FROM THE LAND TO THE SEA

Wayne Koons was a farm boy from Rice County, Kansas. After leaving from high school he attended Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas, where he received degrees in physics and mathematics before electing to join the U. S. Marine Corps and then opting to become a helicopter pilot. He recalls one day in 1959 while stationed in MCAS New River, North Carolina, when a squadron clerk ran up to him and said the commanding officer wanted to see him urgently.

“I was literally apprehensive as I went over to the hangar. The skipper told me they had had an enquiry about using helicopters to retrieve astronauts and spacecraft from the ocean. And I kept thinking, ‘What do you mean – astronauts?’” The term was new to him [3]. He later learned that he had been chosen for this task because he was the only pilot of 250 possible candidates to have a technical degree. Helicopters had been selected for the sea recovery operation because NASA’s engineers were not overly confident in the seaworthiness of the Mercury capsules, while flight surgeons were not confident about the physical shape that a person might be in after making a flight in space. “They wanted to get the astronaut and the spacecraft out of the water quickly,” Koons explained [4].

Lt. Koons was assigned as Project Officer to the retrieval squadron of the Space Task Group, and used his experience and technical abilities to assist in developing recovery techniques and procedures for the yet-to-be-built Mercury spacecraft. His duties included training the squadron pilots. Another part of his assignment involved the design and testing of a special reinforced loop on top of the capsule to enable the helicopter’s copilot to snag it using a long pole with a curved attachment on the end known as the “shepherd’s hook.”

As Wayne Koons described the procedure to the author, “The shepherd’s hook was attached to the lower end of a steel cable, which was engaged in the spacecraft lifting loop by the copilot using a long pole. The upper end of the cable was locked into the helicopter’s cargo hook before the helicopter lifted off from the ship. Lifting the spacecraft was accomplished by raising the helicopter. Once the spacecraft was on the ship’s padded skid, the helicopter cargo hook was opened, thus releasing the cable which stayed with the spacecraft.” [5]

In order to get the procedure right, countless training test flights were conducted using full-size representations of the Mercury spacecraft. In one test, a “boilerplate” cap­sule was dropped from 1,000 feet over Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. Once it had parachuted

into the water, the capsule was retrieved by the crew of a twin-engine helicopter using a “shepherd’s hook” in what NASA later described as a “successful” drop.

The squadron’s commanding officer informed Koons of the decision to have him serve as the lead pilot for this mission. “He asked me if I had a particular choice in copilot, and I said, ‘I sure do,’ because at that point I had been working regularly for several months with a copilot named George Cox. George and I just really got along well. We were kind of like twins. You know, we didn’t have to say everything that we communicated. We thought alike, worked well together, and were comfort­able with each other. And George was really eager to do it, enjoyed working the mission. So that was the basic set up.”

Eventually Koons found out that the retrieval would take place using an aircraft carrier as the destination. “We did some flight training right after we got aboard, and the Air Boss had set the flight deck up and put the skid with the mattresses on it up close to the bow. So we went off, and one of our helicopters dropped the boilerplate into the water, and then we went and picked it up and delivered it back to the ship.” When this proved a difficult operation visually for the pilot, the Air Boss rearranged his flight deck, shifting airplanes around and placing the skid on the rear of the flight deck. “So then when we tried it that way, it was much better, because I had the island in my field of view, and out the front windshield I could see the front part of the flight deck. So it made it much easier, a lot easier to maintain a good visual refer­ence while I was setting the thing down.” [6]

Along with Capt. Allen K. Daniel, Jr., Koons recovered the MR-1A capsule from the Atlantic on 19 December 1960 and safely deposited it aboard the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge (CV-45).

Despite their intense training, the helicopter team often struggled with the payload capability of the aircraft balanced against the weight of the spacecraft. As Koons put it, “The dry weight of the spacecraft with astronaut was well over one ton. When the project started, the spacecraft weight was estimated to be about 1,800 pounds. As the design matured, the weight increased to the point that the complete retrieval weight for MR-3 approached 2,900 pounds. The helicopters were stripped of all unnecessary weight. The extra seats, the APU [auxiliary power unit], heater, some avionics, and the (only) life raft were removed for Mercury retrieval flights. Also, the fuel load was tailored. To explain: The downrange helicopters were tasked to go as far as 115 nauti­cal miles from the ship to retrieve a spacecraft. To accomplish this, the fuel load was normally set for a retrieval close aboard the ship. This reduced load gave the helicop­ter the lift margin needed to accomplish the capsule retrieval. If the spacecraft landed some distance from the ship, once the distance was known, the fuel load was adjusted to optimize the lift capability at the spacecraft, with adequate reserves for the return. The fuel calculations assumed the ship proceeded toward the spacecraft at its best speed after the launch of the helicopters.

“This scenario happened on the MR-2 flight. Range to the spacecraft was about 100 nautical miles. A big problem arose when the ship lost boiler power and went dead in the water after the launch of the helicopters, and we were ‘running on fumes’ by the time we actually got back to the ship with the spacecraft.” [7]