FORT DRUM, N.Y. - Staff Sgt. Jeff Lentz did something new in his Army National Guard aviation career on Saturday— he helped land a CH-47F Chinook helicopter on a building.
"It was pretty exciting," said Lentz, a flight engineer assigned to Company B, 3rd Battalion, 126th Aviation.
"It's always cool to do something new. It kind of shows the versatility of the aircraft and the mission that we can do too," he added.
It is also about "supporting the customer-in this case, Air National Guard joint terminal air controllers, known as JTACs, from the 274th Air Support Operations Squadron - and inserting the Airmen where they wanted to go for an insertion into a mock village at Fort Drum, New York, Lentz said.
The CH-47 company, which comes under the control of the 42nd Combat Aviation Brigade, has trained regularly in air insertion techniques with the 274th JTACS.
"The big thing is weight and size, the weight that the building can support and the size," Lentz said. After verifying the safety, the landing comes down to the crew's comfort level and experience, he said.
During Saturday's landing, Lentz lay on top of the Chinook's rear ramp and peered under the aircraft to physically watch its rear landing gear touch down.
At the same time, the left and right door gunners looked out of their respective sides, and the two pilots kept an eye on things up front while maneuvering the aircraft.
As a flight engineer, Lentz said that while he had never landed on a building before but had assisted in landings in confined areas. Those situations are all about clear, concise communication among the crew members, he added.
"They were making calls, and then I was on the ramp," Lentz said. "All five of us were basically talking in a certain way that's super fast to communicate with and super easy to understand with air crew coordination, making sure that the helicopter as basically on the center of the building and it was safe to bring it down."
Most of the communication took place between Lentz and the door gunners since nobody else could see the tail of the aircraft and the rear landing gear.
The crew did not want to completely land on the building and put all of the aircraft's weight on it, so it landed with only the rear gear and kept the front in the air.
A key part of the process is communicating in a certain way and making sure that the same word means the same thing every time, Lentz said.
"Any time you land on something small, it takes multiple people, lots of information input into the cockpit, for them to be able to do what they've got to do," he said.
"Once you can do it right and you have the faith in your other crew members and your own experience and you can rely on their experience, you can do like what we did today," Lentz said.