UH-1H Huey

The sound of a war

Ask anyone who was in Vietnam what the war sounded like and many will describe the Huey: a deep, rhythmic “thump” from its two big rotor blades, loudest as it descends and turns. The image of soldiers jumping from a Huey has become the iconic picture of that war, and the helicopter is one of the most recognised in the world. [1]

A helicopter with a jet engine

It began in 1952, when the US Army asked for a new helicopter for medical evacuation, instrument training and general utility work, because the ones it had were too big, too weak or too hard to maintain. Twenty companies bid; in February 1955 Bell won with its Model 204. [1] The prototype, the XH-40, first flew on 20 October 1956 at Fort Worth with Bell’s chief test pilot Floyd Carlson at the controls. Its Lycoming turboshaft made it the first turbine-powered helicopter in US military service, and a jet engine gave far more power for its weight than the piston engines of the day. [1]

The Army called it the HU-1A and officially named it Iroquois, after the Native American nations, but the name was almost never used. Soldiers pronounced “HU-1” as Huey; the nickname was so popular that Bell cast it into the helicopter’s tail-rotor pedals, and it survived the 1962 change of designation to UH-1. [1]

Early Hueys were underpowered, so Bell kept adding power. Then the Army asked for more seats, and Bell stretched the fuselage by 41 inches, added seats facing out beside the transmission and fitted bigger doors that could be taken off altogether. That became the Model 205, the UH-1D. In 1966 Bell fitted the 1,400 shp T53-L-13 and moved the pitot tube from the nose to the cabin roof, where landings would not damage it: the result was the UH-1H, the most-produced Huey of all. [1] [2]

Slicks, Hogs and Frogs

The Army meant its first Hueys for evaluation, but pressed them into service: Hueys of the 57th Medical Detachment arrived in South Vietnam in March 1962, and the stretched UH-1D followed: the FAS sheet dates its arrival to 1963 [2], while Wikipedia says the first batch of 77 reached South Vietnam in April 1965. [1] Their crews developed a language of their own. Troop carriers with only door guns were Slicks. Gunships carrying rockets were Hogs or Frogs, those with guns just Guns; units in the field built their own weapon mounts as early as 1962. [1]

Hueys flew medical evacuation, command and control and cargo missions as well as assaults. [2] Air cavalry troops combined Huey-borne infantry with scout helicopters and gunships in colour-coded hunter-killer teams. At night, UH-1H “Nighthawks” with a searchlight and a minigun found and lit up targets for AH-1 Cobras on “Firefly” missions. [1] [2] In the 1972 Easter Offensive, two experimental Hueys armed with TOW missiles were rushed to Vietnam; their crews had never fired a TOW, yet 151 of the 162 they fired hit, including tanks. [1]

The cost was terrible. Of the 7,013 Hueys that served in Vietnam, 3,305 were destroyed, and 1,151 pilots and 1,231 other crew members were killed. [1]

Every service, many nations

The Huey served all the US armed forces. The Marine Corps chose it in 1962 and built the UH-1E with an all-aluminium airframe against corrosion and a rotor brake for shipboard use. [1] The Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron, the Green Hornets, flew Hueys in Laos and Cambodia in the “Secret War”, inserting and extracting reconnaissanceReconnaissance GlossaryJoint terms: A mission undertaken to obtain, by visual observation or other detection methods, information about the activities and resources of an enemy or adversary, or to secure data concerning the meteorological, hydrographic, or… teams; Lieutenant James P. Fleming earned the Medal of Honor in a UH-1F on 26 November 1968. [1] The Navy turned surplus Army gunships into the Seawolves, working alongside its river patrol boats. [1] Australian Hueys flew in Vietnam too, some converted to “Bushranger” gunships with miniguns and rockets. [1]

After Vietnam the Huey flew in Grenada, Panama and the 1991 Gulf War, where more than 400 made up over a fifth of all coalition helicopters. [1] The UH-60 Black Hawk gradually replaced it: the Huey left active Army service in early 2005, and the last Army Huey was retired in late 2016. [1] It has not gone away. Germany flew its licence-built UH-1Ds until April 2021, the Air Force still flies the twin-engined UH-1N, the Marines fly the four-bladed UH-1Y Venom, and more than 16,000 of the Huey family have been built. [1]