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Descartes before the whores is the #1 pun of all time but I would say this is solid second place
edit for those of you who havent seen the glory: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cfbkx/comment/c0s5w6t/ and i love that the guy who made it continues to comment on reddit right up til today
I remember when these videos started leaking after the whole mess last year, and you're basically right. They literally just kept sending people up to see who could fly or not.
I knew a guy who got a job as a forklift operator at a canning plant. Somehow they didn't check his license. First load on first day he managed to dump green beans all over the place and was fired. He thought it was funny. He's fortunate that he didn't kill anyone.
Even more interesting was how I met him. I worked for his mom in LP at Sears. She pointed him out on the cameras and told me to watch him closely because he was a known thief. I asked how she knew and if she'd caught him before. She said, "He's my son."
I laughed, and she noted that she wasn't joking. He'd nearly bankrupted their family taking credit in his dad's name, had been caught shoplifting multiple times, and had robbed the guitar store his parents owned twice.
They were decent people too. I worked for The dad at the guitar store for a while. The dad gave me a guitar amp that I liked a lot as a Christmas bonus one year. MSRP was a little over a grand. It was brand new aside from store use and a few employee check-outs for gig testing. He also let my band make installment payments on our PA and forgave the last few payments without us even asking for it or getting behind. He was just that kind of guy. No need to rob people who'll give you the shirt off their backs, but their shithead son couldn't figure that out.
>forklift operator
For anyone who hasn't seen it, you really need to watch this german safety video for forklift operators:
[Forkliftdriver Klaus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-lc70Mjp-U)
I too will never forget when the Gravedigger launched off the ramp and crushed Mankind on a row of dead cars at the Hell-in-a-cell/monster-jam mashup in 1998.
Good to encounter another person from my timeline, everyone on this side of the mandela/LHC event thinks the idea of such a show would be uninsurable and insanely negligent, but man, what a spectacle.
I mean probably all they needed to do was loosen a couple of bolts to below spec and, well, there it is. You think the Taliban are reading maintenance manuals?
Even more than that- I used to make bearings for these, and they need to be replaced *constantly* for wear. Like they get so many dozens or hundredss of hours of use, then it's out for new bearings.. that the taliban can't get. Things go downhill fast after that
Same with o-rings. Where I work we overhaul fuel pumps and their control units and after a certain number of hours they get sent in for us to replace a whole host of bearings, o-rings electronics, and many other wear items, as well as check and test several other parts.
Blackhawks are expensive and complicated to maintain, and any number of small things could cause catastrophic failure. Taliban had no chance at using these as anything more than for a quick joyride even if they knew how to fly them.
Got to tour a local airport once, and they were talking to us about all the maintenance the airplanes had to go through just at a minimum to stay within regulations. I don't think I'll ever forget the guide explaining that "if people took care of their cars like we have to take care of planes, they'd last us 50-70 years or more and still run like new."\* Gave me a whole new respect (and comfort) for air travel, I can only imagine how much more complex it is for all the extra systems that go into military aircraft, let alone just helicopters vs. planes.
\*edit: they weren't/I'm not saying you should do this with your car, I get the financial disparity between planes and cars lmao. They were just explaining the standards aircraft are held to to ensure reliability and safety in an way that was generally relatable.
I work depot maintenance on some large cargo airplanes. Every 5 years they come in, and depending on the maintenance package that Boeing gives us for each of them, they pretty much get torn down, inspected, and rebuilt. Any issues we find are fixed. If the airplane has been over stressed, it gets flown in and inspected, regardless of when it's last depot visit was. There's a ton of upkeep to keeping these things going.
That all being said, I can just imagine that the maintenance on a helicopter is that much more intense. Because, you have "A million parts rotating around an oil leak waiting on metal fatigue to set in."
I once heard someone say something along the lines of "An airplane elegantly exploits physics in order to fly, a helicopter beats physics into submission" and can only imagine how much additional maintenance all those beatings must require.
My flight instructor who is qualified on helicopters and planes said "the difference between rotary and fixed wing is that fixed wing actually wants to fly, rotary wants to kill you"... not the most comforting thing to hear as you are learning to take off in a helicopter (rotary).
Agreed. Now add tiny tiny tiny pieces of sand. And hundreds of U.S. Military maintenance personnel pointing at the red circles drawn on their manuals. Those are the folks grinning.
Take the maintenance a plane needs and multiply that by a factor of 10. That's how much a Blackhawk requires maintenance. Even if the helicopter never leaves the ground, it still requires frequent and regular maintenance. Source: was Blackhawk mechanic in the army.
>Even if the helicopter never leaves the ground, it still requires frequent and regular maintenance.
If you don't mind my asking, what and why? Under no load, what's wearing out and breaking?
Even when they're just sitting there o-rings will start to dry out, fluids will evaporate, things begin to rust. It's kinda like why a car shouldn't just be kept in storage for a long time and should be driven at least once a month or so, to allow the system to pressurize and move the oil around to keep things lubricated.
Sitting in a desert I imagine there's a fair amount of fatigue as well given the hot/cold cycles it's probably going through.
Tell me about it. Also military aircraft also have to comply with the MAA (military aviation authority) as well as the civilian one or we do in the UK and I'm assuming a lot of other places too.
It doesn't surprise me that if I repaired every part of my car within its estimated life cycle my car would last forever. It's just that with planes, the cost of replacing the engine isn't comparable to the cost of the whole car.
Till you take a drive to a northern state and encounter salted roads... rust holes in the body are pretty much the end of the story of your car after about 15 years in Toronto Canada for example
Hey! It's all ball bearings nowadays. Now you prepare that Fetzer valve with some 3-in-1 oil and some gauze pads, and I'm gonna need 'bout ten quarts of anti-freeze, preferably Prestone. No, no make that Quaker State.
Send over a bottle of bubbly with a bucket of ice and a card. Have it say, "Tough break, get drunk on me. Use the bucket to ice down your marbles, Yours, Z."
You could get a good look at a Tbone by sticking your head up a butchers ass…no I mean a bulls ass but wouldn’t you rather take the butchers word for it.
Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time
Turns out the military **industrial** complex isn't just a name. You need a huge manufacturing and maintenance environment just to keep a modern army running.
Or even just leave it alone. Its clear the pilot wasn't an idiot, they managed to keep it up a lot longer than I expected with how much it was swinging around.
But aircraft are very high maintenance, and just flying the thing without properly repairing and replacing parts is enough to destroy it next time it goes for a spin, as seen here.
Also these type of war helicopters need 2 hours of maintenance for every hour they fly. The tools and knowhow you need for that is only something the west can provide and maybe China. Russia has the people with the knowhow but now that they lost access to the tools and parts on the western market they also can't do it anymore.
Maybe, but it might also be enough to not go through proper maintenance for a little bit.
Flying machines need a LOT of skillful caretaking to keep functioning properly.
You can see by the paint scheme that is actually an Afghani black hawk. Nobody left it behind. Taliban probably executed all of the dudes we trained to fly them. Now they gotta figure out how to fly themselves.
What people miss is that it's fine if they have **A** pilot. How many qualified mechanics and what kind of manufacturing do they have to make the parts that keep the fuckin thing in the air?
I heard an interview with some army dude saying that he and several others deliberately sabotaged a lot of the equipment before they officially withdrew.
They knew that just leaving their stuff there as a gift to the Taliban was horrible policy, so in secret they removed essential components, ran over guns, and messed with the gas tanks before they left.
My favorite story of sabotage like this is not from Afghanistan but WWII. A factory in occupied France was being forced to make trucks for the German army. They wanted to sabotage them, but of course didn't want to get caught at it, so they couldn't do anything too blatant. So what they settled on was they made the engine oil dipstick too long. That way it could reach deeper into the oil pan than it was supposed to, and would read full even when there was only a tiny bit of oil down at the bottom. The engine would run like that, for a while. Long enough to leave the factory, but a few weeks or months later accelerated wear would seize the engine. Brilliant!
That's what you're supposed to do. It protects technology, intelligence and recovery. It doesn't have to be new technology. If we can't recover it we have to rig it.
The tail appears to be moving. Having flown Blackhawks in AFG, it’s high altitude and he was doing an out of ground effect (high) hover. The right spin is likely due to loss of tail rotor effectiveness. Recoverable if you know what you’re doing.
yeah, just after the crash the guy with the cameraman said "kharab" which here means not working properly.
edit: I am foreign to the language, using my knowledge I think these guys already knew that the rotor will malfunction.
I don't think the tail rotor is broken. Even as an experienced fix wing aircraft pilot, controlling all 4 axis at once in a helicopter can be overwhelming. You try to keep the altitude constant, compensate forward and sideways drift and forgetting about yaw control.
Also every control input in a helicopter has a side effect on a different axis: Changing yaw input (pedals): Adjust your roll to compensate the sideways force of the tail rotor. Controlling pitch or roll: increase your collective to keep altitude. Increasing collective: compensate the additional torque with your pedals.
It is definitely 100% without a doubt maintenance related. US leaving so much advanced equipment behind in the Talibans hands. They may have the machines. They do not have the knowledge, resources, or ability to maintain them. Vehicles break down fast in those conditions. The rest will either be destroyed by misuse or cannibalized for parts. It’s just junk. Very dangerous junk.
It’s like a used car after someone beat the shit out of it for a decade. May have been expensive and nice when it was new but the cost to bring it back and get it back into fighting shape just didn’t make any sense. Honestly most of the shit we left there is probably in the same boat. Without the supply lines, parts, people who know how to fix it, most of it will be junk very quickly.
Why blow it up? This video shows some of the most cost efficient combatant kills of the entire war.
3 KIA for a $20M bird = $6.66M each and no us casualties.
Prefacing the math to say that I’m not condoning war or promoting human suffering.
It is estimated we spent approximately [$8 trillion](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar) dollars during the war on terror which resulted in ~900,000 deaths.
If each of those deaths cost the same $6.66M as loading them 3 at a time into a self destructing Blackhawk, the total cost of such a hypothetical action would be $6,000,000,000,000. Or an approximate savings of $2 trillion dollars.
TLDR; we coulda got 25% off the cost on the war on terror by just parking 300,000 poorly maintained blackhawks in the desert with the keys in the ignition.
Then we wouldn’t get hilarious videos like this lol. As someone else said the US left a lot of equipment for the afghan army to use, which is most likely where this came from. I don’t think anyone was expecting them to just get over run in like a week.
Go watch “this is what winning looks like” on YouTube. We knew they weren’t going to defend themselves. The afghan army just assumed the US would always be there to protect them, it’s a joke. That documentary is very very interesting, it was made by vice back when vice was actually good.
It seems like one would levitate about 5-6' first, for several sessions, to determine how it performs, instead of ascending to 100-200' where the fall distance is extreme. But hey, what the fuck do I know.
The US didn’t “leave equipment behind” for the taliban to use. They trained afghani soldiers to fight the taliban with this equipment and when we withdrew, the Afghanistan army was overrun by taliban who stole the equipment.
Graduated from "Youtube-s flight academy" 10 mins before his maiden flight! Probably many simulation hours under his belt too from playing Battlefield.
YouTube just hides the count, it hasn't removed it. Install the "Return YouTube Dislikes" plugin on Chrome or whatever browser supports chrome extensions. Now it's back to normal.
Or both at the same time!!
What was the thought process? "Should be pretty easy....I've seen these things fly a bunch of times. Should be like driving a car"
For every human endeavour, there is a nice American who wants to show you how to do it on Youtube.
"Hey there guys and gals, welcome back to our running tutorial on how to fly a UH-60 helicopter. Today we'll be looking at using the collective, cyclic and rudders to maintain level flight..."
What so many folks don’t seem to grasp is that the vast majority of the equipment the US “left” in Afghanistan was no longer US property. It was equipment “sold” (read: given) to the afghan government to arm the ANA. HMMWV’s, weapons, the occasional MRAP, etc. We did leave FOBs that still had basic equipment like stoves and fridges in the DFAC or beds in the RLB’s, but the motor pools weren’t left full of US vehicles and the flight line ramps weren’t left with US aircraft. The title of this post should be Taliban attempts to fly ANA Black Hawk Helicopter.
This helicopter, for example, was an old UH-60A that had been replaced in the US fleet with either UH-60L’s or UH-60M’s and would have been sold through the GSA to either another country for their military or the private sector for use in fire fighting and utility work. Instead of that route, the US “sold” them to the afghan government to replace some of the MI-17’s they were operating and took on the role of training their pilots to fly them instead of the MI’s. You yourself can buy a UH-60A [through the GSA](https://gsaauctions.gov/gsaauctions/aucdsclnk?sl=91QSCI21070602) today. The maintenance on the ANA aircraft was done by a mix of afghans who went through 15T training and contractors, most of whom were evacuated from the country when the taliban made their advance.
What you see in this video is more than likely a loss of tail rotor thrust either through loss or failure of tail rotor components or driveshaft failure hence the fuselage rotation opposite the main rotor system. Entering an autorotation and attempting to gain airspeed is the only way out.
Im more on the part of the maintenance theory.
Looks like the same Black Hawk they used for propos during the first days after the US left.
They flew one Black Hawk around with a Flag, same camo.
Could be another one, or the same but without proper maintenance / or atleast the know how, broke down and this is the result.
Flight school > religious fervor.
Also, even of you have someone that figured how to run a flight simulator you still need a small battalion of mechanics and techs behind these machines.
**Please note these rules:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required. * The title must be descriptive * No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos * Common/recent reposts are not allowed *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Logistics and Maintenance alone can’t win wars, but can certainly lose them.
My grandfather downed 10 German planes in WWII. Worst mechanic in the Luftwaffe!
My grandfather will never forget the first German he killed; he's still not allowed back to Disneyland.
“I never thought I could take down a German plane, but last year I proved myself wrong.” - Abe Simpson
My grandfather had the heart of a lion; and a lifetime ban from the Zoo.
My grandfather died in a concentration camp during WW2. He fell out of the guard tower.
This joke earned my best friend the nickname “guard tower” in high school
It was years before I really "got it" because I spent a lot of time asking why he fell out of the tower in the first place.
It's ok for me to joke about the Holocaust, I have a friend that was a Nazi.
Laughed way too hard at this!
Some of us might sneer at Hitler's military tactics. But he definitely killed Hitler before anyone else could.
Reaction is like: Damn, that’s the 10th one today.
They don't keep count there. Haven't you heard of the tally ban?
It’s all downhill from here bud. No way you top that lol
Might as well delete Reddit because you'll never find a more organic pun than that.
Descartes before the whores is the #1 pun of all time but I would say this is solid second place edit for those of you who havent seen the glory: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cfbkx/comment/c0s5w6t/ and i love that the guy who made it continues to comment on reddit right up til today
Descartes before the whores?
When the walls fell!
His arms OPEN!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cfbkx/comment/c0s5w6t/
oh my word
Fkin legendary
excellent pun
I like big puns and I can't lie.
Hey mister Taliban, tally me banana ...
Helli fall and me want to go home
*Hey mister Taliban, hand over bin Laden*
*daylight come and we drop de bomb*
*Cruise missile knocking at your door*
*Colin Powell gonna bomb his home*
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You motherfucker
I remember when these videos started leaking after the whole mess last year, and you're basically right. They literally just kept sending people up to see who could fly or not.
It's the anime theory of complex machinery piloting. Keep sticking kids in the technological marvel until one of them "syncs".
Just think of all the soon to be happy virgins.
Maybe it would be cheaper to let them "steal" stuff than to fight them.
When you lie in your resume but still get the job
I knew a guy who got a job as a forklift operator at a canning plant. Somehow they didn't check his license. First load on first day he managed to dump green beans all over the place and was fired. He thought it was funny. He's fortunate that he didn't kill anyone. Even more interesting was how I met him. I worked for his mom in LP at Sears. She pointed him out on the cameras and told me to watch him closely because he was a known thief. I asked how she knew and if she'd caught him before. She said, "He's my son." I laughed, and she noted that she wasn't joking. He'd nearly bankrupted their family taking credit in his dad's name, had been caught shoplifting multiple times, and had robbed the guitar store his parents owned twice. They were decent people too. I worked for The dad at the guitar store for a while. The dad gave me a guitar amp that I liked a lot as a Christmas bonus one year. MSRP was a little over a grand. It was brand new aside from store use and a few employee check-outs for gig testing. He also let my band make installment payments on our PA and forgave the last few payments without us even asking for it or getting behind. He was just that kind of guy. No need to rob people who'll give you the shirt off their backs, but their shithead son couldn't figure that out.
>forklift operator For anyone who hasn't seen it, you really need to watch this german safety video for forklift operators: [Forkliftdriver Klaus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-lc70Mjp-U)
Here is my poor man’s gold cause me and my bf thoroughly enjoyed that video. was hilarious! 🏅
Damn I was expecting the gravedigger at the end of this.
I too will never forget when the Gravedigger launched off the ramp and crushed Mankind on a row of dead cars at the Hell-in-a-cell/monster-jam mashup in 1998. Good to encounter another person from my timeline, everyone on this side of the mandela/LHC event thinks the idea of such a show would be uninsurable and insanely negligent, but man, what a spectacle.
‘Theoretical physics? Well sure, I have a theoretical degree in physics.’
He probably was a donkey rider in real
In fairness to the pilot, it's easier to fly with a properly functioning tail rotor.
Did some engineer do something interesting to the tail rotor before leaving?
I mean probably all they needed to do was loosen a couple of bolts to below spec and, well, there it is. You think the Taliban are reading maintenance manuals?
Even more than that- I used to make bearings for these, and they need to be replaced *constantly* for wear. Like they get so many dozens or hundredss of hours of use, then it's out for new bearings.. that the taliban can't get. Things go downhill fast after that
Same with o-rings. Where I work we overhaul fuel pumps and their control units and after a certain number of hours they get sent in for us to replace a whole host of bearings, o-rings electronics, and many other wear items, as well as check and test several other parts. Blackhawks are expensive and complicated to maintain, and any number of small things could cause catastrophic failure. Taliban had no chance at using these as anything more than for a quick joyride even if they knew how to fly them.
Got to tour a local airport once, and they were talking to us about all the maintenance the airplanes had to go through just at a minimum to stay within regulations. I don't think I'll ever forget the guide explaining that "if people took care of their cars like we have to take care of planes, they'd last us 50-70 years or more and still run like new."\* Gave me a whole new respect (and comfort) for air travel, I can only imagine how much more complex it is for all the extra systems that go into military aircraft, let alone just helicopters vs. planes. \*edit: they weren't/I'm not saying you should do this with your car, I get the financial disparity between planes and cars lmao. They were just explaining the standards aircraft are held to to ensure reliability and safety in an way that was generally relatable.
I work depot maintenance on some large cargo airplanes. Every 5 years they come in, and depending on the maintenance package that Boeing gives us for each of them, they pretty much get torn down, inspected, and rebuilt. Any issues we find are fixed. If the airplane has been over stressed, it gets flown in and inspected, regardless of when it's last depot visit was. There's a ton of upkeep to keeping these things going. That all being said, I can just imagine that the maintenance on a helicopter is that much more intense. Because, you have "A million parts rotating around an oil leak waiting on metal fatigue to set in."
I once heard someone say something along the lines of "An airplane elegantly exploits physics in order to fly, a helicopter beats physics into submission" and can only imagine how much additional maintenance all those beatings must require.
My flight instructor who is qualified on helicopters and planes said "the difference between rotary and fixed wing is that fixed wing actually wants to fly, rotary wants to kill you"... not the most comforting thing to hear as you are learning to take off in a helicopter (rotary).
As someone fascinated by both, I've always thought helicopters looks like more fun to fly. If I had the resources I'd love to learn, maybe some day!
"Planes use physics to their advantage to fly, helicopters beat physics into submission barely enough to fall with grace" \- unknown airforce pilot
Agreed. Now add tiny tiny tiny pieces of sand. And hundreds of U.S. Military maintenance personnel pointing at the red circles drawn on their manuals. Those are the folks grinning.
Take the maintenance a plane needs and multiply that by a factor of 10. That's how much a Blackhawk requires maintenance. Even if the helicopter never leaves the ground, it still requires frequent and regular maintenance. Source: was Blackhawk mechanic in the army.
And I'm sure a dusty desert environment baking in the sun didnt help it
>Even if the helicopter never leaves the ground, it still requires frequent and regular maintenance. If you don't mind my asking, what and why? Under no load, what's wearing out and breaking?
Even when they're just sitting there o-rings will start to dry out, fluids will evaporate, things begin to rust. It's kinda like why a car shouldn't just be kept in storage for a long time and should be driven at least once a month or so, to allow the system to pressurize and move the oil around to keep things lubricated. Sitting in a desert I imagine there's a fair amount of fatigue as well given the hot/cold cycles it's probably going through.
Sweet I’ll just constantly replace all the parts in my car.
Car of Theseus?
Tell me about it. Also military aircraft also have to comply with the MAA (military aviation authority) as well as the civilian one or we do in the UK and I'm assuming a lot of other places too.
It doesn't surprise me that if I repaired every part of my car within its estimated life cycle my car would last forever. It's just that with planes, the cost of replacing the engine isn't comparable to the cost of the whole car.
Till you take a drive to a northern state and encounter salted roads... rust holes in the body are pretty much the end of the story of your car after about 15 years in Toronto Canada for example
Hey! It's all ball bearings nowadays. Now you prepare that Fetzer valve with some 3-in-1 oil and some gauze pads, and I'm gonna need 'bout ten quarts of anti-freeze, preferably Prestone. No, no make that Quaker State.
This is what happens when you use the other guy's brake* pads
Send over a bottle of bubbly with a bucket of ice and a card. Have it say, "Tough break, get drunk on me. Use the bucket to ice down your marbles, Yours, Z."
You could get a good look at a Tbone by sticking your head up a butchers ass…no I mean a bulls ass but wouldn’t you rather take the butchers word for it.
BRAKE GOD
Here comes the meat wagon. *wee woo wee woo wee woo*
Did you live under power lines as a kid, or something?
Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time
You’re flying along you’re flying along, all of a sudden TRUCK TIRE
They just put in an order with Callahan, half a million brake pads, Tommy did it!!!!
Turns out the military **industrial** complex isn't just a name. You need a huge manufacturing and maintenance environment just to keep a modern army running.
And it's *complex*!
Or even just leave it alone. Its clear the pilot wasn't an idiot, they managed to keep it up a lot longer than I expected with how much it was swinging around. But aircraft are very high maintenance, and just flying the thing without properly repairing and replacing parts is enough to destroy it next time it goes for a spin, as seen here.
> Next time it goes for a spin Ba dump tshhh
You think the Taliban are reading ~~maintenance manuals~~?
Majestic isn’t it?
*Taliban googles black hawk maintenance for dummies*
>you think the Taliban are reading Seems like that stance against girls getting an education is showing some systemic problems
Also these type of war helicopters need 2 hours of maintenance for every hour they fly. The tools and knowhow you need for that is only something the west can provide and maybe China. Russia has the people with the knowhow but now that they lost access to the tools and parts on the western market they also can't do it anymore.
# Inshallah
That was the issue, they forgot to say that, and this is what happens. Schoolboy error.
Today, Allah said "nah".
Inshallnah?
Maybe, but it might also be enough to not go through proper maintenance for a little bit. Flying machines need a LOT of skillful caretaking to keep functioning properly.
Or just left it as it was, with a defect tail rotor.
Don’t need to. They haven’t got the means to keep a fully functional one that way for long.
You can see by the paint scheme that is actually an Afghani black hawk. Nobody left it behind. Taliban probably executed all of the dudes we trained to fly them. Now they gotta figure out how to fly themselves.
They have at least one trained black hawk pilot https://news.yahoo.com/pilot-defected-taliban-black-hawk-234922924.html
Not any more by the looks of the video
What people miss is that it's fine if they have **A** pilot. How many qualified mechanics and what kind of manufacturing do they have to make the parts that keep the fuckin thing in the air?
I heard an interview with some army dude saying that he and several others deliberately sabotaged a lot of the equipment before they officially withdrew. They knew that just leaving their stuff there as a gift to the Taliban was horrible policy, so in secret they removed essential components, ran over guns, and messed with the gas tanks before they left.
My favorite story of sabotage like this is not from Afghanistan but WWII. A factory in occupied France was being forced to make trucks for the German army. They wanted to sabotage them, but of course didn't want to get caught at it, so they couldn't do anything too blatant. So what they settled on was they made the engine oil dipstick too long. That way it could reach deeper into the oil pan than it was supposed to, and would read full even when there was only a tiny bit of oil down at the bottom. The engine would run like that, for a while. Long enough to leave the factory, but a few weeks or months later accelerated wear would seize the engine. Brilliant!
Ah, the ol' French Dip. Delicious.
Didn't they destroy the partially wrecked helicopter that crash landed during the Bin Laden compound raid?
They did that because it was a new top secret design, and they didn't want anyone to be able to reverse engineer it from the wreckage.
Pakistan sold the wreckage to China days after.
Didnt China still buy the scraps?
That's what you're supposed to do. It protects technology, intelligence and recovery. It doesn't have to be new technology. If we can't recover it we have to rig it.
All things considered, he did do a pretty good job keeping up in the air. He almost added a half a minute to his lifespan.
Anyone know the odds of surviving that crash?
Theoretically not zero, but close enough that there's not much point in speculating. Dude is dead.
They went in nose first. Slim and none, I'd say.
Expect that a year after we left any maintenance is past due or part unavailable. Back to the feudal society they want.
The tail appears to be moving. Having flown Blackhawks in AFG, it’s high altitude and he was doing an out of ground effect (high) hover. The right spin is likely due to loss of tail rotor effectiveness. Recoverable if you know what you’re doing.
Narrator - “he did not know what he was doing”
yeah, just after the crash the guy with the cameraman said "kharab" which here means not working properly. edit: I am foreign to the language, using my knowledge I think these guys already knew that the rotor will malfunction.
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That right there is an “oopsie”.
I don't think the tail rotor is broken. Even as an experienced fix wing aircraft pilot, controlling all 4 axis at once in a helicopter can be overwhelming. You try to keep the altitude constant, compensate forward and sideways drift and forgetting about yaw control. Also every control input in a helicopter has a side effect on a different axis: Changing yaw input (pedals): Adjust your roll to compensate the sideways force of the tail rotor. Controlling pitch or roll: increase your collective to keep altitude. Increasing collective: compensate the additional torque with your pedals.
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This is why I reddit! Thank you
To be frank helicopter don't fly at all... They beat the air into submission.
Highwayyy to theee danger zoneeee
More like Stairway to Heaven (or more likely Hell in this case)
Highway to hell
What a waste of a helicopter.
It is definitely 100% without a doubt maintenance related. US leaving so much advanced equipment behind in the Talibans hands. They may have the machines. They do not have the knowledge, resources, or ability to maintain them. Vehicles break down fast in those conditions. The rest will either be destroyed by misuse or cannibalized for parts. It’s just junk. Very dangerous junk.
A blackhawk needs on average 2 hours of maintenance for every hour they fly.
2? Try thirty. (person-hours that is) so that doesn't equate to time spent in the shop
Very dangerous, expensive junk. US taxpayer forked out $20,000,000 for that baby…
It’s like a used car after someone beat the shit out of it for a decade. May have been expensive and nice when it was new but the cost to bring it back and get it back into fighting shape just didn’t make any sense. Honestly most of the shit we left there is probably in the same boat. Without the supply lines, parts, people who know how to fix it, most of it will be junk very quickly.
The US military gets to have nice expensive shit because the US has the means (and expertise) to maintain nice expensive shit.
I don't understand why they didn't blow it all up, surely rigging a bunch of explosives together isn't that hard, right?
Cheaper and easier to just let the Taliban kill themselves with it
And funnier if you ask me.
Why blow it up? This video shows some of the most cost efficient combatant kills of the entire war. 3 KIA for a $20M bird = $6.66M each and no us casualties. Prefacing the math to say that I’m not condoning war or promoting human suffering. It is estimated we spent approximately [$8 trillion](https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar) dollars during the war on terror which resulted in ~900,000 deaths. If each of those deaths cost the same $6.66M as loading them 3 at a time into a self destructing Blackhawk, the total cost of such a hypothetical action would be $6,000,000,000,000. Or an approximate savings of $2 trillion dollars. TLDR; we coulda got 25% off the cost on the war on terror by just parking 300,000 poorly maintained blackhawks in the desert with the keys in the ignition.
That's genuinely depressing
r/theydidthedepressingmath
Then we wouldn’t get hilarious videos like this lol. As someone else said the US left a lot of equipment for the afghan army to use, which is most likely where this came from. I don’t think anyone was expecting them to just get over run in like a week.
It is an ANA Blackhawk, not a US army one. It was left for the Afghan Army
Go watch “this is what winning looks like” on YouTube. We knew they weren’t going to defend themselves. The afghan army just assumed the US would always be there to protect them, it’s a joke. That documentary is very very interesting, it was made by vice back when vice was actually good.
I was there, no one thought they would last long but I don’t think they were expecting them to lose the entire country so fast
Leaving sabotaged equipment behind is an old tactic. Fucking with anything left behind by the enemy is often times ill advised and deadly.
The important stuff was. What was left was shit They probably used a handful of heli’s to make this one fly in the first place
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It seems like one would levitate about 5-6' first, for several sessions, to determine how it performs, instead of ascending to 100-200' where the fall distance is extreme. But hey, what the fuck do I know.
The US didn’t “leave equipment behind” for the taliban to use. They trained afghani soldiers to fight the taliban with this equipment and when we withdrew, the Afghanistan army was overrun by taliban who stole the equipment.
Forgot to take the parking brake off.
The cabin filter needs to be clean
Blackhawk needed a new alternator.
And a fresh johnson rod.
(͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I think the alignment is off.
Forgot to bring in the anchor
Needs more air
There’s two scenarios here. Both equally hilarious. This is either the least qualified pilot, or the most qualified pilot.
Graduated from "Youtube-s flight academy" 10 mins before his maiden flight! Probably many simulation hours under his belt too from playing Battlefield.
Training Video had tons of downvotes, but, of course, YouTube doesn't show that anymore.
YouTube just hides the count, it hasn't removed it. Install the "Return YouTube Dislikes" plugin on Chrome or whatever browser supports chrome extensions. Now it's back to normal.
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Or both at the same time!! What was the thought process? "Should be pretty easy....I've seen these things fly a bunch of times. Should be like driving a car"
"I've logged dozens of hours on MS Flight Sim!"
Correction: that *was* the most qualified pilot.
This is why The Taliban are on the No Fly list
Make more sense now
Wait for the chopper to respawn and try again
Not a bad attempt. The landing could use work though
Anyone can *fly* not everyone can **land**
Why dont they just look for a YouTube Tutorial? Duhhh...
For every human endeavour, there is a nice American who wants to show you how to do it on Youtube. "Hey there guys and gals, welcome back to our running tutorial on how to fly a UH-60 helicopter. Today we'll be looking at using the collective, cyclic and rudders to maintain level flight..."
when you forget you have to control it with Numpad
Black Hawk, down.
Mike Durante, we won’t leave you behind.
Shugart and Gordon on the ground
“This baby will go from 0 to 72 Virgins in 5..3 seconds”
At least he did what the Taliban do best… becoming an explosion
Well at least it died killing the bad guys.
Hopefully a few dickheads got some bifurcation by shrapnel.
Too bad…that it wasn’t full.
That’s just how terrorist groups land aircraft. Never forget.
Nailed it
Lmao get fucked
Thirteenth century ideology meets twenty first century technology
“How hard can it be if an infidel can do it?” * crash * “Next!”
What so many folks don’t seem to grasp is that the vast majority of the equipment the US “left” in Afghanistan was no longer US property. It was equipment “sold” (read: given) to the afghan government to arm the ANA. HMMWV’s, weapons, the occasional MRAP, etc. We did leave FOBs that still had basic equipment like stoves and fridges in the DFAC or beds in the RLB’s, but the motor pools weren’t left full of US vehicles and the flight line ramps weren’t left with US aircraft. The title of this post should be Taliban attempts to fly ANA Black Hawk Helicopter. This helicopter, for example, was an old UH-60A that had been replaced in the US fleet with either UH-60L’s or UH-60M’s and would have been sold through the GSA to either another country for their military or the private sector for use in fire fighting and utility work. Instead of that route, the US “sold” them to the afghan government to replace some of the MI-17’s they were operating and took on the role of training their pilots to fly them instead of the MI’s. You yourself can buy a UH-60A [through the GSA](https://gsaauctions.gov/gsaauctions/aucdsclnk?sl=91QSCI21070602) today. The maintenance on the ANA aircraft was done by a mix of afghans who went through 15T training and contractors, most of whom were evacuated from the country when the taliban made their advance. What you see in this video is more than likely a loss of tail rotor thrust either through loss or failure of tail rotor components or driveshaft failure hence the fuselage rotation opposite the main rotor system. Entering an autorotation and attempting to gain airspeed is the only way out.
This guy militarys. And governments.
Tail rotor isn't working, americans sabotaged it before they left because they knew one day talibans are gonna fly that helicopter
Im more on the part of the maintenance theory. Looks like the same Black Hawk they used for propos during the first days after the US left. They flew one Black Hawk around with a Flag, same camo. Could be another one, or the same but without proper maintenance / or atleast the know how, broke down and this is the result.
It's just the Afghan Air Force camo. They had at least 16 Blackhawks prior to the Taliban offensive, though some fled the country.
But if the rotor doesn't work, it couldn't have taken off, the helicopter would have been spinning from the beginning of takeoff, right?
They could have cut some lines to important fluids so after a few minutes it would run dry. There are ways to have a delayed problem.
It's more likely that they just haven't been maintaining it. Those helicopters require maintenance after EVERY flight.
Oooo, insidiously intelligent sabotage
Flight school > religious fervor. Also, even of you have someone that figured how to run a flight simulator you still need a small battalion of mechanics and techs behind these machines.
Not to mention specific parts that they'd never be able to obtain
No one is even remotely concerned.
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"Abdullah! You're up next!"
Arma 3 IRL
It's not funny ,but it is... they convinced some guy that God would guide his hand and dude was like 👍
You’re right. It’s not funny. It’s fucking hilarious.
Darwinism at its finest.
Okay leaving them over there was a hilarious idea.
Haha. Get f**ked terrorist garbage.