed out in front of you, like, oh, my God. Yeah. Years ago, so my. My oldest son and my youngest son were both in the military. The oldest is in the Navy as F18 Wizzo. And when he was out of some phase of training, before he'd been to flight school or anything, I took him out on what we call shock pad out at Fort Campbell. It's a training area, and we were doing a FARP with a Chinook. So Ford Armaan refueling point. So first thing in is some little birds, right? They come in, you know, they land. Yeah. We come in, we put gas in them. And I took my son up to one, is like, here, come. Come on, let's go. And so we walk up to it and we see it. We go back, they take off. Now what's coming in is two Chinooks, right. To the same points. Okay, this is going to be different. Right. So as we stood out there, they came in and it's grassy, so you don't have the. The rocks. But, you know, it's like, you know, you're getting blown back and actually take a knee and it'd be all right. And he's like, wow, that's so much different.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And the crew chiefs are out there, you know, in the winter doing that crap.

[Michael]

As long as you stay inside the rotor arc, you're going to be okay. If you get to that point where it starts doing this number on the way out.

[Alan Mack]

Out. Yeah. It's the same thing if you're doing amphibs. So if you're doing like a ladder X fill, you know, or a hoist or something like that, when the. When the aircraft comes in, you know, you get this, like waves hitting you. And if you can hold on just for a minute. Yeah. You're in this quiet spot.

[Michael]

It's a wall of air.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Once the Earth tornado, I would describe it as.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And once you're on the inside, it's okay.

[Michael]

Stay on the inside, though. Like I said, if you fast rope in and you're heavily loaded and you're going towards the edge of a building that does not have a barrier. I have eject. Elected to just fall and then start grabbing before.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You know, the other thing that changed is that a lot of our training pre 911 was always designed to succeed. Right. It wasn't designed to fail. You know, we pat ourselves on the back. All right, look, hey, we did this very successfully, but the contingencies were always something that. Because we planned our own event, you know, the contingencies were always something we could deal with because we typically would plan them into the operation anyway. Well, in about 90, 19, 98, 99, we got a commander in our company was a former Delta operator with flight school. I call him Joe Gorst in the book. It's not his real name, but he was very intense and he was big into realistic training. Training and to the point where.

[Michael]

And what year was this?

[Alan Mack]

This was, I want to say late 98, maybe.

[Michael]

Early adopters.

[Alan Mack]

And we were doing stuff that nobody else was doing. So, for example, with a terrain following radar, you can separate all the aircraft, say five aircraft by two minutes a piece. Right. And they're using the terrain following radar to do their thing. And then when you get to a visual area to join up, you go into a holding pattern and everybody just slowly joins up on you and off you go.

[Michael]

You kind of just race track until everybody's there. Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, it's. But you're all two minutes apart, so it goes like clockwork, right?

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Well, what he did is something nobody else had thought of doing. Is he told out of a flight of five, he told Chalk Three to not show up. He's like, you know, because you can't. The other aircraft can't see you, right? It's dark and you're on the radar. So he just.

[Michael]

That is an interesting problem.

[Alan Mack]

He just turned away and went to our destination. And so here you show up, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Everybody's there, hey, sorry, we're missing an aircraft after.

[Michael]

How many racetracks did you guys do

[Alan Mack]

to figure this one out? Well, you. Here's the problem. We didn't have enough gas to stay for long. And it, it wasn't in the plan.

[Michael]

So this, what you're describing is like an optimal training scenario. That's what I'm saying. An early adopter of somebody putting that stuff into this. Realistic issues.

[Alan Mack]

And that's why the plan during Anaconda. So I went separately from my wingman, two different infills. And, you know, there's all kinds of comms, fratricide. There's a lot of jamming going on, a lot of confusion. And I said, based on that scenario, I just told you, I said, all right, we're going to link up at this, this checkpoint. If I don't show up within 15 minutes, you do a quick radio search and you leave because you don't have the gas to wait. And you have no idea where I am. And same thing with me. When I get there, I'm starting the clock, 15 minutes, I'm leaving. And so that, you know, what Joe had made us think of, you know, or experience and then included was this, well, what do you do? And so he did all that kind of stuff and he did these shoot down scenarios where you'd, you know, long night, I'd fly from Campbell up to Cleveland, you know, air refueling, both ways, come back long night. And he said, oh, here's a piece of paper with a grid on it. Go here. It's out in Fort Campbell somewhere. What are we doing? You'll see when we get there. You land. There's a pickup truck, you know, with fresh pilots and crew. And they. We shut the aircraft down. We simulated we've been shot down, zeroing all the, the com sac and the computers and all that stuff. And then the maintenance guys came out, reloaded everything. This was a test to see. They've been saying for years they could do it. Now he wanted to see could they do it. And they did. And then the new pilots and crew took the aircraft. And then I stayed up with my guys for like another three days scenario. Yeah. And it's, it sucked. It was like in December.

[Michael]

That's the stuff that saves your life, though.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, it's all stuff that I encountered.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You know, in my shoot down, you know, for example, everything that did not have a little lanyard on it, I lost. So if I took out, you know, a compass. Well, the compass was on a lanyard, but my backup compass wasn't. Yeah. You know, and I lost it. My finger light lost. You know, I had one, you know, flashlight with a little pull cord on it. I had that. But I lost everything else. So I learned after that to, you know, know what do I really need to keep. Yeah, and make sure there's a dummy cord on it.

[Michael]

One of the main things my instructor harps on is that if you're going to have stuff in the bird, it is positively secured. Just nightmare stories of puffy jackets somehow just getting, oh, out the window on the tail rotor side, see you, you know, or everything. Backpacks, fine, have them. But everything is strapped in because if it does go bad, you don't want to add the ballistic hazard of something

[Alan Mack]

flying around in there and only that, you know, being, being snapped in, you know. We had a. A 47 in operating out of Sharana in Afghanistan. And I just left and my replacement, his first night, they go out brownout objective to the X. And the U. S. Engineers had owned the base at one time, this like, area, and they'd put in a volleyball net, and the volleyball net had like telephone poles as the poles and they sunk those babies in and the chunk came in and the rotor blades forward, blades hit these poles that did not give and the aircraft flipped over. And so in the back is all these delta operators hanging from their, you know, their belt harness. Yeah, just the pilots only look back there and everybody's just dangling. You know.

[Michael]

It's a good time for a team photo. Yeah, I mean, you got to be glass half full on that a little bit. You know, everything up before 9 11. I'm assuming other than in small engagements for you guys, it's all simulated gunfight. I mean, I, I guess in my job I could be way more reactive because I could Say, oh, if you're going to shoot at me, I can shoot back at you. You guys at least up front are a touch busier. How was that going from watching somebody with a BFA or blank firing adapter with like this flamethrower, flame coming out of a 5, 5, 6 round and then the next thing you know you're on the end, you know, the receiving end of Belfed762. I mean how was that for the guy?

[Alan Mack]

Guys, it sucks, you know, I mean there's just no other way because how do you train?

[Michael]

I mean how are you going to train for that? You're really not going to until you're in it.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And knowing that you could die.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You know the. We did a Hyde X fill one time, Army Rangers and you know they were in contact on the day. They're waiting for night for us to come get them and we knew it was going to be a hot X fill. And I came in, they were off to the left and you can hear, you know the. Over the aircraft, you can hear and feel the gunfire, you know and then all of a sudden the minigun opens up, you know, to suppress fire and it's like, you know, they switch it to high. It's like. Well, they stopped doing that. The, the AC guns had the two power. Right. And they went to a DC powered gun which.

[Michael]

That's not fun. That's how you could tell the emotional state of the door gunner.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

If he was really into it. We'd get a little bit of high burst.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah. Those things are, you know, I'll tell you, the, the old guns were basically muskets. You know, you'd go to shoot it in real life, you know and if it was too far forward or back, you know, you get a kink in the, in the belt and it would just jam. You get a belt set. So the, the D.C. guns, they, they routed them different. They were made by Dylan as opposed to. Yeah, yeah, those things. I only had one malfunction that I couldn't take to the target in the entire time we had those things.

[Michael]

So how did you train those pilots who had gone from a hypothetical world of simulated gunfire to be prepared for when they're sitting up front task saturated with flying these multi million dollar machines with people in the back in real lead.

[Alan Mack]

That's a good question. You know it's at stress inoculation. Right. So during peacetime, you know, I know the, the teams are the same way. We're essentially to each other.

[Michael]

Yeah. But like we can shoot like wax bullets at her. You know what I mean? Like, and there's physical pain. You can't.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, there's nothing.

[Michael]

I mean, honestly, like, first off, that would be fun to shoot that at you guys, but also probably not best for the turbines to ingest all of that. You know what I mean? So I think you're limited in how much you can simulate, I think.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And I think, really, the. I'm trying to think of a way to describe this. You just have to do it, you know, and once you've done it a couple of times. Yeah. You know, it's kind of no big deal, you know, I mean, it's no fun. Yeah. You don't want to get in it because, you know, there's a lot of important stuff back there, you know, black boxes and wire bundles and things like that. And of course, people.

[Michael]

Yeah. Let's not forget the cockpit up front and the. Well, it's not glass Plexiglass, whatever it's made out of.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. It's just. It's like golden laid Plexiglas.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Is all that's in the windows. And it's. Yeah, it sucks.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

There's no other way to put it.

[Michael]

Do you just tell guys, just work the problem? I mean, your. Your priority is to fly the ship. So that's what you just focus on, regardless of what's going on around you.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You know, I never really had to say it. I mean, I mean, you know, Most of the 1/60 pilots are former operators of some sort. You know, in the Chinook community, it's mostly Rangers and SF guys.

[Michael]

As the pilots.

[Alan Mack]

As the pilots.

[Michael]

Interesting.

[Alan Mack]

Okay, so they get tired of being on the ground. Right. And watching the Chinooks fly away and they go to flight school.

[Michael]

Deeply understand that.

[Alan Mack]

And so, you know, if they do that, let's say you made sergeant, you know, as a Ranger or a E6 or E7, as a. As a Green Beret and you go to flight school and then you did an assignment somewhere and then came to us. You were very customer oriented, you know, you understood what the ground force wanted, you know, and not that the other pilots didn't, but it's just, you know, maybe it's a little bit of a. I don't know, a boost to the ground force to know that, hey, you've got a bunch of.

[Michael]

I think it just helps even it. Again, did no aviation stuff in the military, but at the last five years, when I was an officer, for the few times I likely was effective, I Would directly associate that with an understanding of how the machine works from the enlisted side and knowing either a more efficient way to commute, not a different way to communicate, but a more efficient way to communicate and achieve the end state. That previous experience helps for sure.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

When you don't have to tell somebody what it is that you're looking for because you already know the headspace that they are in because you've been in that headspace. Now we're talking.

[Alan Mack]

So I think a lot of that has to play in there. Like we had a couple of guys that were rangers in Mogadishu that were pilots with us. You know, a couple of them had, you know, purple hearts.

[Michael]

That's awesome. Not the purple heart part. The enemy marksmanship award is highly overrated.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. But you know, guys that were in the convoy, you know, and just going back and forth and back and forth, but so those guys and it's contagious. Yeah. You know, what was it one of my favorite stories is? I think it's called Endurance. It's with Ernest Shackleton.

[Michael]

Oh, yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Right. And so he understood the chemistry and the, in the, the, you know, people's mindset and how you had to keep like the, the naysayers away from the guys that were. Could be influenced and stuff like that. So he would put groups of guys together in a, in a way that their chemistry, you know, didn't, you know, it offset each other. Yeah. And so the same thing can happen in a cockpit or a crew. You know, you'll, you'll battle roster guys together based on their, their chemistry, their skill sets. You know, one guy, you know, you don't necessarily have the two best guys in the cockpit. You might have one great guy and one okay guy, but that okay guy is prob. Super cool under pressure. Yeah. You know, or he's got the two

[Michael]

best guys in the same cockpit. You would want to probably aggregate that out a little bit.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, well, the 160. The cool thing is, is almost everybody's pretty decent. And you know, as a flight lead,

[Michael]

one of w stuff up.

[Alan Mack]

You know what I like, I like the best about being a flight lead? There was two things. Number one is when you went tdy, you get your own room. And number two, you got a fully mission qualified co pilot, whereas all the other chocks in the, in the, the in in the flight have an FMQ as the guy in charge. And then he's got a bmq, a basic mission qualified pilot.

[Michael]

Oh, really?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. So as you go back in the Flight until you get to trail. Right. So the. The two best are in. In lead and in trail, and everybody else is kind of like on a little rocking chair.

[Michael]

Oh, no, we don't want the operators to know that, like, I'll be arguing to get in the front or the last helicopter.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Although, you know, the. You know, I would always put Chalk Two as the Kazabak bird, so. So you could be on there, and if something happened, you know, that Chalk Two, those are good guys, too, you know. Yeah. I mean, everybody's decent, but I would generally try to put trail as somebody good. And if. And if I couldn't be lead, I always wanted to be trail.

[Michael]

Out of the Chinooks, the daps and the little birds, the ahs and mhs. Was there a platform that seemed to absorb more enemy fire than others, or was it pretty well spread out across.

[Alan Mack]

Pretty well spread out. I mean, you know, everybody had their niche. Right. So the little birds are generally going to the top of the building. You know, that the mhs.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So, you know, they're like. As we come in, you know, because you always watch the ISR feeds, it shows, like, the overall objective, and all of a sudden it zooms in. Soda straw just on the cupola. The rest of us are landing and say, hey, come on, guys. We want to see ourselves. You know, but, yeah, it seems to be just spread out. You know, the Blackhawks are really almost as big as a Chinook. Yeah. You know, when you consider the length of the tailbone. And so in a non dusty environment, I can land just about anywhere a Blackhawk can.

[Michael]

Really?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. But when you get in a dusty environment. No, I can't even come close to doing.

[Michael]

Can you believe civilians now are just buying Blackhawks out of D ormo? Yeah, just like ripping around in personal Blackhawks. I mean, don't get me wrong. If I had Blackhawk money, I'd have a Blackhawk right now. We'd be doing this from the cockpit, flying around Glacier National Park.

[Alan Mack]

You know, when I was flying at West Point, the superintendent would say, chief, I want a Blackhawk. Because we had the EC145s.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

I was like, sir, you don't want a Blackhawk. He's like, yeah, I do.

[Michael]

First off, the 145 is probably a more capable platform than the Blackhawk was.

[Alan Mack]

Perfect for what we were using it for. Right. I mean, because I would fly him into dc, you know, or colleges, you know, Yale or something like that. You don't want to do that with Blackhawk. Yeah, I could just come in with a, you know, the. The Lakota. It was quiet, you know, we didn't never get any noise complaints. Every summer when the Blackhawks come from Fort Drum and they do the. You know, the summer tr. Yeah, it's all, you know, noise complaints, and they're just flying the same profile I was doing. They weren't doing anything wrong.

[Michael]

But I feel like the maintenance costs on it. Well, I was gonna say I feel like it's really high, but I feel like also, if you can afford a Blackhawk, you probably could afford the maintenance.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Be like, you know, my Lamborghini is super. I. I love this thing, but I can't afford the gas. I feel like you can probably have. If you have Lambo money, you probably have Lambo gas and insurance money, too.

[Alan Mack]

But, yeah, it's a wild world.

[Michael]

People are just snapping them up and some interesting paint schemes, and they are out there just banging corners and.

[Alan Mack]

A Blackhawk's an amazing aircraft. You know, of course, we all talk crap about each other's airframes, you know, but it. It's a. It's a good airframe.

[Michael]

Yeah, man. Unbelievable. You guys do crash from time to time, though. I will say, even the 160th will wad them up from time to time.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, yeah. Had one last summer. It actually flew into wires out of the Seattle area.

[Michael]

Did they survive it?

[Alan Mack]

No.

[Michael]

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about.

[Alan Mack]

Training flight.

[Michael]

How. Okay, in a training flight, nighttime or daytime?

[Alan Mack]

Nighttime.

[Michael]

Had they done a site survey? Do you guys have software that can look for that? And obviously, things can. If software isn't updated, things like, there was a God, dude. I don't know how much you follow civilian aviation. I think it was a Robinson, and nothing against Robinson, but I think it was loaded with four people. And there was a super. I want to say it was some type of, like, a slack line wire, and they had published it in a notam, which, I'm gonna be real honest. No pilots are really reading notams. And it was only associated with an airport that was a distance away. So a guy was flying a path that he had done many, many times.

[Alan Mack]

All four, I think. You know, I don't. I haven't seen the results yet, the actual accident, but sounds like kind of the same thing. You know, they just. You know, it's a local area. They were kind of familiar with it. It used to scare the crap out of me at West Point. We had these wires down by the front gate that during football games, I'D have to go fly around, do traffic duty. After I did the jump team.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And I was always like, you know, on a crappy day, those wires, you just can't see them. You know, I knew they were there. Yeah. And I was like, in D.C. well, it's a funny story. So we're flying the superintendent to the Pentagon. And daytime in, it's gonna be a nighttime X fill. And I couldn't get the safe open to get the goggles out. The combo was messed up. Right. I was like, what the hell? And like, sir, we got to go. You know, I was like, all right, all right. We're going unaided. Right. And now I've been down there a lot. So I understood, you know, where to go from the observatory up around the marina.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

To the, to the Pentagon. So we did that all unaided. And you have to be 100ft or below because, you know, Reagan, the traffic comes in right there.

[Michael]

It's very tight.

[Alan Mack]

And so here I am, zero alum night flying over the marina and there's like cranes and masts and stuff. And I get just the white light on, but I know what's there. I was like, it was scary, you know.

[Michael]

And note to self, understand the safe combo.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. I got back, I said, what's wrong?

[Michael]

I don't know. Is it the. Is it. Is a wire strike survivable as long as it doesn't interact with the rotor disc or I would say come through the cockpit, like if you can, like, you know what I mean? Like, is it ever survivable?

[Alan Mack]

I don't think so. We had a, a Chinook on a training flight down. They were head to Fort Rucker from Savannah, brand new G model. They were flying along at like 900ft in the clouds. They were not doing what they were supposed to do. Yeah. But they were just coupled up, letting the aircraft drive and they had the digital map up. Yeah. And what they didn't realize is that there was a thousand foot antenna. Oh, no. That was mislabeled on the map. It was about a half mile mile off. And they ran smack dab into this thing and the wire came through. Like the guy wires to the tower.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Came through the cockpit and like decapitated the cockpit. And one of the pilots actually lived. The, the cockpit actually separated and the, the main rotor stayed on board or the forward rotor stayed on and he just sort of came down and the, the what was left of the cockpit landed in the trees backwards. And the what? He unbuckled his seat belt and stepped Out. Everybody else was killed. Yeah.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

It's pretty wild.

[Michael]

I feel like that happened so fast too.

[Alan Mack]

And we had one Desert Storm, A D model CH47D ran into an unlit tower. They were unaided. They. You know, back then, not everybody flew goggles. Yeah.

[Michael]

Well, I also don't even think there were that many goggles to go around. Count.

[Alan Mack]

There weren't. Out of 16 air crews, we had, I want to say six crews, maybe nine, but I think it was six. Wow. Man. And not everybody had to be qualified back then. So you could be a goggle qualified guy. I was in Korea one time in a regular unit and I had to fly down to. Down south to Pusan and fly back at night in the mountains with a guy who wasn't goggle qualified. So I had to fly unaided in the mountains. And we couldn't go up because it was a cloud deck. Yeah. And he wasn't like his instrument ticket was expired.

[Michael]

Great.

[Alan Mack]

He's a staff guy.

[Michael]

Awesome. No, thank you. How do I. Man, I know you've been out of the game for a bit, but how does the 1/60 keep pushing the training envelope to make sure they're ready for whatever is next? Is it just. Is it reps? Are they. You think they'll ever move away from those platforms too? The 47s, the Blackhawks, and the little birds, Are they looking at new and emerging platforms?

[Alan Mack]

They are. Are they're looking at the. The V280. I think it is the Valor.

[Michael]

I don't know which one that I know the.

[Alan Mack]

It's a tilt rotor.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

But it looks like. The way I would describe is it looks like a Blackhawk.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

With tilt rotor. So instead of having a rotor system, was it V280?

[Michael]

We're going to need a picture of this. Michael V or V V Victor. I mean, I would imagine just like any other tier one, you. They're looking that you want to stay on the, the cutting edge.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Because it'll do, you know, close to, you know, 300 knots. Nuts. Really? You know. Yeah. I mean, the best you're going to get in helicopters, you know, 220 or something like that. What, that's it right there? Yeah.

[Michael]

That is basically a Blackhawk fuselage.

[Alan Mack]

What's cool.

[Michael]

Interesting.

[Alan Mack]

See how the, how the, the propellers go up and then the cells stay like this. So now you can have door guns. See, the problem with the V22 is the whole engine nacelle moves and there's no way to go back. One picture. Oh, look at that.

[Michael]

So you see the front of it, Michael, how the front of the nacelle goes up, up. The whole thing doesn't rotate.

[Alan Mack]

Well before pull up a picture of

[Michael]

a V22 hovering and it. And pull them up side by side, you'll be able to see the exact. I know exactly what you're talking about.

[Alan Mack]

This, by the way, is the original tilt rotor design from the 50s.

[Michael]

The V22 killed a lot of people in certification. So you see how the nacelle or the exhaust is coming down with that, Michael, on the picture on the right now look at the one. You'll have to switch to the other picture that's in flight. But if you go to the. See how it, like, snaps in half so you have a clear view underneath the wing? Wow. 300 knots.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, it's sweet. Like, I did a article for Stars and Stripes on this. Yeah. And it was an OP Ed, and I was talking about. I don't remember the distances and times now, but we. Operation Enduring Freedom Philippines was happening right after 911 as well. And we had 47s flying out of Cebu down to Basil island. And that's about three or four hundred miles one way. And they were doing that with tankers, you know, tanker support, long nights. This. This aircraft, the one that's behind there, could do it, you know, there and back, you know, just that much faster. Instead of flying 120, he's doing 300.

[Michael]

How long, would it take? Let's say a unit like the 1/60th? First off, let's say that the aircraft is built and certified and enters military service. How long would it take them from when they got their hands on that? And let's say they could get as many as they wanted to being FMQ'd with that platform. We're talking years to just finally get an understanding of how the thing.

[Alan Mack]

I guess two years.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Because we had the G model, the MH47G, to replace the Echo. And it was a significant difference in the cockpit, the aircraft still flew the same. So that wasn't the issue. It was the software. How you build a flight plan, how do you control things in the initial work they did was horrible. It was Rockwell Collins, who you'd think would do a great job, but they mixed their experience from other airframes into this thing, and it just didn't work. So, for example, something like the color scheme in the mfds. Right. They had magenta. Yep. As one of the colors. But the problem in a dark cockpit, when you dim the MFVs down, you can't see magenta when it's dim.

[Michael]

MFD is a multi function multifunction.

[Alan Mack]

So the glass cockpit, Right. Yeah. Little TV screens. So when you would dim it down to where people don't see you and shoot at you. Yeah. You know, you also can't see where

[Michael]

you are with your magenta line. That's excellent.

[Alan Mack]

So we changed the colors, you know, and I remember the introduction. Engineers just going, why would you come here? You know, you go in the dark cockpit, dim it down and go, this is where. How we fly.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Well, you can't read it. Yeah. No, that's why you're telling you.

[Michael]

So how would they do that, though? Would they dedicate an entire squadron, for lack of a better term, to be offline for that two years till they could get up and running with that. Like a whole group of people that are just.

[Alan Mack]

Well, it would start with. So at B. Right. So the Special Operations Training Battalion would. Well, first SIMO Systems Integration Maintenance Office. They develop the hardware and the software.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Then they bring it over to SOAPY and they have some experienced guys working it, flying it, just trying to bend the thing. After they get the airworthiness release. And so they'll go out and they'll figure out what they do and don't like about it. They'll make changes. Which is nice about the 160th, because the regular army was feeling the F model Chinook, which is the same cockpit, same hardware, but the software was about five versions behind ours. And they couldn't change it. They hated it it. And so they brought me down because I was the senior pilot and I was down with des, which is the Directorate of Evaluation Standards. And they're like, al, tell us what we're doing wrong with this. I'm like, well, you've got the wrong software. I said, that sucks. We had that and we did not like it.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And I showed them an example of what we had. I was like, this is what we've done.

[Michael]

And they probably went, that's amazing. That's exactly what we're trying to do. But we can't get it right.

[Alan Mack]

And they eventually kind of did. But initially they had that pain. So anyway, you go back to the 1/60, so you've got this. That's why these organizations within the organization exist. So you can develop and then you can do a spiral development. So it continues to, you know, go out into improvements. And then you field it to a company. Right. An entire company will just stand down, go over do training, and then they'll go out on what we call UMT Unit mission training. And they'll go out in all the environments. You know, they go to Colorado in the mountains. They'll go somewhere to hit a ship, just flat ears out of it. And they'll do everything they can to learn it really quick because they're going to be the next ones to deploy it in, in combat. And then, then when those guys do that, now they have lessons learned from overseas. And now they'll come back onesies and twosies and go out with whatever the next company is that stands down and they'll be like a liaison to them and they'll be like, go hang out with them, you know, so it's a really neat process.

[Michael]

How old are the designs for the 47s? The 60s. And the little birds? I mean, little birds are what I mean, Magnum PI Was flying around in a little bird. So we're talking 80s, 70s. What about the 47s and the 60s? Are they about the same?

[Alan Mack]

Well, no, the 47s were developed for Vietnam. Okay.

[Michael]

Wow.

[Alan Mack]

For the 101st, right. Actually the fur 10th. I can't remember that designation before they were the 101st for four. First air assault test or something like that. Okay. And so they built the chinooks so the 101st could go to Vietnam because without the Chinooks, they didn't have the lift capacity they needed for some of the. The stuff. I don't remember the details, but it was, it was built 1959, 1961, something like that.

[Michael]

Okay, it's time.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And you know, so as there's a poster that Boeing put out one time, it's called Only the Only. The silhouette remains the same. So it looks like a Chinook. You can tell. Oh, that's a Chinook. I used to fly those in Vietnam. Yeah. Come take a look.

[Michael]

You know, same as the 130s. Now you're looking at. I was in a commercial airliner taxiing by like an Air National Guard. Like that looks like a C130. But that is a very interesting blade design.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, the J models. Yeah. It's got a curve to it.

[Michael]

Yeah, very.

[Alan Mack]

I'm like, is 12ft longer?

[Michael]

Yeah. But I bet you somewhere in there is a stamp that says 1968.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, yeah, from the French. There's Chinooks that I think. So now what they're doing is There's, I guess, 72 of them. Right. When I first got to the 160th, we had 24 emojis models. That was it. And the old D model, adverse weather cockpits went to Savannah and there was 12 of those and now there's 72. But they're sending them all to get turned into beer cans now.

[Michael]

Really?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. So they're. They're all doing new builds because all of these things were some of the original Chinook airframes.

[Michael]

You know, there's some people out there with some Chinook money and they should be able to also buy a Chinook Chinook. If we're gonna DRM a Blackhawk, I think Diesel Dave needs a Chinook. I don't know what kind of money a Chinook costs. I feel like it's a tremendous operating cost per hour.

[Alan Mack]

When I left the. The G models were 62 million a copy with a turn in. So you had to turn in an aircraft? Basically.

[Michael]

Yeah, but that's government pricing. Civilian could probably get that for 6.2 million. Not that that's a small amount of money by.

[Alan Mack]

I think now they're, you know, like 80 or 90 million and. Good God, like Columbia Helicopter has them. You know, they use them for logging and for.

[Michael]

They're out here? Well, yeah, it's a 47. The firefighters, I think they're based out of Billings, but yeah, they rotate through sometimes. Yeah, they'll park it over.

[Alan Mack]

I have friends that do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a big bird.

[Michael]

So speaking of Chinooks, I swear to God, every year, and you'll understand your direct tie into this. This narrative comes around about extortion 17 where it was a sacrifice operation where Obama sold out Gold Squadron because of Red Squadron actioning Neptune Spear. And unfortunately, there is at least one that I know of, family member that helps perpetuate this.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

And. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you were the investigating officer for that accident. A little event.

[Alan Mack]

No, I wasn't. I was involved, but not okay as the.

[Michael]

So you may not have been the person who actually bottom lined it, but I am hoping that we could walk through that a little bit. And one, I have tried to explain to people the complete and utter unrealistic nature that, that I don't even know how you would coordinate that, by the way.

[Alan Mack]

No, you couldn't. Yeah, you know, extortion. The first of all, it was a 47D. Right. So it was a conventional aircraft. That family member you're talking about, I think is the one that was saying, why don't they give us the black box? That would tell us everything. Well, there was no voice data recorder on those Things only the echoes and the.

[Michael]

And the Golf, also, from my understanding, the thing burned for hours.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. So magnesium and fuel. But the other thing with that aircraft is it wasn't, you know, the problem. The easiest way to boil it down is that when CAG left Iraq and they went to Afghanistan, they now had priority on the rotary wing platforms, the soft platforms. So everybody else had to gaff. So that's the seals doing the ground assault force. And then you could have what they call opportune air. Right. So you get somebody that's not busy and they come help you. Yeah.

[Michael]

Scheduling issue for people listening. If it's available, you could ask.

[Alan Mack]

Right. But here's the thing. In order for a conventional aircraft to fly a Tier one unit, you had to meet certain criteria. And, like, you had to be in country for a period of time. You had to. Pilots had to have so many hours, all that stuff. So the extortion guys did. Right? And so they could do what's called an offset infill. You know, they weren't even supposed to do what we call to the y, which is 300 meters from the target, or to the X because they don't have the same defensive armament and a bunch of other things. So anyway, they can only do an offset infill. So that unit was ripping out, right? They were relief in place, and the new unit was coming in and they were out doing a local area orientation, right? So what that encompasses is, you know, so you're the new pilot coming in, I'm the old guy going out. We get in the cockpit together and we fly around to all the forward operating bases, and I show you. This is how you get in and out of this farp. This is where you can watch out over here, there's a big balloon on a tether. You know, you come at this base from the side.

[Michael]

We do the same thing on the ground force. We do a left seat, right seat. We leave a headquarters contingent, or we send one over early. You get atmospherics on the ground operational tempo.

[Alan Mack]

So here are these guys doing that. That and their Blue Force tracker, Right? The. The beacon that tells people back in the talk. Screens like this up on the wall.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, we need a helicopter to take, you know, Gold Squadron out to reinforce the Rangers. You know, they're under fire. Okay. Oh, look. Extortion One seven is certified to move Tier one forces. Send them. Well, these guys, that wasn't in their mission brief. It wasn't anything they analyzed. They're out checking out, you know, FOBs and FARBs and they have never flown together together, the two, the pilots and half the crew in the back is also different units. So there's a little bit of a disconnect because you know the one thing about battle rostering in the 160th is you know, the guy next to you, you know what he's going to do or not do. You know, a lot of times you don't even have to say it. It just, it's, it's just, it's just known. And so they get sent in there, you know and they all in a

[Michael]

cycle of darkness as well. Like the. Yeah, I'm saying. So. Yeah, I mean everything you're describing wasn't like a multi day process. Somebody probably called in troops in contact. They looked at what they had available. It's not, it wouldn't be incredibly uncommon for a tier one unit to be response force like that. You're going to go. I mean sometimes, I mean we would have other units doing the exact same thing for us on a contingency basis. So it sounds like they got the call, got the bird there as fast as they could. I'd heard there was some decision about whether splitting into two helicopters and going a lower route or one helicopter and going over a piece of terrain which

[Alan Mack]

is I believe what they chose. Correct. They is for what I understand they drove right up the, the high speed avenue approach because they, they lumped everybody into one aircraft. And so now it's heavier now it's not going up or around, it's going to go right up the road and you know, so think of a V shaped valley, right. Instead of running at the bottom of the V where it's the lowest, where you have the most payload capacity but you have no room to maneuver. And one of the problems with the army aviation, well, military rotor wing aviation in general is when you get shot at, people have a tendency of trying to dive down away. Right. Like I did on the, on the hill.

[Michael]

Yeah, but you were on a mountaintop.

[Alan Mack]

But, but that's only good if you can put terrain between you and the guy shooting at you. Right. So what happens? And I almost was the chief of the aviation shoot down assessment team says I know some of this stuff is, I've watched some of the videos of like a Blackhawk, an Air Force Blackhawk getting shot at and he's running down a valley just like what they did in extortion and he's getting shot at from all these different directions. And as they're talking on the ics you can Hear the bullets hitting, and they're just zipping around. They can't go any lower, but they're doing this. And the only thing they didn't do was go up at all. Right. And there's a. There's a maneuver called the Wells maneuver, where you essentially, when you get shot at, instead of diving down and away or turning, you actually climb a little bit and then you start to turn and everything's done. So the gunner can't see you doing it. He doesn't know that you've just climbed up a little bit.

[Michael]

He doesn't change the geometry.

[Alan Mack]

Every nine seconds, you're doing something different. So the gunner can't anticipate what you're doing. Because they used to helicopters just diving down.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And trying to break contact. Well, there's nowhere to go if you're already flying at the bottom of the V. Yeah. You're just, you know, like, if it had been me doing that based on my experiences, you know, I would have found a way to get around. I would not have gone up that. Yeah. Main Avenue approach, you know, and that's kind of what happened on Red Wings, you know, with Turbine 33. You know, they went right up the spine of the ridge.

[Michael]

Oh, you talking about the one that got shot down?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, that was.

[Michael]

Did the RPG actually go into the back of the helicopter on that one corner?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, right up into the ramp area. We. We believe it hit the aft transmission or the. Or the C box or the combined transmission. And, you know, it's funny, you know, you talk about extortion, you know, Turbine three. Three. We still have people. I. I did an interview for an article that's going to the Smithsonian sometime this summer, and they were talking about that and a couple of seals, I don't know from who said that. They know that there's ISR footage of the battle of the four original guys, you know, Marcus and Murphy.

[Michael]

I have heard of that. I've heard people saying. I was going to say. I've heard people saying that. I've never met somebody who says they have seen it.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, there's not the only.

[Michael]

Yeah, because the platform. And again, this is what people don't understand about isr, which we're largely talking about Predators, or. What does it stand for? Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance. Predator Reaper. It would have had to have been overhead to begin with for that to exist. They might have surged it there once they got the Red Star Club, metaphorical Red Star cluster, which is, everybody come help me.

[Alan Mack]

Right. But they didn't have that. They had an A10 with A. With a lightning pod. Yeah. So what we call non standard ISR, you know, so it's an A10 overhead, and that's after, you know, the whole compromise had happened. So there's none, but they insist that exists. And the guy I was talking that wrote the articles, like, he's seen all the classified materials and he's like, there's no. You know. And the same thing is everybody thinks a man pad brought it down. It's like, no, it's an rpg. I watch. Watched it on a feed, you know, from the A10, you know, and, you know, if it were a man pad, the flares would have shot out. None of that happened.

[Michael]

So I don't know how to stop the rumor with extortion. It's rough to see. And personally, I'm biased on this one because I knew the vast majority of people on that.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

I was a Gold, and I was in 2 troop, and that was 2 troop of gold. I'm not saying I would have been on the helicopter if I'd stayed there. I spent the minimum amount of time at that command. I'm just saying thing a guy from my BUDS class, Jonas Kelsall, who was enlisted in BUDS and then went to college right after graduating buds, before going into the SEAL teams, was the. What would he have been? Ground force commander. I don't know if he was the commanding officer of Gold at that time, but he was at least the GFC that night. I mean, it's rough, and I just. I don't understand why some of those things get so sticky and why Red Wings is a really touchy one in the community. Because. Because externally, it could be viewed as the makings of a great Hollywood movie, but internally it is full of lessons learned that didn't quite make it into the movie. And I don't even know if people would have understood those lessons learned. But it's taught as not a success. It's taught as a failure and a breakdown down of. Of so many things. But that to me, doesn't ex. I don't understand why people get so. To use Michael's word vehemently, which is not the way you say it. So now I always say it incorrectly because he demanded that. He just was like, that's how you say it.

[Alan Mack]

They won't let it go. Yeah.

[Michael]

And what is it. What is it supposed to show? I mean, and I know the argument that. Because the. The discussion basically comes down to this. Did as the movie shows, Marcus stay and fight until he was almost out of ammunition or did the opposite of that occur? Those are basically the two narratives.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

And there's some real weird things in there, like why were there two after actions that were written? Why was he asked to write another one? Why did the military essentially issue him an editor and a publisher? Right. I mean, I know the answer to that because they knew they could turn it into a great recruiting piece. And I very barely know Marcus. I've hung out with him two times. And I'm not trying to throw shade at him at any, in any way because the guy has to live with whatever the reality on the ground is that man has to live with it for the rest of his life. So I'm not trying to throw shade at it, but both sides of that conversation have these things that they have their talons in and they won't let them go. Yeah, it's the same thing with extortion. Like, I. I can't fathom what it would feel like to be a family member losing somebody in that situation, wanting and demanding answers that like the black box, if they can't even give it to you, but you are convinced that it does exist, and because you're not getting it, it's therefore a conspiracy. And then let's attach that to the President just, just waking up and going to the Oval Office one morning over his coffee and just saying, you know what? Let's just sacrifice gold squatter me. Because that makes sense in any universe, right?

[Alan Mack]

And just think of, you know, Occam's Razor, right? The simplest. Right? For sure. So if you're a group of bad guys and you've got the, the Rangers, you know, under fire and you feel like you're outmaneuvering them and you, you may do some serious damage on them, what's going to come, you know, that the Americans are going to send especially

[Michael]

over a decade deep into that.

[Alan Mack]

Right. They know it's, you know, would Napoleon say, don't fight your enemy too much or they'll know you your ways. Right? So all you got to do. And this is why I said, what's different between me and the guys from my time frame is we learned, you know, with blood, you know, what you do and you don't do, and you don't just fly right up the valley because it's the quickest way in. You know, I would always take. Guys used to hate when I would come over. At least I always felt that way because I would always. I'd always make them do things the hardest way. Yeah, that would be like, hey, let's take, you know, the, the seals want to go here. All right, well let's go like this. No, we're going to come this way over the shittiest terrain and we're going to come in. They're like, oh, wow. That you know what the approach is going to be like going in there. I'm like, yeah, they won't expect us. Also, don't all our guns are fainting this way.

[Michael]

Don't you guys love that though up front? Like, I figured you guys would love to come in the most difficult way and just bend those machines to the best of your.

[Alan Mack]

See, that's because you're. But you know, that's what I used to say all the time was that, you know, I always tried to leave myself an out. Right. And I was thinking about, you know, you flying around here in your helicopter.

[Michael]

I always have an out.

[Alan Mack]

You gotta. Right, Yep. The seals wouldn't let me have one. They'd be like, we want to land at the end of this box canyon. But if I do that and we brown out, there's nowhere for me to go and I don't have enough power to get out of there. Yeah, but you'll do it.

[Michael]

It works until it doesn't.

[Alan Mack]

Well, and then I end up doing it, you know. And we've done stuff, we talked last time I was here about doing a one wheel landing to xville guys.

[Michael]

Yeah. Oh, there's iconic pictures of you guys doing that stuff.

[Alan Mack]

And it's like, I don't want to. And they're like, yeah, but you can.

[Michael]

I'm like, but I don't sunny out. It's two hours past sunrise. Go ahead and come in.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, the AC is already gone because

[Michael]

yeah, they're like, yeah, we're out of here. We can see eastern glow.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, the sun's gonna come up. We're leaving.

[Michael]

I mean there's a time to go up the gut. I mean if somebody is calling a cazavec and it is life limb eyesight, I'm like, go for it.

[Alan Mack]

But even that, Andy, you know what I would do on a, on a, on a hot X fill for a casabac. Let's say I don't have the, the medic on board. It's chalk Two is. I'd escort him in. Essentially he come in low, I'd come in high and I would do everything I could to draw a tank attention to me. It's like here, shoot at me. You know, I'm still moving. I'm not maneuvering you know, to land, let him come in and do this. And this worked several times.

[Michael]

Is it safer, actually, once you guys are on the ground? Because sometimes, especially in an urban environment, you don't have direct line of sight.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, only if you can block, you know. Okay. If you have cover. Yeah. You know, concealment's no good.

[Michael]

See how it works in hide and seek, though? Don't confuse the two in a gunfight. Both work in hide and seek. One's way better in a ballistic environment. Yeah, yeah, I figured you guys were always looking for the most challenging way. I just figure aviators love doing aviator stuff. So they're just.

[Alan Mack]

They make great stories, but they're no fun to do. You know, it's like I was thinking on the way here, you know, talking about air refueling. So air refueling can be fun and terrifying all in the same flight, you know, like. Yeah, just as simple as, you know, you got a nice smooth night, you know, you're plugging away, everything's good. And it's smooth because it's, you know, you know, a warm front with low clouds, but it's looking pretty good. And all of a sudden, the tanker drags you into a freaking cloud. Now all you can see is the hose and the markings, and you might not even see the tanker, but you got.

[Michael]

How would the tanker do that to you guys? Because he's got a windshield, too.

[Alan Mack]

I think they're up there eating cornflakes. You know, he's like, give me some more milk.

[Michael]

You know, now they're probably just like. They have the little dial. They're like, give me three left on the heading. We're putting them right through.

[Alan Mack]

Through that cloud sometimes. Yeah. And then you know what to do is they'll. They'll turn. But once you're in the cloud, you got to just stay level. But what they'll do is they'll turn out of it.

[Michael]

Oh, my God.

[Alan Mack]

And it's. It's really a challenge to stay with the tanker. And once you're on the hose, you don't want to get off.

[Michael]

No.

[Alan Mack]

You know.

[Michael]

And what's the fuel feel like on that thing we're talking about for people listening to the big extended boom? That's usually on the. Usually on the right hand side, isn't it?

[Alan Mack]

Yes, on the right hand side. Yeah.

[Michael]

What kind of fuel float you get into that?

[Alan Mack]

£750aminute.

[Michael]

Really?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And a. A pound or a seven pounds of jet A is going to be about a gallon. So that's about 100. We'll call it 100 gallons a minute.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, it's quick. I mean, it takes. You can fill up £13,000 of gas in about three, four minutes.

[Michael]

I like the ones where the rotors they cut off the hose. Those are my favorite.

[Alan Mack]

That happens.

[Michael]

I know they're on the Internet.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You know, it's the blades take it though, for a little.

[Michael]

I mean, I'm not saying the pilots are enjoying it and they. No, they do emergency on their hand.

[Alan Mack]

You know, where they tear up the aircraft is on landing. So. So the, the. You were talking earlier that the. When you move the cyclic forward on a chinook, the blades don't tilt. They actually decrease the pitch in the forward and increase it in the. After the whole airframe. Yeah. Tilts. So what they do is they have these little computers that will. Will tilt the rotors once you get in forward flight, and it gives you a more level attitude. Those are called longitudinal cyclic trims.

[Michael]

That makes a lot of sense other be way nose down.

[Alan Mack]

Right. Now, the problem with that is that when you're doing air refueling, these things can move based on what the computers sense. So you put them in manual so they can't move. So you're doing 120 knots. You lock these things in place. Now you just hit the hose and you're, you know, you take a chunk of your blade off like this, and now you're like a washing machine out of balance. And you're just looking down going, okay, let's put this on the ground. Right.

[Michael]

So you said that can't feel amazing when starts shaking like.

[Alan Mack]

No, when, you know, the RPG came through my aircraft. You know, parts of the. What I think was probably the ammo can came out the other side of the aircraft and took a chunk out of the rotor blade. And that thing, you know, I didn't even describe how it was. You know, it's flying like this. Yeah. But. So here's these guys, they hit the hose. Now they're all freaked out because they don't want the aircraft to come apart, and they want to just get it on the ground. They never. I know of three incidents that this happened in my time there. Not one of them remembered to put the LCTs back in auto. So when they touch down, the rotor blades are still tilted at 120 knots. So you don't slow down. You know, you get down, you get the forward gear down, and you're still getting pulled along because the rotor blades are tilted in a way that they're not supposed to be.

[Michael]

Michael, this one's Worth, did you find any? Yeah, I'm actively searching. Just go on to YouTube and put helicopter mid air refueling chop hose. It's probably going to be a 53.

[Alan Mack]

I don't know. They're, they're, their probe tip sticks out from the, the rotor. Santa Chinook. It's like eight feet inside the rotor disc. So you've got to make contact. So you get about five feet away from the hose. Yeah. And then once it's ready to move, you move to contact and you move quick and you just hit it get connected. And then once it's on the probe, it's there, you know. And then it can't fly up and down into the rotor system.

[Michael]

Allegedly.

[Alan Mack]

Well you can. I've seen people toss it off.

[Michael]

We, the very first target we hit with you guys in Iraq in 03 was that Chembio target. And I think it was about four hours each way we refueled on the way in and the way out. I chose to look out the window

[Alan Mack]

very briefly that I know that, and

[Michael]

then said no, I'm just gonna sit down and pretend like this isn't happening.

[Alan Mack]

Happening right, listen.

[Michael]

Because they were on both sides too.

[Alan Mack]

We were in, we were going into Yemen for, for a target with Dev Grew and the. One of the tankers was going to also be like a, a backup far up and a wet wing Kazavac kind of thing. So we refueled on the way in or up, I think that's the Red Sea. You got Yemen and Eritrea and Ethiopia over here. And so you're going up there and you know the, the up and down drafts are terrible and the drogue, you know the paradrogue is going up and down below the rotor and you get on there and boy once you got on and I remember the troop chief was on my aircraft and he's looking out the window, he's like holy, that sucks. He goes, I don't ever want to see that again.

[Michael]

I was like man, yeah, unplug and go turn around.

[Alan Mack]

But it was funny because one of the, one of the guys didn't get enough gas and the tanker that's supposed to be on the ground starts accelerating away and Chinook wouldn't let him go. It was know just chasing him down. So you're doing 130. They were doing like 160 still on the hose and the guy's like trying to outrun him and finally they just pulled away. But he got his gas. Good God.

[Michael]

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[Alan Mack]

Didn't find cutting the hose. Yes you did. Just.

[Michael]

This is the beginning of.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, there he goes. Yep. Oh.

[Michael]

Oh, he cut off his own probe.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, now see, that's what a chinook can't do.

[Michael]

You know what though? I'd say just try to put it back in the old drug shoot there. I mean like what's. I'm sure you probably. Oh my God.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

What so Those probes are probably made out of a harder material than.

[Alan Mack]

It's the. It's foam wrapped in Kevlar.

[Michael]

Okay, what kind? I don't. Honestly, I don't even understand how the helicopter still fly it. One of those blades is incredibly damaged. If not.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's that whole.

[Michael]

This is actually the video I was thinking in my mind, for whatever reason, I thought that they had hit the.

[Alan Mack]

The drogue shoot. Yeah, the same thing. Same thing happens. I mean, we. Yeah, you know, the. You just cut off the. The last five feet of it. There you see little white markings all the way up. Those are hose markings. So you can see how far the hose is.

[Michael]

And that guy has got some paperwork to do at the end of his day.

[Alan Mack]

Well, you said it can be fun and it can be terrifying all on the same flight because it's fun up until that happens. And now you've got to deal with it.

[Michael]

On the refueling on that first object, a missile went underneath the refueling bird and it was like, we're leaving.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And just bailed.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And again, I was just sitting in the back like, I don't know what's going on.

[Alan Mack]

And, you know, that's the thing. You asked me the difference between the 90s and after 2001. And we always had redundancy planned in. So air refueling always had a redundant fuel plan, you know, ground fuel somewhere else or a shortened route or something. Once Afghanistan happened, you know, the very first time, we had Talons instead of papa models. So the, the C130 papa is a dedicated refueler. And the Talon, the combat Talon, you know, is for also, you know, delivery of air packages. Right. And that's what they consider themselves. We're Talon pilots, we're not tanker pilots. And so one day, they prioritized the drop over my fuel and I had to land in Afghanistan was a flight of 2, 2 and wait for another Chinook to fly fuel to me because I ran out of gas.

[Michael]

You had to wait for one of your buddies to go hit the gas station and bring you a. Basically, I assume it was a red Jerry can, big black one.

[Alan Mack]

It's like 500 gallons. But yeah, I remember being so pissed. It's like, come on, guys. You know, because. And they were just so used to us being able to absorb not getting our gas, you know, and that changed because now we were going, okay, look, we're going to get to the tanker with 20 minutes of coffee fuel.

[Michael]

That is a thin margin, man.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, but when you start talking about Afghanistan in particular, in order to carry the amount of assaulters that the ground force feels they need, something's going to give.

[Michael]

Yeah. Weight. Balance is a real thing.

[Alan Mack]

It's usually going to be fuel. So that's the questions. You know, the go back and forth I'd have with the, with the troop commander would be, okay, do you want a lot more people or do you want me to have power to go over the mountains that nobody else is flying over and surprise the enemy? Or do you want me to have more gas on the objective so I can do Kazak or hang. What do you want? You got to tell me. And so there'd be this little, you know, in the early days, it was like, I want everything. Yeah, you can't have everything. You can have one of these three things.

[Michael]

It's always the way it is. Looking back on your career, I mean, obviously, other than Roberts Ridge, do you. Does anything else stick out at you where you're like, wow, I am never doing that again, or. Or that you really got away with one where it shouldn't have gone your way, but it did?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, there's a lot of those. I mean, I have to pick one.

[Michael]

You don't have to pick one. I could listen to this stuff.

[Alan Mack]

Well, here's the cool one.

[Michael]

My wife will be like, why are you watching helicopters crash? As I'm trying to learn.

[Alan Mack]

So this book, Razor 03, came out, oh, almost three years ago now. Right. And I, So I wrote a second book called Chinooks in the Dark. Same publisher, it's waiting to hit print. Took a year to get through the Pentagon security review, and then now it's

[Michael]

been surprised it actually made it through.

[Alan Mack]

You know, it's funny is that Mark Bisson, you know, is bitching that his book is.

[Michael]

Oh, yeah, Matt.

[Alan Mack]

Okay. Yeah. He's like, oh, yeah, they're. They're trying to get me, you know, they've taken this time. It's like, dude, you're not even a third of the way through. What I had to do.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You know.

[Michael]

What substantial changes did they come back with in your manuscript?

[Alan Mack]

None.

[Michael]

And see, that's what's wild at this point. I mean, I guess people could write the tell all if they wanted to. But here's the thing. If they do that, they're not going to put it through for that submission.

[Alan Mack]

That was why I thought Shinooks in the Dark would get through so much quicker.

[Michael]

I think it's a manpower issue on the receiving end of the manual script. Yeah, it is.

[Alan Mack]

It is Socom they only had one guy, and he wasn't doing his job. He's reservist. And then a new guy came in in who had a reputation getting done. And he did, man, and boom, he got in, like, two months, one guy,

[Michael]

really well staffed up. Yeah, we're just really placed up here.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. But anyway, the first chapter in that book, it. I was in Iraq, and There was a dust one, right. Three 101st soldiers were taken. Dust one stands for duty Status undetermined whereabouts. Whereabouts unknown. Know. Yeah. And so they. They think there's a source that knows where these guys are. He's up in Mosul, and we're down in Balad, and the. The CAG guys are down in the Green Zone at the mss. So I got to go up and pick up this source now. The source is like, 600 pounds, this guy. That's what they wouldn't let me put the book. I. There was a nickname for him, and

[Michael]

I'm gonna say thin, skinny, perhaps. It has to be.

[Alan Mack]

It was Jabba.

[Michael]

But actually, as you just said, 600 pounds. I'm not gonna lie. My first thought was of Jabba the Hutt.

[Alan Mack]

Well, that's what he looked like.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And you could Google me. He'll pop, Right. But so he gets on the aircraft, and it felt like a Humvee was driving on board. You know, he's like. You could feel it. And then I got a haul ass down to Camp Cropper, and they're gonna debrief him. And so that night, you know, they're convinced that in a place called Yusufia, it's down just. I think it's west of Baghdad, and it's a very nasty place. You know, a lot of. And some of my bad guys. And so we go in there with five Blackhawks, two Chinooks, two MH6s, and two AH6s.

[Michael]

That's a heavy package.

[Alan Mack]

That's the package. Right. Because we think we're going to get American soldiers. And as we come in, it was interesting. It's beautiful weather. We got a big stack back overhead, you know, all the firepower you could. You could want. And I remember the little birds doing their bump. And the funny thing is, I've never seen them do the bump.

[Michael]

Oh, really?

[Alan Mack]

I've only seen the rockets hit.

[Michael]

Oh, you're talking about for the. The ahs as they do their little pop up. Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So they're always on my. You know, behind me.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So when they go up and come down and they start shooting, all I see is the, the miniguns and the rockets. I don't ever get to see the aircraft. Yeah. And so one day we did this, I'm looking at it anyway, so we, we do this, we put everybody in, we go back to the mss. Now it's just time to wait, you know, the actions on or happening. And while that happens, a thunderstorm rolls through and it's a biggie, Right. It drives all of the upper package, ISR fires, everything gone, everything left. So now the ground force is on the ground.

[Michael]

So people listening to this from the ground force perspective, everything you're describing is stuff that they love. Right? Because the, the stack overhead is literally aircraft, aircraft stacked. It'll be at 1,000 to 2,000 foot intervals. You could have A10s, F18s, F15s, F16s. You could have AC130 like everything. And they're kind of coordinating and doing their own thing. Right. The AC130 is lower in their orbit, but then they can coordinate like, who's looking at what? And you're just on the radio and you can just. I want that destroyed. Not a problem. And so then, though, imagine being in a contentious environment and then all of a sudden that leaves. Yeah. And now it's just boots on the ground versus boots.

[Alan Mack]

And the sun's going to come up soon.

[Michael]

Oh, of course, why not?

[Alan Mack]

Right. So you know the weather. So the rain has stopped. But you know, anybody who understands meteorology, you know, the wind is now, you know, five to six knots. The dew point spreads like four, and there's a lot of dust in the air. So there's fog, Right. There's a lot of water around the Euphrates river and all that stuff. So it's solid fog. And the LNO comes, comes to me, we're sitting there and he's like, hal, ground force commander wants to talk to you. Right. So this is, you know, the, the actual green commander. And he's like, al, they tell me you can get my guys out. I'm like, what do you mean we can't get them out? He goes, have you looked out the window? I was like, no. Right. So I, I walked the door and you can't see across the road to the, the helip.

[Michael]

So this is like low hanging ground floor fog. Just the debt. Yeah, that stuff actually happens up here quite a bit too, shockingly enough. Well, the temperature, dew point spread just smashes together even in freezing temps.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, you can, you can fog up an aircraft or an airfield with an aircraft. Yeah, Right. You just get that Mixing action.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

But anyway, so I look at it, I'm like, you know, what are the other guys doing? You know, and the Blackhawk guys have all the same equipment as me. Yeah, you know, the radar and all this other stuff, but they don't, don't practice it the way the Chinook guys do, because the Chinook guys have been doing this since early 2001. This has got to be 2005 or 6 now. So I said, okay, give me a half hour, I'll, I'll go get them. Right. With two Chinooks. So you, you know, I told you the package. Five Blackhawks, two Chinooks. There's a lot of guys. So I call, I pick what I think is a good lz and then I call up to Balad to the imagery guy, and we're now talking, walking back and forth, and he's like, all right, man, move it here. He's menstruating, you know, the target imagery. He said, there's telephone pole here, you don't want to go there. And so he, he picks two spots on the same big, you know, lot, and we, we're gonna go take off two minutes apart, fly up to like 2,000ft, couple up the aircraft and let it drive down to a 40 foot hover, and then we're gonna land.

[Michael]

You basically are going to do an instrument approach into a combat landing that's

[Alan Mack]

never been turned right. So like any, any instrument approach you've ever done to an airfield, there's math that's been done and they.

[Michael]

Flight check, it's almost as if it's certified and checked. Oh, my God.

[Alan Mack]

There's a guy from the FA has told us flight check. Yeah. So we go, as we're walking to the aircraft, I remember I couldn't even see the helicopters. It was so, it was still dark. And you know, they emphasized the fact they really needed them to come out before the sun came, came up. So we go out there and, you know, my chalk two, and I got to tell you this, the, I think it was after I did your podcast, actually. The guy who was the co pilot, not the co pilot, he was the pilot in command of that aircraft, said, al, I noticed you say, I, I, I did this, I did that a lot because as I recall, I was either in the cockpit or behind you doing the same thing. So I had to, I gotta, you know, I gotta put that out there. Is that fair enough?

[Michael]

You wanna, you want a solo flight of one?

[Alan Mack]

No. And you know, and the guys that flew with me, you know, they're riding right along. But so we go out there, we get cranked up, and now we're going to do what's called an ito, an instrument takeoff from a walled compound. And you can't see, so pick up straight.

[Michael]

See the edge of your, like, rotor arc.

[Alan Mack]

Only because the static electricity. Yes, you get the. You get the halo, they call it. And it's just static, which, by the way, under nods.

[Michael]

Watching you guys come in or just, just spin on the ground. It was one of my favorite things to do. It's. And I don't know why it happens other than the static electricity. I don't understand the mechanism.

[Alan Mack]

It's the nickel. The nickel erosion capsule. Yeah.

[Michael]

It's like. I know, I know it happens, and I can kind of talk about why, but it's so cool. Under nods, too.

[Alan Mack]

Well, that's all we could see. And so we took off. And, you know, we've been flying multiple nights. Everybody knows where all the telephone poles are. So we come up to about, I don't know, 75ft feet, and then start a forward flight.

[Michael]

Are you just head down, looking at an instrument? Like, are you. Or does the machine have the ability to do this autonomously?

[Alan Mack]

No, it does now. Okay. Back then it didn't. So.

[Michael]

So you're just straight.

[Alan Mack]

It's a video game.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

You know, there's a little. A circle and a line and a crosshair, and you just got to keep them all lined up. Yeah. So we do that. And then you get up to. Once you get up to about 60, 70 knots, you can couple. Right. So now the aircraft will drive on its own. Right. This is all pilot induced. And so now the aircraft is climbing on its own on a heading, you know, and then you couple up to the flight plan. Yeah. And then it turns while it's climbing and it goes up to like, I think we went to 2,000ft out of

[Michael]

the clouds at that point.

[Alan Mack]

No, we're still in the clouds. So this whole time we're in the clouds and, you know, the aircraft turns and you hit what's called top of descent and it starts to. To come down. Right. And now, now everything's fine except the radar altimeter kicks on at 1500ft AGL above ground. Yeah. And so once that happens, it's like, like any instrument approach you've ever done to an airfield when you're really, you know, shooting to decision height. Yeah. You know, it kind of sucks. Once the radar altimeter kicks on now and it's like, okay, we're actually getting near the ground. Yeah. This is.

[Michael]

And especially when you're getting your, your you know, potential go around criteria and you're getting the, you know, 400ft. Feet, three and you in your decision altitude is 200 and you still don't have ground contact.

[Alan Mack]

Right. And we're going to 40ft. So now I've got to hope that the imagery guy was, was good.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And he was. What is his name? Coats and Craig Coatson.

[Michael]

It literally would take the substitution of one digit and then probably the 10 digit that he gave you guys, you guys would die.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And you know, the other thing we did have is the, the, the uniform element went out and walked the, the grounds. So the. One of the.

[Michael]

That's still assuming that your hardware is going to fly you to that designated point.

[Alan Mack]

But, but we'd done this, we'd done this in Afghanistan a number of times. I just never done it. I had never done it to a, a field that I hadn't already been to. Yeah, I've done it to FOBs, I've done it to runways. Never done this. So this, let me tell you my, you know, seat cushions up and up around here.

[Michael]

Water tight?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is a frog's ass waterproof? Watertight. Oh, yes. But so we, we come in and actuals effect.

[Michael]

Damn. I didn't even know there was this. Okay.

[Alan Mack]

And I've got chalk 22 minutes behind me. So he's doing the same thing, but he's slightly offset. He's going to land about 200 meters away. That's it. And so we come down, we're at 40ft and now you take over. The pilot does and you just come straight down and land and, and that's dust now too. So as the dust settles, I can see it looked like pilots. Pirates of the Caribbean, the very first movie with a, with a pirates are coming out of the mist and the underwater or whatever. It looked like that as the ground force came at us. And now I took, God, I don't know, it must have been 60, 70 people, you know, on board each aircraft. And then we what? And we. Yeah, I get the whole assault force.

[Michael]

So you had to been super light on gas then too to be able to pull out.

[Alan Mack]

Well, in Afghanistan, yeah. In Afghanistan you can. I can, I can carry. Very efficient. You know, payload wise, I could take more than you can put inside.

[Michael]

In Iraq, you mean Iraq.

[Alan Mack]

Iraq, yeah, Iraq. So, you know, I'd say you can have, you know, 20 on the infill and 60 on the X fill.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Okay. You Know, for contingencies, that is. But so we took back off, did the same thing, went back to the mss. Now the fog was starting to dissipate, and as we flew over the top of the mss, what I told the commander was, I'm not doing an approach into there. You know, it's too many things.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You know, I said, but I'll come over the top, and if I can see down, I'll come and land. If not, I'm taking the guys to Balad, and we're going to do a real instrument approach to the Runway. Yeah. But I came over the top, looked down, and I could see the mss, and so I just spiral on down. I. As in we. Yeah, you know, spiraled on down, set them down, and got everybody. And so the. The next day, I come out there and the commander's like, like, good job, Al. You, and you guys did a great job. As a reward, you can have ice cream.

[Michael]

Thanks.

[Alan Mack]

Because that's the big thing with the Tier one forces is they sometimes get Baskin Robin's ice cream.

[Michael]

Sometimes.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. What they didn't know is we've been pilfering it.

[Michael]

Why would you.

[Alan Mack]

Not for weeks anyway. Right. It's like, oh, yeah, maybe we knew

[Michael]

and were facilitating that. So you would pick us up on foggy days.

[Alan Mack]

It could be. It could be. But, you know, it's funny, because nobody had ever done that before.

[Michael]

Yeah. Because it sounds wildly dangerous.

[Alan Mack]

Well, there's a lot of risk to it, and there's not a lot of. Not a lot of leeway to screw.

[Michael]

Were you the final authority on the go, no go for that, or did you have to push it? Would you. If something would have happened on that,

[Alan Mack]

it would have been my fault.

[Michael]

Would have been your. Okay, so, like, your CEO above you wouldn't have bitten the bullet for that one or did.

[Alan Mack]

No, they would have because they asked. They, you know, Al, can you do it? Yeah.

[Michael]

Yes.

[Alan Mack]

Right. So a flight lead in the One Trust. A flight lead in the 160th has a lot of trust. So if. If I say I can do something, chances are the commander is going to let me do it. He may have some criteria that, you know, makes him happier. Like, all right, but can you take five guys less? You know, so you're a little bit lighter. Sure. You know, whatever. But for the most part, like, in Afghanistan, I was allowed out of Sharana to do vehicle interdiction with Chinooks. Now, there was a. What they called the Day VI package, which was little birds and Blackhawks, you don't do VI with Chinooks. Right. And everybody, you know, the 160th opinion. Right. But the Blackhawks couldn't fly at Sharana. It's too high.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So in the summer, they couldn't even come to a hover with no ground force, let alone. Wow. You know, so I would do these vi and the other, the other flight leads were. I don't know if jealous is right, but they were mad that they weren't allowed to do it, but it just happened to be that, you know, I was in the one place where you could only do it in Chinooks. Yeah. Where they were. You could do it with the package.

[Michael]

It was an interesting time when they shifted from doing daytime vi, which is vehicle interdiction, from the night, because again, traditionally the night stalkers, shockingly enough, prefer to fly at nighttime as they should because the odds are stacked in your favor. But, you know, never underestimate your enemy. It's like, wow, we've been looking for this guy and he's not very active at night, but in the daylight hours, hours, he seems to be out there. And yeah, I mean, there's certainly more risk, but also you can, you can probably catch these guys.

[Alan Mack]

Well, look at Iraq or not Iran with the, you know, the decapitation strike. You know, the guys were brazen enough to meet together in the daylight. They won't come out in the day.

[Michael]

Yeah, I mean, dropping bombs of the day is a little bit of a different story. I mean, you're talking literally. I won't get into the details of the vi, but let's just say that the helicopters and assets are in pretty close proximity. Proximity to what's going on, you know, which is protected a little bit more in the COVID of darkness. So, yeah, it was a ballsy move for sure. But, you know, for high. A high value enough target.

[Alan Mack]

Well, that's the thing. You know, the last hurdle I had to get with shinooks in the dark with the dod was they. They sent it back to me, approved with some minor changes. It was all stuff that was inconsequential. It's like even a Razor 03. The stuff that they made me take out is they wouldn't let me put CAG in there or Dev Group. It had to be SEALS and sf.

[Michael]

Both of those names are very. That is the actual util. The name. That's the unclassified name.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

That is so stupid.

[Alan Mack]

But anyway, so I didn't put insurance in the dark. I didn't put that. Yeah. And so the last. But they send me back this thing. It's approved. I sent it to the publisher. And then the guy from the Pentagon calls me. He's like, al, you didn't send that to your publisher yet, did you? He's like, yeah. Why? He goes, well, one of the commands just came back. They got some concerns, like, okay, turns out it was PAYCOM or Sock Pack. The Pacific area, you know, the Philippines. The chapter I did on the oefp, and they were doing boat interdiction. Like. Like Vi.

[Michael]

Yeah, just VI in the water.

[Alan Mack]

Right. But it was very sensitive because they, The Americans weren't really supposed to be doing offensive operations. In this case, they weren't. But if they were shot at by the boat, they could defend themselves. Right. And then they were going after a guy named Abu Sabata who was the head of the Abu Sayyaf group, had the Burnhams hostage. And so the, The Philippine seals were on a boat with one set of goggles from the Night Stalkers. And they. They ran right over the bad guys. Intentionally or unintentionally? No, no, unintentionally, because all they had is the one guy. It was like the liaison was on the bow, you know, and so they

[Michael]

ran him over in a boat.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I love every part of this.

[Alan Mack]

And these. And these idiots. I don't know if they're idiots or not. They're probably going to die anyway. But. So they're in the water, the bad guys, and they're shooting at the.

[Michael]

Whilst while floating in the water.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. So they all. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. So I thought that's what. I thought that's what the concern was going to be. And it was nothing.

[Michael]

But

[Alan Mack]

I had mentioned what the mission set was for the. For the Night Stalkers.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And they wanted one acronym removed. That was it. And I'm like, okay, that doesn't change anything.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

I would take it, but the stuff I thought was going to be a problem wasn't. And the stuff that I was like, that's not a big deal.

[Michael]

How many hours did you exit service with flying? How many hours did you. When you got out of the military, how many hours did you have?

[Alan Mack]

I think officially on my. On my flight race, I had 6,700.

[Michael]

What's the biggest lesson you learned? Learned in that 6,700. Advice to young Rotary pilots like myself or any aviators out there. I'm about half of that with my fixed wing in there, but just a couple hundred of Rotary.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. I mean, the Big thing is two things. Number one, always leave yourself an out when you can, you know, and never quit flying the aircraft. Just like you said about, you know, skydiving, you got to do everything you can, and if it's going to kill

[Michael]

you anyway, you might as well fight the thing until the very end.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You know. Yeah. The. So I was talking to the mother of the pilots that died in wild 42, which was the aircraft in the Philippines. They, they, they nosed doing about 150 knots and water. Yeah.

[Michael]

Yeah. That's not survivable.

[Alan Mack]

They were Chalk 2 and Long Night. It's. It's. It's detailed in the book, but they essentially got spatial disorientation and drove it right into the water. And I've heard the voice data record order. Yeah. Cockpit conversations. And at the end, you know, they tried, you know, as a crew chief, saying, you know, climb, climb, climb. And they tried. And the pilot, one of the pilot's mother is asking me, she goes, did he suffer? And I was like, no. I said, he thought he was going to be successful until he ceased to exist. You know, he just wasn't there anymore. But he was trying, you know, and

[Michael]

he was working the problem until he came.

[Alan Mack]

That's the thing is you. You don't know until you pull it away and you're like, holy crap. Yeah, I made it. Other than that, you'll never know.

[Michael]

Yeah, I have. I'm. Even when I was flying fixed wing, very current, and flying professionally part 135 and then part 91, I always just. I mean, I'm voraciously read accident reports, and it's. It's amazing at how often it is not the piece of equipment do you have up here.

[Alan Mack]

Like in Colorado, we used to fly out of a place called Gunnison. It's kind of up in the mountains.

[Michael]

I know where it is.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Okay. And every box canyon. And I. Every isn't mean literally everyone, but probably eight or nine of them had airplanes at the end of a box canyon. Really, that did not make it out for whatever reason. So the advice I would give you flying around here in the mountains, two things. Number one, when it comes to power, never do an OG maneuver right at your power. Always give yourself 10% at least.

[Michael]

Of OGE stands for out of ground effect for people listening. Yeah. Which they're not going to understand, but that's what it means.

[Alan Mack]

And then the other thing is always fly one side or the other on. In a valley.

[Michael]

Yeah. So you can turn either left or right.

[Alan Mack]

Right. And. And that's the one thing, you know, I talked earlier about. The guys were always like, oh, I was going to make us do this the hard way. You know, when you come down from a, you know, 12,000 foot mountain to a 3,000 foot landing zone in like a three, four mile stretch, you're coming down fast.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And the only way to do that is to hug one, the guy on the controls, hug that side of the valley so you're seeing the terrain rush past you. But if you go right up to center, which is what most guys try to do, everybody's just disoriented, you know, because you don't have any real rush of the terrain. You just.

[Michael]

The very end.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And it's like, then you get to the bottom, it's like, ah, yeah, it's interesting.

[Michael]

Not all, I mean, not all pilots are created equal and not all instructors are created equal. And I have noticed a difference between instructors that have the vast majority of their time only instructing in a very linear airport environment versus instructors that learned in that environment and now have tens of thousands of hours in an operational world. And they basically will say this, this is me speaking. But they'll say, hey, you know that stuff you Learned in those 90 degree turns that you do when everything is linear? Wipe your ass with that shit. Let's go goat and the mountains. And I will show you how you actually stay alive and how some of that stuff will actually kill you, which is wild. There's a huge gap between those two knowledge bases between the operational pilot and the instructor pilot. And by no stretch, throwing any shade at that instructor pilot. Because they don't know. Exactly. They don't know. And they're not trying to be dangerous, and they aren't being dangerous. What they are teaching people to do is to pass their private pilot's license test, which is a license to go kill yourself.

[Alan Mack]

Yourself, if you're not kidding. It's like one of the things I learned in avoiding threats turned out to be great for environmental conditions. So, for example, flying in the mountains, if I've got to go from that 3,000 foot, you know, valley floor to 12,000 foot right here, I'm not going to start this gradual climb because now I'm blue sky, if you will, for a manpad, Right. So he's going to lock onto me with no trouble. So instead you stay low until you can't it and then you kind of zigzag almost like a, like a switchback. Yeah.

[Michael]

Like you're hiking up a mountain.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You just, you Fly. So you can still be at 50ft above the terrain, which is you're coming up. And then if you run out of power or somebody get shoots at you, all you do is just dive down and away and at the valley out there.

[Michael]

And my instructor's been awesome about this as well too. Depending on where the wind is at, you might get some nice or graphic lift. And the next thing you know you're doing like 1500ft per minute. Up, up, it's 60 torque. You're like, this is awesome.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And that's the stuff we didn't even. I. Yeah, I haven't even thought about that in years. But you know, when you do a pinnacle approach, you know you're looking to come into the wind. You've got this line of demarcation or if you come in under it, you're probably going to get a downdraft just as you're at the wrong time.

[Michael]

Yeah, you don't want to confuse those two. If you're expecting an updraft and you have a power setting for that and you start getting the hand of God put on the top of your.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, there's along the lines of a. What do you call it, like a micro burst on a fixed wing.

[Michael]

Yeah. So there's a grass Runway just just outside the airspace and probably the, the physical boundary of Glacier National Park. And there were two fatal accidents there last year, both in the summer, both on very hot days. So they were hot and high, meaning high hot temperature, high. And I'm talking density altitude, which is not necessarily what the altimeter is showing you. This is what you're echoing engine things, both of which unfortunately included passengers, both of them long into the trees, which, I mean, I think you see that

[Alan Mack]

a lot in Leadville in Colorado.

[Michael]

Wouldn't surprise me.

[Alan Mack]

Highest airport in the country.

[Michael]

I've jumped into Leadville and when I flared my canopy, I heard it laugh at me as I smashed into the ground. But again I, I try to read up on that stuff as much as possible. And I'm not shared a Monday morning quarterback. But hot and high days up here will kill you for sure. Like if I am gonna go on fog fly in the morning or go fly in the evening when things have cooled down a little bit just to give me that more power. Same thing you said, like hugging always make. I mean the classic flight school approach is that you approach everything from a 90 degree straight out. It's like, no, no, take an incredibly oblique angle. So it's just a nice peel off to the side you don't learn that stuff, though, until after you have your license.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And hopefully not. You know, I used to say that, you know, when I was a W1 1 or a young W2 in. In a conventional unit, and they send me out with another guy, my equal or less. And, you know, I said, there's a. There's a saying that, you know, oh, bad decisions, equal experience. Experience equals good judgment.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

I said I was getting a lot of good judgment because I was getting a lot of experience doing stupid things shouldn't do because I was junior.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And the other guy was no better to say, al, that's not a good idea. It's like, all right, let's try it. You know, and if you survive these things, you know, then you've heard it

[Michael]

in terms of buckets. You have luck bucket and experience bucket. And it takes a little bit of time.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

To move. Yeah. I just hope that you're around at that. The second book, what did you change between razor03 and then shooks in the

[Alan Mack]

Night, Schnooks in the dark. So Razor 03 was mostly. Mostly stories in Afghanistan that had already hit the news. So I figured that was the easiest way to. To get through because there was already some open source stuff.

[Michael]

The talking about you're inserting the horse soldiers and all that stuff early on. And then again, people. What was it, Michael? 253.

[Alan Mack]

Let me double check.

[Michael]

Pretty sure it was 253. So we went into that pretty deeply the first time. So people are interested in the early. And by that, I mean early. Early Afghanistan.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And. And then I had some family challenges. You know, my wife at the time had an opioid addiction, you know, prescription meds. She ended up dying.

[Michael]

I'm sorry, man.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. But you know, this. How many years was that now? But, you know, that's why I went to West Point to fly there and found my new wife Patty, who's great, but. So Chinooks in the Dark doesn't have that family drama. And it's mostly Iraq, although there's a. There's the. The Philippine. You know, I talked to those guys, put that in there. I talked to General J. Daly, who we nicknamed Coach. He's one of the original commanders of the 160th. And I interviewed him on a thing called Mount Hope 3. So Mount Hope 3 was. They took a Chinook and they flew into Libya and they stole a hind that was disabled.

[Michael]

So far, I love every part of the story. When did this happen?

[Alan Mack]

This was in the 80s.

[Michael]

Did they obviously fly a mechanic in there, too, to, like, help put it back together and get it serviceable?

[Alan Mack]

No, they flew it. They flew it to Chad, I think it was.

[Michael]

So they just got in there, kicked

[Alan Mack]

the tires and they slunk. No, they slung it.

[Michael]

Oh, no, in this story.

[Alan Mack]

No, they tried that. They did that in Mount Hope one. Okay, they tried that.

[Michael]

Yes.

[Alan Mack]

They couldn't get it going. There's bullets in the engine. So they could get it started, make it probably. And then Mount Hope 2. I'm not sure what it was. Something along those lines. Mines. And Mount Hope 3 is the very first use of a Chinook being moved by C5. They had to devise the whole process. And so this is like early 1980s, maybe 80, 82. It's when the. Remember the. The Iranians were mining.

[Michael]

The 19 would have been five, so I do not remember.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, well, anyway, the 160th was shooting up all these. My lane boats. Okay. Prime chance was the name of the thing during that time frame is when this happened. So General Daly, who was a colonel at the time, the regimental commander, actually wasn't a regiment. It was the soag, Special Operations Aviation Group. And he's fighting with the Air Force, and the State Department doesn't want him to do it, but I can't remember who. It's in the book, but, you know, so they figure out how to put A2 Chinooks into C5. They fly out, they put it back together, they fly in, they sling this thing out, out, and they put on A. Another C5, and they took it back to Fort Rucker and it flew for the test activity for years. Now, this is back when you couldn't buy a Hind, you know, now you can probably buy them.

[Michael]

I think you. Well, I mean, I flew in the back of a Russian MiG down in Bozeman, so I think. Yeah, depending on the pocketbook. But the era you're talking about. Yeah, they didn't want us to have one of those.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. But it was interesting to listen to him talk about what it was like, you know, the regiment. And as he told me about the things that they did and they developed and the techniques and the equipment, I thought, wow. I was in the unit longer than it existed when I got there.

[Michael]

Oh, wow.

[Alan Mack]

Right. So it. I got there, the unit was like 15 years old, and I was there 17 years. Yeah. So when I got there, I just thought, this is the way it's always been. No, you know, the. The Chinooks only got not, you know, really involved, you Know, there. And, and that was the, the, you know, the fastest deployable aviation task force in the world. You know, that was kind of the proof that you could do that with everything to include the Chinooks.

[Michael]

How long did it take him to sling that thing?

[Alan Mack]

It didn't take long.

[Michael]

I feel like they were doing NASCAR pit drills.

[Alan Mack]

They knew, you know, what they did? They, they flew in with a C130. Yeah. With a rigging team.

[Michael]

Yep.

[Alan Mack]

They rigged it up. And they had been practicing all this out of Bragg. There's a place called at, and they had a Navy SH3 is the closest thing they could find. And they put a bunch of weight in it.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Yeah. And the idea was the airframe was the right shape to see what it would fly like. Yeah. And so they did a proof of concept. They went out to Holloman Air Force base and flew 5, 500 gallon blivits beneath the shirt, which is, you know, £18,000 or so.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And they still, no matter what they did, that aircraft was trashed when it was done because they were way over gross. But the one doing the lift, that's the kind of. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that's in the, in the book. And then I talk about every step of the way from, from assessment to flight lead using real vignettes of either stuff that happened to me or other people that I talked to. So, you know, I talked to. Let's see, they did a hostage rescue in Afghanistan on top of a mountain where they came in. Then you've seen the video of the guys walking up and the bad guys don't have any sentries and they're asleep with their blankets probably. You see the helmet cam of the guy, you know, come up. You see the muzzle of an M4 and the guy pulls the, the blanket down and then pulls it back up and they. But I don't know, just the move.

[Michael]

Do you watch it happen or do you go back into your blanket? It's tough to say.

[Alan Mack]

I don't know. But anyway, there's that and some other stories in Iraq, you know, like the one I told you about the, you know, getting everybody out. And one of the coolest ones I did is I think called Kiowa, which was a guy that came out of Iran into Iraq and it was crappy weather, so he figured he was safe. But no, you know, we flew ground force out, got him, you know, and it's, it's a pretty cool story actually.

[Michael]

When you guys. What is the selection and assessment investment like do you guys put a message out and say, hey, if you want to fly here, here's the criteria.

[Alan Mack]

They have a recruiting team that goes around to all of the installations that have pilots and crew members, army only

[Michael]

or will you guys go service wide or military wide?

[Alan Mack]

The recruiting effort only goes to the army. But the last five years or so that I was there, we had 11 Marine Corps aviators, lieutenant colonels. Everyone of the them all came across to be army warrant officers and fly for the 160th. They did an inner service transfer.

[Michael]

Is there a pay hit associated with that? I was gonna say.

[Alan Mack]

But what they did is they give him a bonus to offset it.

[Michael]

Yeah, when I went from E6 to 01 there was a pay hit, but there's. That's why it's O1E. There's a little bit of a stop loss.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I feel like lieutenant colonel to yeah. And then CW1 is gonna sting and

[Alan Mack]

then you can just put in for it. You don't have have to go to but the recruiting brief, they show you a little hoorah video and yeah, you know they.

[Michael]

So then do they fly you out to the unit and what if you're not? Do you have to be flying one of the assets that they fly?

[Alan Mack]

No.

[Michael]

So then how do you test them on like. So say they've never flown either an MH Blackhawk or a Chinook. Let's say they're 53 pilot. How do you assess them? Then you get in there in the cockpit with them and then you, you may. Obviously somebody in that aircraft is fully certified and qualified.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And you're looking at their stick and rudder. Is this an interview thing?

[Alan Mack]

It's everything. So it's only a week long assessment. But you fill out this packet. It's like this thick book, you know, and I can't remember the numbers. I did put it in the book. The numbers of the people they actually assess, they reject from the packet. They bring you in and then you do, you know, standard army PT test test, a swim test, just a Navy.

[Michael]

Yeah. All the basic military stuff.

[Alan Mack]

And then you know, psychology, couple of psychology tests. And then depending which aircraft you're assessing for. So if you're already a Chinook pilot, you know, you're assessing for Chinooks. If you are another airframe that we don't have like you know, an Apache guy or a 53 guy, they'll figure out where they're going to put you and then those guys will assess you. And so for example, we, I found that Apache and Kiowa Warrior guys, which was the. Oh, 58. Yeah. With the best Chinook transplants, really. And the reason was Chinook pilots that came already had kind of a cushy life. So they generally don't come to the 160 because it's an assault platform. You know, it's not. It's not really a cargo. It's a. It's heavy assault. Yeah. So it's more like a Blackhawk mission. So if you get Blackhawk guys, guys. The blackout guys have what's called interference, you know, in their mind. And they kind of. They.

[Michael]

They're like, I feel like this is a ding on Blackhawk guys.

[Alan Mack]

But no, no, no, no. Well, it should be. But no, it's not just that. You know, they would be like, this isn't how you do an assault in a Blackhawk. This is a Chuck, you know, these other things. So they. They're a little bit tougher to get through that initial, you know, okay, this is how we do it. But the Apache and the KW guy guys haven't got a clue. They're attack guys. Right. And they just come in, you tell them what to do, and they just do it. Oh, okay. You know, or Cobra guys. They were a lot of fun, interesting. But, you know, if you're an attack guy, generally you want to come in and you want to be an H6 pilot. Right. But there's only so many of them. And if you're good enough, like, they want you, but they just can't take you in that unit, they'll say, would you accept a Shino transition? And almost always they say, yes.

[Michael]

That is the correct answer.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And then they'll bring in.

[Michael]

So how can they assess? So say you bring in an Apache guy and whatever he's going to get into a Chinook. What are you asking them to do in that bird, given that they've never flown it before, to really give you an idea of the level of aviator.

[Alan Mack]

So they don't. If they're not qualified in the Chinook, for example. Yeah, they don't fly in the Chinook.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Right. What they do is they'll come to the. The simulator. Flight simulator is very realistic. And I will sit there and say, okay, look at this stuff. Here's what the aircraft will do. Right. And it's twofold. Number one, it's a little ooh. And a, you know, recruiting pitch be, look, you can look what you can fly, but I want to see his retention. Can he figure out, because, you know, 20 minutes into this, I'M gonna say, okay, bring up the hover page. And if he remembers the right button to push, and then I tell him how to use it, and if he can do it, it then, okay. In my opinion, he's trainable.

[Michael]

So it's actually less stick and rudder and more your ability to learn.

[Alan Mack]

Yes.

[Michael]

Are there people who are just not good enough pilots and they're just wadding the simulator up left?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's guys, you know. Yeah, no, there are. And you know, there are guys that have gotten through where they were good enough pilots, but their personality sucks, you know, and you can tell, you know, when, when the board happens at the end, right. They, you sit in front of this board of officers, you know, your instructor pilot, the recruiter, the commerce, the colonel, you know, and they sit there and they critique your performance and you have to give a briefing and some other things, but they critique your performance. And if we already know that, we're not going to take you. It's generally a very gentle, you know, 20 minutes and you're out of there. Right. Let you down easy. Maybe we'll even ask you to come back. You weren't ready.

[Michael]

Yeah, especially. Yeah, there's no reason to drag that up. The news is already bad enough, but if you're an. And there are a few 60 minutes minimum.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna run the whole gamut. I've seen captains, I've seen captains, Army 03s get, you know, veins popping out of their head, sweat every. And just, you know, spittle flying as they walk out of their, you guys, I'm out of here. And as they leave, the Colonel's like, yeah, I knew he wasn't going to fit in.

[Michael]

And your name will be put on whatever roster it is to make sure that you never return.

[Alan Mack]

Well, you know what sucks, though, is those are the guys that go back to the unit, their unit, and talk bad about us, like, oh, those guys, you know, a bunch of cowboys. They wouldn't take me, you know, and

[Michael]

it's like, they missed out.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, they missed out, right? It's like, no, we dodged a bullet. But, you know, then there's other guys who. We're not going to take them. Well, you might take them. And they're kind of on the fence, right? And you're like, okay, let's put the screws to him and see how he handles it, you know, how does he handle the stress of this? Because it's not, it's no fun. And, you know, I remember when I was on the other end of it, you know, thinking, you know, God, this sucks, you know. But I was expecting them to ask me questions about my wife at the time that I wasn't ready to answer, answer or I thought would stop me from getting in. And they never did. So every hard question they asked me was not hard because it wasn't the one I feared.

[Michael]

Yeah, it makes sense.

[Alan Mack]

And then afterwards, the shrink took me aside, say, hey, you know, we purposely didn't talk about that. We'll deal with it, you know. Yeah. Kind of thing.

[Michael]

What. How long does it. In the civilian world, they would call it getting type rated. How long is the. If somebody comes in there, they're going to be a snook guy they're coming from.

[Alan Mack]

An Apache takes about eight months.

[Michael]

Eight months?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Jesus. I was going to say two weeks.

[Alan Mack]

No, but that, but that improves. But that includes the environments. Okay, Right. So you're going to do mission training. So you do terrain following, radar, you do air refueling, shipboard landings, mountain, oxygen, urban. Right.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

So you do all that stuff in the course of eight months. So.

[Michael]

Okay, well, that's way more like in the civilian world, you would go learn the aircraft itself. The minimum to be able to kill yourself by getting it off the ground. And then you'd get a rubber stamp.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, yeah. That's what a friend of mine, when I went to the Lakota transition, Indian Indiantown Gap, a friend of mine was flying EC145s for air methods. Yeah. And he goes, so I did a ride along with him, he goes, yeah, see this? Three days. I got three days of training and they sent me off on my own. He goes, you're going to go to Indiana Town Gap and take eight weeks to learn what I learned in three days.

[Michael]

I don't know if learned in three days. Days is the appropriate word to say there. Yeah. You'll learn in eight weeks what he tried to learn in three days. Those two products are not the same. But that is about what it is in the. You're going to do, you know, what's the maximum gross weight? You know, what's the maximum allowable?

[Alan Mack]

You know, it's like, I want to say it's probably two months of that eight is spent just learning to fly it. Yeah.

[Michael]

Airframe specific types.

[Alan Mack]

So you're doing, you know, engine failures, roll on, landings, emergencies, AFCs, off flight. Yeah. And then once you're good at that, then we do instruments.

[Michael]

Yep.

[Alan Mack]

And then you transition into mission stuff. And each of those mission environments you do in the Simulator First I was

[Michael]

gonna say, how much of this time is in the sim versus the real aircraft?

[Alan Mack]

Not very much. But you always proceed the next phase of training in the simulator.

[Michael]

That makes total sense.

[Alan Mack]

So air refueling, you get up there and it's. The thing is it's not that realistic, but you can do the maneuver right because the, you know, the, the tanker comes at you 300 foot above you, half mile offset, he's doing 100 and 180 and as you combine you're doing 120. And then he loses all his speed as he comes around you and stops at your 2 o'. Clock. You climb up, get into position, plug into your thing so you can do that in the simulator, you know, and they run the checklists and, and all that kind of stuff. But the actual movement to contact the simulator is. The fidelity is not that good. But dust landings, it's good for that. That and you can go land into walled compounds or canyons and stuff like that and transition to the, what we call loss of visual reference. Yeah. Approach. And so it's good for all that stuff. Deck landings, you land on LHD LPDs right there in the simulator. So before you go to do deck landings, you're going to be in the same. That's pretty cool. So it's actually better than. What do they call that? The fclp, The I can't remember the acronym. So. So typically when you go to a Navy ship, you have to do a refresher. You have to do six bounces at an airfield that has markings like.

[Michael]

Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You know, like, like now I can't remember the acronym. But we didn't have to because the Navy certified our simulator is good enough, you know, to do that. Yeah.

[Michael]

What's the most impressive thing you've ever seen happen in a helicopter?

[Alan Mack]

A good question. I think the most impressive thing I've ever seen is what we talked about earlier, the one wheel landing in Afghanistan on a ridge line that probably wasn't much wider than this table.

[Michael]

See if you can find this Michael. It'll be, it would probably be Army Chinook rear wheel landing on Hut. On mountainside.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. That's a famous picture of the guys out of Pencil, Pennsylvania. Actually, they made a Christmas card. I mean, as far as Christmas cardi, It ain't Santa Claus.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

You know, and this is a two wheel landing that he's going to pull up and try doing it with one because now you're balancing. If you get two. The thing is Stable.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And kind of like this. It ain't moving. If you're on one, you got. You're all over the place.

[Michael]

Yeah. Three dimensional rotation. What'd you find there, Michael?

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[Alan Mack]

Wayfair. Every style, every home still. But the most impressive was to see that happen once on a target that went hot. So.

[Michael]

And the guys just rock.

[Alan Mack]

Guys. Yeah, we're doing this with silver and we come in and every approach was a fast rope approach. Except for this one which was a two wheel landing. And he lays. He's doing it. The ground force is getting out and a machine gun is right there like a belt fed machine gun. And the minigun opens up while the guy doing this.

[Michael]

That's weak. I don't know if this the exact video that you're looking for. That is not the exact video I'm looking for. Does that look like a hut in Afghanistan? You disgust me.

[Alan Mack]

I did his. Oh, it's on. Okay. Okay. His what?

[Michael]

That is in theory though, kind of what we're talking about. Except take put a structure on there and the guy didn't destroy. Well, he probably did when he left and when he applied power. But.

[Alan Mack]

Well, but see. So if you look where the pilots are. Are.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So they've got an armor panel in that. The. The right door. Okay. Right. So the chin bubble's clear. But the right panel looks like it's probably got a. An armored panel there. So he's not looking down. So. And because you got the pointy nose, the chin bubble is not as big. Yeah. So you have like. You can't look you, you. You got nothing to look at. Is this just.

[Michael]

Oh yeah, there we go. Listen to the crew chief too. Like. Yeah, forward five right there.

[Alan Mack]

That's it. Yeah, you got to listen to the crew. The crew chief is everything especially. I've done stuff to like these little patrol bases. Like this is.

[Michael]

This is similar but this is demonstrated again. Are you up there? Is there in the modern ones, is there a button they can push that would hold that position.

[Alan Mack]

Or. Guys, there is now.

[Michael]

Wow.

[Alan Mack]

It wasn't.

[Michael]

I was gonna say. So you're up there and just.

[Alan Mack]

There's.

[Michael]

There's stuff right in the bowl.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, there's stuff now. I'm jealous. There's stuff they can do now.

[Michael]

I mean, that's ridiculous.

[Alan Mack]

Also, did he back.

[Michael]

Did he back into that or did he come straight to down?

[Alan Mack]

Probably came straight down. It's the easiest thing to do. Backing up sucks. Yeah. So, like, when you do an external load, for example, you'll. You'll come to a hover about 10ft above the load.

[Michael]

Yes.

[Alan Mack]

You're stable. And then you go, okay, moving forward. And you just ease forward. And the crew chief's looking through the hole. He's like, all right, forward, you know, 20, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And as you. As you hear that final countdown, you just slow down and you stop. But if you stay there too long and you start moving around because there's no visual reference. Reference.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And then he's like, you know, back five. You might as well just go around.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Come back because it's so much.

[Michael]

Because you're staring out into space. Right.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. That's the guys. Those are the guys out of the Pennsylvania Guard, actually.

[Michael]

I mean, basically the front of that is parked in a tree.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And that's what you want.

[Michael]

That's what you want a great visual reference, though.

[Alan Mack]

It is great. Yeah. I did a thing actually on Red Wings. I put Red Squadron in. And they were supposed to fast rope, 90 foot, right.

[Michael]

That's not fun, by the way.

[Alan Mack]

No. And the other aircraft did it from 90ft, and they all burned their hands and stuff. And as I came to. To a hover, the other pilot was flying as he came to a hover, and the crew, she's like, you know, come down 20, you know, 10, you know, and the guy goes, oh, I can't see. I got nothing to look at. And I had a little bush out the side. I was like, oh, I got a visual. I'll take the controls. Right? And then the crew chief goes, or just keep coming down 20. We did a 10 foot rope, right?

[Michael]

And the best is when you kick the rope and it doesn't even go out of frame. And you just see the bag. You're like, yeah, that's what. So here's a great example. Pre 911 versus post pre 9 11, we would go do our static fast rope training in the airlofts, right? And we do 90 footers or whatever. We could Get. And I remember the old guys, like if I even see your boots on the rope, you will never live it down you. It's just, I mean we're on these thick ass welding gloves with flight gloves underneath. Post 911 it's like I got all of. And then we were in flight suits, right. So light and people were still burning in at the bottom. We'd have like the honeycomb down there, as if it's going to do anything. And then post 911 it's like all of my fully loaded out with a backpack and they're like, hey, grab the rope with whatever you can. It's just the difference between how awesome we thought we were and then the reality of a 90 footer. Oh my. Even with your feet on the rope, it just sucks.

[Alan Mack]

Right? And, but now, you know what I'm saying is the aircraft. A good friend of mine, John Woodyard was the guy that actually developed what's called DAFIX digital AFCs and automatic flight control system. And it just sounds like cheating. Oh it is, it's. I would love to have had that. And I mean I got, I got to fly it, you know, when it's still in the test phase.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

But I wasn't there when they implemented it. But you could come in to an approach and I think there was a button on the cyclic you hit and it was position hold and then the altitude and it was all. The only altitude hold we had for the ground was a radar altitude hold. And the problem with that is the slope. Yeah, right. This thing is all the ins. So it's a gyro and it knows the aircraft is steady. So you could come six inches off the ground and just hit it. Just hit it and it's good. And you can move it left and right just with the, your thumb and bring it up and down with your other thumb.

[Michael]

And now do you think that decreases stick and rudder skills?

[Alan Mack]

It does, it does.

[Michael]

But also there's a time and place for that too.

[Alan Mack]

But you don't need it, you know, So I mean, mean when you need it is. Yeah. Is when that stuff goes away like battle damage. And you know, there's. For example, there's. We had three types of desert landings or what we call loss of visual reference approach. 2130 it was called. And you had what's called an Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. So an Alpha, you come into a stationary hover above the dust cloud. It's all roiled up and you get stable. You center up everything on the hover page and you just come down at 300 foot a minute and just descend into your touchdown. And one of my favorite pilots, guy named Bubbles, used to call it the Screaming Alpha because if you're. Sometimes the ground force would say, I want all three aircraft in the same lz, you know, like one at a time. And so the first aircraft, it sucks. Now the second one, you've got all this talc is up in here and by the third guy, you know, you're way up here.

[Michael]

Yeah, I was gonna say you're hovering at 600ft to be out of the.

[Alan Mack]

That's the Altar Alpha. Right. It's the low. It's actually the least traumatic of the bunch.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

The Bravo is a VMC approach a little bit steeper than normal, where at about 80ft you try to match your altitude above the ground with your half your airspeed. Right. So 80ft, you want to be 40 knots. Yep, 40ft. And if you do it right when you get to the bottom, it's not too bad. Although you've been there, you know. Yep.

[Michael]

Sometimes, sometimes it's fine when you're in the Hilux, strapped in.

[Alan Mack]

Right. Well, when you're not, it can be tough. And then what was called the Charlie. Now the Charlie is essentially an old fashioned thing and you could do this in your helicopter right now. So let's say you're going to land to a snowy field Y and there's really. When you come in, you start to come into a hover, you start bringing up the, the white out and you go air speed. You go, okay, that's not going to work. You're going to come in with air speed. But here's the deal. You come in well short of where you're going to land and you essentially air taxi on up and you keep slowing back until the dust cloud comes up and it comes to about here.

[Michael]

So before that though, you have enough ground speed where you are outpacing. Yes, this. Okay.

[Alan Mack]

So you're slowing back.

[Michael]

Yep.

[Alan Mack]

The cloud will come up and it will start to come up on you.

[Michael]

So you're catching it in your peripheral

[Alan Mack]

and you'll see it and just look. Okay. And all you do is once it gets to here, even if it comes around like this, like this, and you don't like what you see in front of you, you just speed up just a little bit. It's, it's just, just. Yeah, it sounds like that. Yep. And, and then you just, then you steer with the pedals to, to find where you're gonna. Yeah, I like, I like that. Yeah. Now what you've done with this cloud is now you're as slow as you can go in those conditions. The wind or whatever it is, it's almost like a single engine or engine out procedure in a. And a, a EC145. You go as slow as you can at about 5ft until it goes bing, you know, and you go, okay, that's it. And you just run it on. And it could be a hover. Right. But you don't know. And that's what this does is it allows you to do that. But nobody ever liked doing it. And they always be like, why would I have to learn that? I was like, okay. You ever had your MFD shot out? I have. And you might want to know how to do this.

[Michael]

I feel like.

[Alan Mack]

And you could do this without the mfds, just the backup attitude indicator. Yeah. So you just, you're just looking and if, and if it gets to the point where you know the. You're still doing 20, 30 knots on the clouds here and yeah, you might want to rethink what you're doing.

[Michael]

There's some actually really cool grass strips here, the Forest service grass strips, that you could practice this in the wintertime, relatively consequence free, where you could. Because for what you're describing, I will go practice this next season because it's season was horrible for snow. I would just go land somewhere else where there's no snow and hike if you guaranteed to not wad up the helicopter.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, but we would do this out at. We were.

[Michael]

I'm flying for slightly different reasons than you were though.

[Alan Mack]

So we were playing with this out at Fort Lewis. We were landing to this trail. It wasn't snow, it was dust and it was super talc powder, you know, dust. And we were just coming in and landing like this, you know, because I was showing, Showing, you know, their instructor. Yeah. You know, the right way to do this because the. I was lucky enough to be on the ground floor of inventing these procedures. Yeah, it was a guy, Chuck Grant, I'm going to say is his name. It's not his real name. He's the one that came up with it. And then we as a group polished it up and wrote it down as a, you know, task condition standard. And Afghanistan was the first place we got to really use it. And our company was really good at it because we'd been in Kuwait a couple years. I mentioned this on that first podcast. And the other company didn't quite embrace it yet and they lost a couple landing gear and like you know what? We'll, we'll start doing that.

[Michael]

Those dust clouds that you're talking about. I mean, do you have maintenance people up there just washing after every flight and cleaning and compressor washing?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And are they just pulling blades out of the. Basically the N1 blades of the turbine all the time? Because I can't imagine imagine those. This. You guys ingesting stuff that should shut down an engine.

[Alan Mack]

They flush the engines every day. So how could not we fly at night. So we come in and it was always interesting. We'd come back, you know, sun up, we do a pre flight for the next period of darkness. Then we go eat breakfast. Or maybe we'd eat breakfast first, wait for the sun to come up and then we all go to bed. And then at the end of the day, which is our beginning of the day, you know, the maintenance guys have been up, the day walkers have been doing their thing thing. And you know, I would be the first one into the planning area. I make coffee, I turn on all the mf the. The big screens and look and see what the ISR is looking at. And then I'd look at the coordinates on all of them and see which ones were in our aor. It's like, okay, those three of five are possible, are possible for my guys, right. So I would then plot them, get a general idea of what was involved. And I'd read the, the daily, what they call insums and the misreps. So all of the, the sapphire events, all the, the shooting people, shooting helicopters and stuff like that. So I would know what was going on before everybody else came in. And then the maintenance guy would come in and he ripping to me about, you know, how we.

[Michael]

He had to have something for you every day.

[Alan Mack]

It was every day. And he was, he was one of my favorite pilots. But yeah, I get my ass handed to me every day for stuff that wasn't my doing. We landed one time on a rock, rock about this big. And it got stuck between the two tires on the front landing gear. It was in a riverbed and it would not come out. The guys were like trying to kick it out. And we flew all night, you know, into the Khyber Pass.

[Michael]

Just a little flare piece.

[Alan Mack]

Well, there was, you know, we didn't like choice, you know, they were, they were in contact almost the whole night. We did a couple cazavets and so the next day he's like, what the hell you. That rock could have dropped on somebody. I'm like, could you get it out? He goes, yeah, we got it out with no problem. I said, how'd you get it out? We tried, like, well, we had to jack it up, deflate the tires. Yeah. And pull it out with a chain.

[Michael]

You had to use tools that we didn't have available to us at the time.

[Alan Mack]

And I'm like, do you hear yourself? He's like, well, you guys should know better.

[Michael]

Hey, man, real world situations dictate. But they did.

[Alan Mack]

They did. The maintenance guys are the unsung him heroes. You know, I would go in Iraq. What was cool I did detail this in chinooks in the dark is we go down there and I'd bring like a contact team. So it'd be a gator with, you know, a bunch of avionics and engine parts. And I'd bring, you know, an avionics guy, an electrician, the engine man, and a tech inspector ti and, you know, sometimes be a hydraulics guy. And we'd go down there and they would sit and, you know, these were echo models, and they were on the end of their. Their time, and they were always breaking and be like, ah, the ground force is going to be here in 15 minutes. Oh, and this sensor just went bad. Bill. Got it, sir. You know, it was like a nascar pit crew. Yeah. And it was so great, you know, and I couldn't do that all the time, but there in Iraq, I could. And we had enough people, so they had a day and a night schedule.

[Michael]

And what you're describing is just hard shut down for any other type of aviation. Aviation?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Like there's no gator with all the extra avionics and. Oh, yeah, just switch out the blade and, you know, some of the compressor fans on the number, like.

[Alan Mack]

And these are guys that want to do it. They want to get out of the wire. They want to go down, you know.

[Michael]

Yeah. That's like a hard stop. Maybe disassemble the rotor head as it gets lifted onto a truck and taken to the mechanic somewhere, and you get it back four months later. In the civilian world, I had a

[Alan Mack]

flat tire one time, as in all of a sudden facade and. Or some gold, actually. And I come out there and my left aft tire is flat. And I'm like, the seals are going to be here in like 20 minutes. Like, don't worry, sir. We got it. Go ahead, get inside. Right. So I get inside, I bring the everything up online. I feel the aircraft getting jacked up. You know, it sounded just like something out of formula one.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And then like, go. You know, it's like,

[Michael]

yeah, none of that stuff would work without those guys who. And gals who never get the recognition.

[Alan Mack]

No, they don't get a movie made about them. You know, they're so. It's nice that I, you know, you have a chance to talk about them right here.

[Michael]

No, it's amazing. I. I try to as often as possible. It's, you know, putting stuff out on the Internet. You have no control over where it goes and where it lands and what people do with it. But all the time I. I will have people who are. Have a conventional military background and they'll email and say, well, you know, did I do enough? I feel like I did. I'm like, listen, man, I'm sorry that the special operations world writ large gets more attention because the special operations world, just so, you know, can't operate without every other conventional unit. Enforce, by the way, whether it's by, with and through, whether it's the supply network, like, you know, who's not getting a movie either. The pilots who flew us from Virginia beach to fill in the blank. And then the world, you know, with the helicopters, you know, and that's one

[Alan Mack]

of the chapters I did, was I. So I did a chapter on the flight medics doing a casaback. I talked to Jimmy Hatch.

[Michael]

I know Jimmy well.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And so I did an interview with that. And so we had a Kazak thing. And then I did one from the maintenance guy's perspective. And. And you know, the, the guys that don't get out, like the, the operations guys, they were great. And they're just flat ops guys that you, you. They keep track of your flight time. Right. But not overseas. Overseas, they're keeping track of everything. They're keeping the Blue Force trackers up. Yeah. They're the guys making sure you have fuel. So they're like, you know, okay, sir, these five fobs normally have fuel, but only two of them do because there's contamination at these other ones don't go there, you know, or they would keep track of the hospital beds that were available. So if we had to do casabac, where take them.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Or not. And then who else did I do the air mission commander, which is a role that doesn't get a lot of. It's tough. They're sitting in the seat in between and behind me and the other pilot. Right. So they have no reach on the controls. Yeah. Yet they are seeing all of it. And so, like, when you look up front, sometimes you're like, oh, yeah. I don't just close my eyes if you don't like, what you see, don't look, you know, well, he's got to watch, watch. And he has no control over it. And so I did a, you know, a chapter on that, you know, saying, you know, some of the things, and it was just. It was fun. It was a fun book to write.

[Michael]

I'd say 99 out of 100 people would have no idea. The air mission commander role. It is kind of an invisible spot. In the movie Blackhawk Down, I think they portrayed it a little bit because they were at least relaying up to that individual that seemed to be holding Darren Harrell. Yeah, right, man.

[Alan Mack]

And, yeah, so this would be like, he's in the Chinook in the flight. And then they used to try. So this was a 90s thing that they tried into the early 2000s was the ABCCC, so the airborne command and control platform. Right. So It'd be a C130 with a bunch of radio consoles, but there's no ISR, there's no video.

[Michael]

Oh, can you imagine trying to coordinate that just by ear?

[Alan Mack]

And that's what they were doing, and it just. It sucked, you know, so now we've come so far. Like, when I left, you could see the ISR feed in the cockpit. Yeah, right. I mean, years before that, you know, the ground force had a laptop that would plug into the set antenna. They could watch.

[Michael]

Years before that. There wasn't that, though, either. You know, it evolved over time.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

And you get radio updates.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

Like, people are running. You're like, right where?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

In which direction?

[Alan Mack]

And so that, you know, the fact that you can now see that and get some situational awareness, you know, I did put one time. You know, the follow on missions were always fun because I got to use the. The goodies, you know, all the stuff the aircraft had to offer. The ground force would come in and go, hey, we got to follow on target. Here's the grid. I'd pull it up on the mfd, go to imagery. Yeah. And instead of a map, and they look at it and go, yeah, we want to go there, to that spot. And then I could press another button that had contour intervals, and it would show that that empty spot was actually like this.

[Michael]

Yes.

[Alan Mack]

I was like, yeah, I can't put you there. They're like, why not watch this. Like, oh, okay, but we still want to go there. Yeah. Well, you know, in Afghanistan, if you see an empty spot in a mountainous area from overhead imagery, it's probably a cemetery or a hill. Yeah, right. I mean, there's no Place that's flat in the hills that's not built on. Yeah.

[Michael]

The topography lines in Afghanistan are often very close together.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Yeah. What do you want to do with the rest of your life, man, now that you're. I mean, you lived a life of hell of an adventure. What do you got now?

[Alan Mack]

Well, so I did the. The time in the 160th, and then I did my last assignment at West Point as a commander of the flight detachment. That was where I learned to skydive and fly the general around. And I like to say that that was just enough stress as the commander to. I think if I had stopped being a special operator, just stopped. I think it'd be tough, you know, mentally and emotionally. But instead, I got to do this other job that still had a lot of responsibility, extended off ramp, if you will. Yeah, that's what it was. And so when I finished that, I got this job with the county. So I ended up being the deputy commissioner, Emergency services for the Division of Emergency Management. Right. And that's a long way of saying I dealt with floods and storms and, you know, things like that. I did that for 10 years. And then this takes me up to now. So I retired from New York State, date doing that, and it's like, all right, what's next? Right. I get a little older, so I went back to school. So I'm. I'm getting my master's in communications at Johns Hopkins, and I'm doing that all online. And so that's given me time to sort of figure out where I want to go, because what I've been doing the last couple years, in addition to my real job, the emergency manager, was speaking gigs for fundraisers for non profits like the Night Soccer foundation and the Special Operators Transition Foundation. So I'd be the guy, the draw that brings in the money, you know, oh, you want to sit and have a meal with a. Hell, that's $15,000, you know, like, okay, you know, and sit down, and you raise money that way. So that's been a lot of fun. And I'm gonna. I'm trying to, you know, kind of hone that a little bit better for some corporate speaking. So that's where I'm headed. Waiting for the other book to come out. And I'm writing another book. I'm actually outlining it right now. It's gonna be a fiction book, military thriller, and that's kind of that there. Oh, I'm gonna visit my grandkids now. When I was here before, I had three grandkids now I have five.

[Michael]

That's how life works.

[Alan Mack]

And they're all over the place.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So, you know, I was just down in D.C. watching the cheer competition for the girls.

[Michael]

So, so happy. My daughter never got into that.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, it's insane.

[Michael]

But that very good choice of my granddaughters.

[Alan Mack]

Both of them are little peanuts, you know? And hey, they're the ones, they throw the flyers. Yeah.

[Michael]

They get any desire to fly anymore at all?

[Alan Mack]

No.

[Michael]

Interesting how that is, huh?

[Alan Mack]

A friend of mine used to. The same guy that gave me the ride along with their methods.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Or stat medevac, I think, is what it was.

[Michael]

You want to talk about a dangerous trip job? Dude, I didn't realize how often those helicopters crash.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, well, they've. They've instead a bunch of stuff that they're followed. They. It's. They're safer than they used to be. But he retired from that and then he got asked to this other company. I can't remember the name. They're out of down where Hershey is. Harrisburg. So there's this company that they fly by, like heart transplants and lung transplants and by jet.

[Michael]

That makes sense.

[Alan Mack]

But the traffic in that area is so bad you got to fly it by helicopter.

[Michael]

They didn't have hospital from airport.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. So they didn't have that component. So they asked him to, you know, set one up. And so he calls me, he's like, al, I want you to be one of my pilots. And I'm like, I don't want to do that.

[Michael]

You know, I don't think it would probably check all the boxes for you, but I mean, again, it depends on how much or why you would want to fly anymore. Maybe you got all your flying.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, maybe. But you know, the. Where I was going partly with the, you know, the step down from the special operations to the West Point to this other thing, it was very similar, you know. You know, we had a. A school bus crash where bus flew off the road. And I helped coordinate that effort. Yeah. You know, we've had. You know, the funny thing is President Maduro not only did the 16 just go picking them up, there's my foam. You know, I'm not there doing that. But they brought him back to Stewart Air Base, which was my hangar for West Point.

[Michael]

Probably just you off.

[Alan Mack]

You sit like this and my office is in the background. I'm like.

[Michael]

And I feel like they chose that intentionally just to irritate.

[Alan Mack]

They did. And I just retired the day before. Oh, no way. From that job. Not the county job. Yeah. And the emergency management section was involved in dealing with the. The state police and. And the feds and all that stuff, securing him and providing comms. That would have been me. So I've totally missed out on everything.

[Michael]

I wonder, though, if you were to, whatever. Get a little Robinson or whatever it is, and if you were able to just fly because you wanted to and just mess around, I wonder if you would fall back in. In love with it again with all the other pressures and stuff.

[Alan Mack]

For me, I think I'd get bored because we. Or.

[Michael]

Or I could see that. Or you'd be like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I'm in love with aviation.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, maybe. But, you know, at West Point, like, every year, you know, you get to, you know, October, September, you know, and say, oh, we've got these flight hours to burn. We didn't use them. And I'd go out, single pilot in the. In the Lakota, and just fly around these beautiful days. And, you know, upstate New York's beautiful.

[Michael]

Yeah, for sure.

[Alan Mack]

But I got bored really quick. It's like, all right, there's an hour. Oh, well, what. You know, because what I liked wasn't the flying. I mean, I did like flying, but. Yeah, I like bringing, you know, an assault force to the target and beating up bad guys. You know, watching them do it.

[Michael]

I mean, there's a lot of problem solving in that, too. That terminates and then being able to get there. I. I get it. Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And that's, you know, that's the. The thing. Problem solving. So here's what a lot of people don't realize is that again, the 160th, it's more fun to be the guy running in the cockpit than the guy flying the aircraft.

[Michael]

Really?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. So, you know, just because you're busier. Well, you're making happen, you know, you're the one making sure that you. That guy's. You're telling, you know, fly right, turn left, you know, climb, descent, and he's doing it.

[Michael]

And sometimes there's control of the monkey on the controls.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And so fly monkey.

[Alan Mack]

You're. Yes. You're creating.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

We call it the stick monkey. You know, it's like.

[Michael]

All right.

[Alan Mack]

Some level of truth to that. They call monkey skills. Yeah. It is like monkey skills are a dime a dozen. But to be able to get to target, you know, around the threat, you know, my buddy. I don't know if he. I can't say his name. He did the bin Laden thing. Yep. Right. And he tried to go public with it. He Was told he could, and he started to. And then he got his PP swack and he's like.

[Michael]

So when you say the bin Laden thing, did he successfully land the haircut aircraft or did he crash one in the front yard?

[Alan Mack]

No, no, he's the, he's the.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

He was the overall flight lead. Okay. You know, but the simple fact that he had come up with the plan that originally didn't include those stealth birds. Yeah. But he doesn't have the opportunity to tell that story. It's a wonderful story. Yeah. You know, and he doesn't get credit for that, but it's fun to be the guy in charge.

[Michael]

I wish they wouldn't have taken those birds only because China now has them within like 72 hours. I think the vast majority of that helicopter was in another country.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

It was funny.

[Michael]

The stayed in the hangar.

[Alan Mack]

Maybe the, The. I can't remember. The, the first stealth drone came to Afghanistan. Right. I get a special briefing, like, all right, if this thing goes down, because normally we just JDM them or go pick up the, the. Some of the black boxes, you might go, yeah, get. They said this thing goes down, you're going to go recover it. Right? Period. Yeah. It doesn't matter what time of day. And then I was like, okay, about a week later, the Iranians hacked it and flew it into Iran, took it. I was like, am I going to go get it?

[Michael]

No.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

You just told me that wherever this goes. So we got. We're loading up the fuel truck.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, man.

[Michael]

Yeah, I didn't. At the coffee shop, the alert pilots and crew will come in and I'll. I'll chat with them. And they're based out of the hospital and they're one of the few helicopters in town. And I love watching helicopters fly, but I hate hearing that one take off because it's not going to a birthday party.

[Alan Mack]

Right.

[Michael]

And then once. You know what to listen for, like. And last time I saw was like, you guys are flying a lot. They're like, yeah, they're. They were flying yesterday down south. Like, man, that is. And then also, I guess you could feel great that you're helping people, but at the same time, do you get joy from flying to somebody's worst day? You know?

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. You know, Cesar, PR and Kazak are the same way, you know, in, in the military. So, you know, PR is personnel recovery. Kazakh is. It's. It's like medevac. But the difference with medevac is it's dedicated. They have these bubbles that they operate in Right. Yeah. Whereas Kazak, you're tackle. You're along with the mission and you've got the same capabilities, sometimes better. You know, we would carry a. What's called a SRT surgical resuscitation team. Four high speed doctors, plus our flight medics, which are the best in the business. Yeah. But when somebody gets hurt, you know, like Jimmy Hatch, you know, you're going, yeah. And you're going to do everything you can to get to them.

[Michael]

And yeah, there's no joy in that type of flying.

[Alan Mack]

I've had a lot of success stories where, you know, you know, six months later you get an email, mail said, hey man, thanks for coming. Get me. Yeah. It's like, of course I came and get you. What do you think I was going to do? And. But, you know, it's nice. Yeah, that's my favorite mission actually. Do you know Nick Palm Shano? I do. So I did his podcast a while back and he asked me, he goes, what was your most rewarding missions? And I said, kazakh. And he said, why? I said, well, assault, especially when it works out, is satisfying just because the plan worked. But Kazabak, you're saving somebody, you know, and if you can bring a guy home and his. I'm doing it now too. I started to tear up. He's like, you okay? I'm like, sorry. He just. It, it's very.

[Michael]

Yeah, I get it.

[Alan Mack]

But yeah. So those are my favorite, most rewarding favorites. Not the right word, but most rewarding was I could see actually pull somebody out. Yeah.

[Michael]

And be the difference between them having a family or they're being, you know, know, a solely forgotten member of the family. For sure. Yeah. When does the book come out? I'll let you get it. We've been out for almost three hours. I'll let you get.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, you know, it's supposed to be between September, October.

[Michael]

Oh, so you have no idea. Amazing. Yes.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, as a matter of fact, especially when I knew I was coming here. Yeah. I called my editor, I was like, come on, give me a date. And he's like, I'll give you a date range. Yeah. He's like, well, you know, like, how did your book go? I mean, you're.

[Michael]

I don't know. It's not out yet. Oh, isn't April 14th. I have a date though. It's a couple weeks away. It, man, what an interesting process. The writing. It I enjoyed then I didn't know. Thank. Thankfully there are people who are book editors because I tell you what, I didn't know how to use some words properly or punctuation. Semicolons really got me. And I think every time that they showed up in the book is because I hit the wrong key and didn't realize it, but those were corrected.

[Alan Mack]

And then you did your. The audiobook.

[Michael]

I did the audiobook. I did right here. Actually. Sitting right here. I guess in previous years, you would have to travel to a studio, but I mean, these are the same microphones that they would use. So I zoom called into an audio guy expert, super cool on a zoom call. And there were some settings that we could change so he could hear the audio better and more professional. Because they're worried about, like, if you get too close or too far away, the popping.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Read through it. It was about six hours a day for three days, which I didn't mind at all. It's like two podcasts in a day. I'm like, okay. I'm literally sitting in the same chair.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. I had fun. I did mine in a home studio that I made.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

You know, blankets on the wall.

[Michael]

Yeah. As long as you have the controlled environment.

[Alan Mack]

And it did. Okay. I mean, I really enjoyed it. But my dog. I'm wearing headphones. You know, I had a nice microphone. And my dog would come. He's a little Jack Russell terrier. Yep.

[Michael]

They're.

[Alan Mack]

And he's like, you know. Yep. And I didn't hear it until the book is done. And I'm listening to the. The final product and I hear.

[Michael]

See, that's. That's why I was lucky. I had another guy listening. And in. I would almost always know when I needed to repeat something. But, you know, you. Whatever you round something on a word, it doesn't come out super clear. So three days of that. But I turned in the written manual script, which I think is the right word for it. It's non fiction. Well over a year ago. So the process has just been really long. I finally got actual hardcover versions of it. Is it hardcover or hardback?

[Alan Mack]

Hardcover.

[Michael]

Right.

[Alan Mack]

I think it's hardcover.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Two days ago. And it comes out in. Today's the 26th of March. Three weeks.

[Alan Mack]

Nice.

[Michael]

It might be. I have absolutely no idea what to expect.

[Alan Mack]

You know, the. The publishers don't do much for you anymore. I mean, even, you know, Nick was saying that about scars and stripes. He said you pretty much have to do your own promo stuff.

[Michael]

That's what he said.

[Alan Mack]

This is still selling. I mean, the paperback just came out.

[Michael]

So how do they decide when they transition from a hardcover to paperback?

[Alan Mack]

It's usually 18 months.

[Michael]

Okay. So that. That is going to happen at some point.

[Alan Mack]

Probably. Like, did you. You signed a contract that probably has that in there?

[Michael]

Yeah. I didn't read that, though. Oh, again, if I turned the manuscript in a year ago, I signed that contract two years ago ago, I might have signed away the rights to my children.

[Alan Mack]

Well, that's the thing. Right. So it looks in the dark. I signed that contract two years ago. Yeah. You know, I mean, I'm sure I

[Michael]

can find it somewhere buried in a file folder on my computer, but at this point, I'm like, hey, in three weeks, this thing comes out, so.

[Alan Mack]

But what's cool is it. It's still selling, which is. Is fun. So, you know, I go on Amazon every couple days. I look at the. The rankings, the seller ranking.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

And if I can be in the double digits, as opposed to three digits. Yeah, that's good.

[Michael]

What. What genre is it in on Amazon?

[Alan Mack]

Military history and memoir. Okay.

[Michael]

I don't know where mine will land. I did Andy Frisella's podcast not too long ago. Holy cow, it was. It peaked at number 143 of all books on Amazon, and it's not out yet.

[Alan Mack]

Hey, let me tell you, when I did Sean Ryan's podcast. Yeah. They ran out of books. Yeah. You know, I'm sure the same thing will happen here. Your listenership probably just as big.

[Michael]

Nope, not at all. But I don't know Sean well at all, but I am super appreciative of the platform that he has built. It's amazing to me there's something weird going on in the veteran community right now. And I don't know if it's a matter of. Because the gwat is increasingly farther away in the rear view mirror, but there seems to be two camps. One of them is, it doesn't matter how much you've done. It wasn't enough. And the other camp is, even if you've done things outside of the military, never forget that you would have been nothing without your military service.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And I'm like, I don't understand that. Like, my theory is this. Your experiences are yours to do with what you want to. So if you are a train wreck and you lie and you rely upon those military experiences, go ahead and do that, but you get to eat the consequences of that. And I don't understand why people can't realize that. You could have had a military job that was very interesting, but also without that qualifier, you could still be an interesting person as well. And I don't know if it's because some people view what other people are doing and they want to have that, so they try to chop them down at the knees. To me, it's like, dude, awesome. That just shows you what's possible. Now, if you want to go get that. Let me tell you right now, the path to getting to where Sean is is not by talking about Sean.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And saying, oh, he shouldn't be doing that, or we should be doing it a different way. It's like, dude, just do better. Figure out if maybe he has a personality that you're never going to have. Sorry.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

Welcome to the real world.

[Alan Mack]

And he's super nice, by the way.

[Michael]

That's what I'm saying. We text back and forth very infrequently. Usually it's memes, or when he and I get put into the same thing and be like, did you see this shit? I'm like, I know. I saw it too. And I met him one time, but again, why not from a distance? Be like, dude, that's awesome.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I'm stoked that you were able to build something like that. Did he take the exact path or approach that I would? No.

[Alan Mack]

But that.

[Michael]

I'm not into the. I'm not into this competitive success.

[Alan Mack]

Right. Well, that's the thing is one of the things I'm considering as I try to support these non profits is, you know, other than, you know, corporate speaking, is maybe doing a podcast cast. But I don't know, you know, where I would even start with something like that. You know, I look at what you guys do, and it's like, this is like.

[Michael]

I mean, but I mean, this. So what we are sitting inside of right now is basically, it was a shell that was created by a Hollywood set production company, which hooted better to make things that look real, that aren't real than a Hollywood set production company,

[Alan Mack]

because that's what they do.

[Michael]

Before this, it was curtains. Before that, it was a smaller room in the same building with smaller curtains and Michael barely fit, but behind his desk wedged into the wall. Before that, it was just me in the room.

[Alan Mack]

This is gorgeous.

[Michael]

It's amazing.

[Alan Mack]

It really is.

[Michael]

Before that, it was me just in a room, and I had to watch back every interview that I did, and I was doing the camera angles afterwards, so. And you want to talk about wanting to put a gun in your mouth, just listen to yourself talk for three to four hours on a conversation you've already had. And before that, it was. I was at my house, and before that, it was audio. So I Mean, don't view it as a current snapshot out of what. I'm super, super happy with what it is right now. But, like, this is many iterations down the road.

[Alan Mack]

Well, I'm in the process of deciding the first iteration.

[Michael]

So I would just say do it for the what? If you can figure out a reason, or if you know the reason that you want to do it is because you're generally interested in doing it, I would say, go for it. I get bombarded with people who say, hey, I want to start a podcast. And they almost always add this one qualifier and they say, say. So they'll say, I want to start a podcast. How did you monetize yours? Like, ooh, card in front of the horse a little bit.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, you know, the funny thing about that is, so, you know, I get through my website, you know, people will come on there and they'll ask me to speak, you know, and if it's a good thing, I'm pretty much like, sure, you know, and like, what do you charge me? Nothing. You know, just pay my expenses. Yeah. And my wife, you know, kind of is like, no. Yeah, have them talk to me, I think, because I would.

[Michael]

That's actually the move. That is the move.

[Alan Mack]

Because I'll always be like, yeah, I tell you what, buy 50 bucks and pay my plane fare, and I'll come

[Michael]

do whatever you want and outsource that to somebody else.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, I have to, because, yeah, I'm so, too.

[Michael]

Like, a fire. Fire department will hit me up, or an agency. I have two prices. I have the not for profit agencies, which I will do anything I can work inside of budgets. And then there's the for profit price, which.

[Alan Mack]

Right. Those are two different.

[Michael]

Two different things.

[Alan Mack]

Listen, we've got a thing, you know, for your listeners. In October is the 25th. Well, September 11th, 25th anniversary. And then in October, the Nightstalker foundation is doing this thing at the top of the Freedom Tower. They've got a big venue up there, and. And it's one of those fundraisers for the Nightstarker Foundation. I'm not sure who this. The keynote speaker is going to be it. They were looking at some. Some big names, but, you know, they were kind of hoping for some pro bono work or something like that. Yeah, but. But it has to be somebody. It can't just be somebody who's cool, you know, like, in our eyes, it has to be somebody who people, you know, finance people in New York City,

[Michael]

you want to come, would find interesting.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, I'd like to go Hear him, You know, we've had, you know, Bill McRaven do some stuff. He's a pretty good draw, you know, but, you know, we've seen him. Yeah. Kind of thing. So now I understand what you're saying.

[Michael]

How did the 1/60 get permission to fly under that bridge in New York? I don't know, because you know what I'm talking about.

[Alan Mack]

I do know and I can tell.

[Michael]

Birds went first and then I think it was the Blackhawks. I don't know if Chinooks were involved in this evolution.

[Alan Mack]

I have seen video of it, and I don't know if it's real. And that's the problem is I think this one's real.

[Michael]

Michael, TF160 flying under bridge in New York. I'm pretty.

[Alan Mack]

Was it New York? It was it San Francisco?

[Michael]

Is New York okay?

[Alan Mack]

I think. Yeah. That this happened once before. I got to the 160, so I got there in 95. So like in 93 or 4, definitely underflu.

[Michael]

A bridge and definitely modern era.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know. I saw it. Yeah. I just don't know if it's not

[Michael]

AI I don't think it is. Come on, Michael.

[Alan Mack]

I mean, there's a. You know, this is New York, right?

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, the Brooklyn Bridge. Okay.

[Michael]

Yeah. Let's get some volume, Michael. Volume. That's not AI. That is not A.I. i mean, they're not putting anybody at risk.

[Alan Mack]

No.

[Michael]

Here's something that people may not understand. Are not going to like, military aviation is not really constrained by the same rules as the faa.

[Alan Mack]

No. And chances are if that's. It probably is real, but. Yeah, that's 100% real. But we've done stuff where I went out to New York Approach Control and we were doing a parachute jump with the cadets into, I don't know, Giant Stadium or something like that. Oh, did you.

[Michael]

So you actually went out to the. The building.

[Alan Mack]

So I went to the Tray con,

[Michael]

which is actually really cool, to see how they do stuff.

[Alan Mack]

It was. But here's what's even cooler. So it's a very. It's just a couple buildings and a fenced in area.

[Michael]

They look like non descript offices.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah. And so they're like, hey, can you come back back, you know, a month before. We want to talk to you one more time, you know, about how we're going to do this. It's like, sure. And they go, can you land right there? And they point at the grass outside their building. Obviously, I'm like, I Can. But this is the tray con. And they go, yeah, we'll give you permission. So they just wanted it, you know, see it.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

So, I mean, they're easy to work with. Yeah. You know, and I would fly over that all the time. You get the BMW, the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge, and then you get the U.N. yeah. And LaGuardia is right there, but yeah. And south heliport is. Or not south, but yeah. Yeah.

[Michael]

Listen, the unmarked black helicopters do what they want.

[Alan Mack]

There's a process, you know, I mean, I bet you they went and surveyed it firsthand.

[Michael]

Oh, for sure.

[Alan Mack]

There's a restaurant right where this is taken from called the Riverside Cafe. I guarantee they walk the grounds, make sure there's nothing hanging down. There's a process in the. So there's a manual called the ATM Air Crew training Manual that has everything you do in the aircraft with a task, condition and standard tell you how to do it. Right. Under flying obstacles is a task. I agree.

[Michael]

And like I said, the FAA can get real mad, but if they were doing military training, I would bet they had permission. I would think they did, too, because I hope that they did. Because if they did, high profile.

[Alan Mack]

If. Yeah, I was gonna say if you. You didn't, you'd hear about it by now.

[Michael]

Oh, the boss is 100% getting sent that faster than you would ever probably before those turbines spun down.

[Alan Mack]

You know, I told you before we started filming about being in Colorado with the snowmobiles in the back of the Chinooks.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Alan Mack]

Somebody took a picture of that and sent it to the regimental commander and said, look, you guys are out screwing off. You know, taking guys with snowmobiles up in the mountains. It's like, those are 10th grade group. Those are their official vehicles. And yes, we are doing that.

[Michael]

It's also. Shut up, nerd.

[Alan Mack]

But at first they were all mad. You know, it's like, what are they doing?

[Michael]

Where can people find you?

[Alan Mack]

Easiest way to find me is my website, alenc.com okay. Or just Google Alan Mack podcast and you find. You know, man, I'm all over the place. I. Did, you know, Sean, Yours now, Twice did. Mike Ritland. Yep. Also super nice. Yeah. And an assortment of other guys, lesser knowns, but also very good interviewers, so.

[Michael]

Well, hell yeah, man. Thank you for making the trip out. I deeply appreciate it. You got to sign those books for me.

[Alan Mack]

Yep, these are signed and I promised Michael you could have one.

[Michael]

But. But the thing is this, promises are made to Michael all the time.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, I got a coin for you, too. I think I gave you one of these last time. But I don't. I don't. I don't know.

[Michael]

So, Michael, looking at this, which direction is the helicopter turning? I can barely see.

[Alan Mack]

It's too far away.

[Michael]

Unbelievable.

[Alan Mack]

Now imagine just getting that down so you can barely see.

[Michael]

This is all you get, and your life depends on it. We are at. What are we looking at here?

[Alan Mack]

Slight right turn, I think.

[Michael]

Slight right turn. About a 10 degree bank.

[Alan Mack]

Oh, that's. If you look. Look on the. On the left side, there's a little diamond.

[Michael]

Yep.

[Alan Mack]

That's a terrain following radar cube.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Alan Mack]

That's called a floating diamond.

[Michael]

Yep.

[Alan Mack]

It's not bad.

[Michael]

So always Michael, try to keep the blue on top of the brown.

[Alan Mack]

Yeah, I realize now what it is.

[Michael]

Awesome, man.

[Alan Mack]

Thank you. All right.

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