US-1A

Aircraft Information
Aircraft Make: Shin Meiwa
Aircraft Model: US-1A
Aircraft Nickname: Kai
Aircraft Mil Civ Description: Airplane ME Turboprop
Category: Airplane
Class: Multi Engine Sea
Engine Description: 3 or more Engine

First Flown Information
Sequence First Flown: 0
Date First Flown: 05/10/1999
Location First Flown: Japan
Who and/or What Organization First Flown With: Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF)

Aircraft Experience
As of: 05/09/2020
Number of Hours Flown: 4
Number of Times Flown: 1
Other Aircraft Models Associated:

Recollections:

–One of the neatest parts of being an Instructor at USNTPS was being able to “monitor” a student or students doing their Thesis project near the end of the year-long TPS course. This thesis, referred to as the “DT-2” (for “Developmental Testing, Phase 2”) involves assigning the student(s) an aircraft they’ve never flown before. They write an extensive test plan, conduct approximately 4 flights and then document their findings in a large report of test results (RTR). All in the span of weeks. This “graduation exercise” requires an instructor to mentor and eventually grade the test plan and report and that’s where I came in. Evaluating the student’s work requires the instructor to be familiar with the aircraft as well. So, every class–which means every 6 months since classes start twice at year–the instructors have the opportunity to do a “qualitative evaluation” on an airplane they, too, have likely never flown. These airplanes are obtained world-wide in cooperative relationships with test centers, aircraft manufacturers, and operators. Beginning in 1998 I started working on building a relationship with the “Japanese Navy” (the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force or JMSDF). In the end, it was my good fortune to travel to Japan, observe the JMSDF Test Pilot School (Japan has TWO military test pilot schools, just like the USA and the JMSDF school–the only one I have had direct contact with–is every bit as professional and thorough as USNTPS), and fly the US-1A..a truly unique airplane who’s mission is Search and Rescue…to rescue downed airmen and others in need at sea.
–This “Qual Eval” was “top 3” out of all the Qual Evals I’ve ever flown. I could write a book on this experience as well but space is short…so, here are my most distinct memories. It was, frankly, so much fun not because this is a cool airplane (which it most definitely is) but because of the PEOPLE. The hosting was simply incredible…I doubt the Ambassador to Japan is treated better than I was. That’s me in the official photo, with all the professionals of the JMSDF who hosted myself and Joel Walker (the lucky student assigned to this first-ever DT-2 on the US-1…first, but not the last) in such an incredible fashion. I made life-long friends with several people I met on that trip.
–The US-1A “Kai” is an 8 engine airplane: 4 turboprops on the wing, an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) that provides electricity a second APU that provides pressurized air to blow over the airplanes surfaces to increase lift at slow speed, and two engines on the Zodiac that gets deployed from a door behind the wing by the professionals of JMSDF. Watching the guys in the back take a zodiac that was completely packed-up and collapsed, with no motors….take it, inflate it, install the motors and launch it…all in less than a minute…wow!
–I was allowed to fly the machine for several hours and did several landings….but all the landings were inside the protection of a harbor. To show me the true capability of the airplane, the Plane Commander, Commander Toshitaka Kudoh–the Skipper of FS-71, flew out across the open ocean to show me a REAL water landing…in the open ocean. Prior to the landing, the crew flew a pattern to pick a spot for the landing, all the while mapping the ocean wave forms using a precise doppler radar altimeter. The current, waves, and wind were all calculated and considered. Finally, having picked the spot, and the desired direction for the landing, a flare was launched while airborne to mark the spot. Quite a bit of science had led up to this selection. But that’s where the science ended and the pure skill of a man who had flown thousands of hours in THAT US-1A came into sharp focus. He flew a downwind, turned base, set up for the landing. The flare appeared and then disappeared as it rode up and down on the large ocean waves. I lost sight of it for most of the “final”. Then the Skipper brought the airplane down to the surface, for a perfect water landing. It wasn’t smooth, there was no way it could be in those towering waves, but it was precise. As the airplane bounced slightly from one wave-cap to the next, it slowed down, stopped, heaved up and over a wave crest into the trough beyond, with giant waves all around, RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF US, maybe 50 feet away, was that flare. It lives in my memory as probably the greatest feat of airmanship (and seamanship!) I have ever witnessed.
–I was in awe…..but then I remembered that I was supposed to go watch the raft deployment so I scrambled down onto the main deck and watched the guys get the Zodiac ready like an Indy pit-crew, shoot some kind of rocket-propelled line out to the flare and launch out for their “simulated rescue”. My over-all feeling was “the US ought to have this capability!” and, for awhile, I actually tried to convince some folks to field a capability like this, with a vision of ME being–someday–a quarter as good as Skipper Kudoh.