| HURLBURT FIELD,
Fla. (AP) -- The Air Force is hoping flight simulations can help
solve the disappearance 30 years ago of a rescue helicopter in
Vietnam.
The project may lead to similar
efforts to find other aircraft that vanished during the Vietnam
War, former flight engineer Bob Baldwin said Wednesday as the
nation marked Veterans Day.
Baldwin is part of a team of
veterans teaming up with the Air Force to find an HH-3E Jolly
Green Giant and its four-man crew. The helicopter named Jolly
Green 23 vanished 9 June 1968, while searching for a downed
attack pilot, who also remains unaccounted for.
Baldwin was part of the wartime
effort to find the helicopter. Thirty years later, he's helping
with a new search despite being thousands of miles away from the
scene.
Black and white aerial photos
taken in the late 1960s were converted into digital photos and
matched with current maps to recreate the wartime landscape near
the Vietnam-Laos border. Baldwin then used a computer joy stick
to fly through the scene displayed on a console.
"I just closed my eyes and when
I opened them up, it was like stepping back 30 years," Baldwin
said. "The only thing missing is that the tracers aren't coming
at you from antiaircraft guns."
The simulations at the Hurlburt
base in the Florida Panhandle allowed Baldwin and another former
pilot to pick out three spots where the helicopter may have
crashed.
A military team in Vietnam
searched for four days before the monsoon season forced them to
stop. They plan to resume when the rains end next year, said Maj.
Mike Vaughn, who helps supervise computer mapping and flight
simulator work at Hurlburt.
The team found no sign of Jolly
Green 23, but did find wreckage of a Marine helicopter that had
been forced down. All but one of the crew members had
escaped. |