As military operations in Afghanistan moved into the mountains (as if the Afghan "flat land" were really flat), we found helicopters getting into trouble. Many performance-related accidents occurred. To compensate, vastly shrinking payloads produced odd circumstances where large utility helicopters became scouts and giant cargo helicopters became squad carriers. For many units operating at high-altitude, tactical doctrine had to completely revamped. Let's examine some of the issues, and perhaps help us better handle our machines at higher altitudes. The basic cause is clear, as you go higher in altitude the available engine power drops, we can carry less and we have more opportunity to fall through on approaches. This is especially a problem when we take off from lower altitudes while carrying payloads that were once comfortable in home front operations. It became all too common to discover at the end of a mountain top approach how very wrong the "back home" flight planning was. Shrinking engine power at high altitudes is both predictable and deadly, but is made much more so by the fact that we now have two generations of helicopter pilots have grown up at low altitudes using powerful turbine helicopters.
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