By Robbin Laird
During my recent visit to 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, I visited Marine Corps Air Station New River and had a chance to meet with two members involved from the outset in HMH-461 standing up the CH-53K.
I first visited New River in 2010, where the focus was on the coming of the Osprey and its initial engagement in Iraq and later that year in Afghanistan. The Osprey is obviously a very different aircraft than the CH-46 it replaced, as is the CH-53K with regard to the CH-53E. It just doesn’t look that way in terms of a quick glance.
That is why I wrote a piece in 2020 where I suggested it should have been called something different, such as the CH-55. This is what I wrote:
To the casual observer, the Super Stallion and the King Stallion look like the same aircraft.
One of the challenges in understanding how different the CH-53K is from the CH-53E is the numbering part.
If it were called CH-55 perhaps one would get the point that these are very different air platforms, with very different capabilities.
What they have in common, by deliberate design, is a similar logistical footprint, so that they could operate similarly off of amphibious ships or other ships in the fleet for that matter.
But the CH-53E is a mechanical aircraft, which most assuredly the CH-55 (aka as the CH-53K) is not.
In blunt terms, the CH-55 (aka as the CH-53K) is faster, carries more kit, can distribute its load to multiple locations without landing, is built as a digital aircraft from the ground up and can leverage its digitality for significant advancements in how it is maintained, how it operates in a task force, how it can be updated, and how it could work with unmanned systems or remotes.
These capabilities taken together create a very different lift platform than is the legacy CH-53E. In a strategic environment where force mobility is informing capabilities across the combat spectrum, it is hard to understate the value of a lift platform, notably one which can talk and operate digitally, in carving out new tactical capabilities with strategic impacts.
During my July 2024 visit, I met with Capt. Jeffrey Stanton, assistant operations officer, and with Capt. Philip Wood, CH-53K pilot and pilot training officer.
In fact, at the beginning of the discussion, the officers noted my chapter in my CH-53K book which made the CH-55 point, and they fully underscored the core argument about the differences of the King Stallion from its predecessor.
Both officers were legacy heavy lift operators and came to the squadron at the same time and have been on the ground floor with the squadron as it has begun its CH-53K operations.
As Capt. Wood put it: “The CH-53K is a completely different aircraft from the CH-53E. The way you physically fly it, the way you plan for operations, and the way you maintain it are completely different.”
He went on to note that when he came to the CH-53K he was told not to treat it as an Echo but to change his mindset. And he noted that helped him to shape a different muscle memory capability to fly and operate the aircraft, again, completely different from the Echo.
Capt. Wood described the shift as follows: “It is more of mental than physical game in operating the aircraft.
“You are focused on manipulating everything the aircraft can do. You are focused outside of the aircraft on what the pilots can do to support operations. The pilots have much more situational awareness and can operate the aircraft to support the changing operations environments more rapidly.”
We then discussed an interesting case of the difference which I learned about when I visited MAWTS-1. This was the case of a downed Navy helo which had to be lifted out of a very difficult location, namely at the bottom of a ravine.
This is how 2nd MAW described the operation:
U.S. Marines with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH) 461 and 2nd Distribution Support Battalion (DSB), U.S. Navy Sailors with Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Four, and animal packers with the U.S. National Forest Service hike to the site of a downed U.S. Navy MH-60S Seahawk to prepare it for recovery at Inyo National Forest, California, Oct. 19, 2023.
The combined efforts of U.S. Marines, Sailors, and Forest Service personnel allowed HMH-461 to successfully recover the MH-60S Seahawk with a CH-53K King Stallion.
HMH-461 is a subordinate unit of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, and 2nd DSB is a subordinate unit of the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, the aviation and logistics combat elements of the II Marine Expeditionary Force.
What I learned at MAWTS-1 was that the hover capability of the King Stallion was critical to being able to lift the downed Seahawk out of the ravine. During a visit to VMX-1 in 2020 with Lt. Col. Frank, he underscored the importance of precision hover as follows:
“We’re not used to anything like this. It’s very intuitive. It can be as hands off as you know, a brand-new Tesla, you can close your eyes, set the autopilot and fly across country. Obviously, you wouldn’t do that in a tactical environment, but it does reduce your workload, reduces your stress.
“And in precision hover areas, whether it’s night under low light conditions, under NVGs, in the confines of a tight landing zone, we have the ability to hit position hold in the 53K and have the aircraft maintain pretty much within one foot of its intended hover point, one foot forward, lateral and AFT, and then one foot of vertical elevation change. It will maintain that hover until the end of the time if required. That’s very, very stress relieving for us when landing in degraded visual environments.”
Capt. Stanton was part of the ground crew during the Seahawk recovery operation and underscored how the King Stallion facilitated the lift operation. He noted: “I was on the advance party we sent out to plan the operation. It was clear that using the CH-53K would reduce significantly the risk factors involved in such an operation. It was around a 2 minute precision hover to come in and allow the helicopter support team to rig the Seahawk and to have the CH-53K to lift the Seahawk. And we did some non-traditional hooking of the aircraft to the CH-53K as well.”
The two officers noted that the aircraft is going through its developmental progression so that new capabilities are being released as the aircraft tests out each of these capabilities. That means that the King Stallion has been largely limited operationally to what the Marines do with the CH-53E but as capabilities are certified and then available, they fully expect the squadron to drive significant new innovations with a fully operational CH-53K squadron.
And while doing the path to transition, they are doing even CH-53E tasks more efficiently and in a more effective manner. Notably when moving equipment off an amphibious ship, the CH-53K can carry what a CH-53E either cannot or not do as easily or efficiently. A case in point is the ability of a CH-53K to carry a JLTV ashore in one sweep.
Col. Fleeger in my recent interview with her underscored how she saw the innovation process associated with the aircraft as follows:
“The operating crews will drive the out of the box thinking about how we can use our heavy lift assets to do new things and work new thinking about what payloads we can and should carry. In the Marine Corps, there is not simply out of the box thinking, it is really about operational innovations, and such innovations will drive new ways to use the CH-53K forward and suggest innovations we can work with the remaining legacy heavy lift aircraft.”
Both officers underscored their agreement with this perspective.
As Capt. Wood put it: “There are a lot of things we could do now with the CH-53K that have yet to explore.
“And there are certainly things the aircraft can do that we have not even thought of.
“The fleet pilots will come up with new ways of doing things and employing its new capabilities.
“And it has capabilities were are not even realizing now.”
Featured Image: A U.S. Marine Corps CH-53K King Stallion helicopter, assigned to Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH) 461, conducts an external lift at Auxiliary Airfield II near Yuma, Arizona, March 28, 2023. The CH-53K King Stallion performed the heaviest lift by a U.S. military helicopter outside of developmental testing with a total load weight of 36,000 pounds. HMH-461 is a subordinate unit of 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, the aviation combat element of II Marine Expeditionary Force. (U.S. Marine Corps still image extracted from video by Cpl. Jaye Townsend)
The Strategic Shift and the Role of the Heavy Lift Helicopter in the USMC