I don't want to take anything away from the chap, I would not swap places with him, but I would be interested to read the real story and not the boy's own version produced for Joe Public. Whist he struggled to fly with blood was pouring from a gunshot wound to the forehead, what was the other pilot doing, filing his nails, reading the agony page of the Sun. Sorry to be sceptical, but it looks like this has been spun to make a feel good factor for an unwanted war.

Matt

expat wrote on Mar 6^th, 2010 at 7:07am:


It does seem odd... but in the heat of combat, when you're busy flying a chopper, it's possible to not realize the severity of your injuries, and other crew may also not be aware at first.
A better case-in-point is the story of ANG Major Tammy Duckworth, who was commanding a Blackhawk (with the copilot actually at the controls at that moment) that took an RPG hit in the nose, which blew off both her legs and almost took off one arm.

She was unware, at first, that she'd been hurt so badly, because she was focusing on the aircraft, as her training would require:

“I was more concerned about our helicopter. We’d lost all our avionics and flight instruments, and that’s something that almost never happens in a Black Hawk because the systems are so robust. I knew we’d been hit but I didn’t realize how severely, and I was doing everything I could to help [Milberg] fly the aircraft.”


...and finally passed out from shock and blood loss as she was going through her emergency shutdown checklist on the ground after a safe landing!!



She's taken up flying again, BTW... a very determined aviator!

http://www.aopa.org/feature/tammyduckworth

Now, compared to her injuries, this Chinook pilot's wound was a scratch... nobody, including him, may have realized the severity of the problem.