Black Hawk Super 64 shot down

Black Hawk Super 64 was shot down while taking the place of Super 61 over Mogadishu, turning an already unfolding helicopter emergency into a second, isolated crash-site crisis. A rocket-propelled grenade damaged the aircraft’s tail assembly; after it initially remained flyable, the failure became catastrophic, sending the helicopter spinning into a field of tin huts. Its upright landing left the crew alive, but the only airborne rescue team was already at Super 61, and Somali fighters were closing in on the new site.

Formation and the strike

Super 64 had not been in orbit over the target area long enough to synchronize with the other helicopters. Mike Durant was still working into the position vacated by Cliff Wolcott’s Super 61, which had been shot down only minutes earlier and lay smoldering on the ground. Mike Goffena, piloting Super 62, was moving up behind Durant’s aircraft as the formation adjusted around the first loss.

Goffena saw the rocket-propelled grenade strike Super 64’s gearbox. The explosion tore away part of it and sent the helicopter’s oil streaming out in a fine mist. Yet the aircraft remained intact, and its systems appeared to be functioning. From outside, the damage looked serious but not immediately decisive; from the cockpit, the size of the Black Hawk and the distance between Durant and its tail made it difficult to know what had happened. Goffena radioed to ask whether Durant was all right, then explained that the aircraft had been hit and that its tail area was damaged.

Tail failure and loss of control

Durant steered the crippled aircraft southeast over Mogadishu, toward the Indian Ocean and the base. Goffena followed for perhaps a mile, having decided that he would accompany his friend and the other men aboard at least part of the way home. He had been providing cover for the target building and Super 61’s crash site; he had also seen the rescue team descend there by rope and the ground forces preparing to leave. After judging that Super 64 might make it back, he began to turn away. Then the tail rotor assembly, its gearbox, and part of the vertical fin blurred and came apart.

Inside the cockpit, Durant and copilot Ray Frank felt rapid vibration and heard the dry gear shaft whining before a loud bang. With much of the tail fin gone, the helicopter’s balance shifted abruptly forward. The nose dropped and the aircraft began to spin to the right. Durant pushed the left pedal down, the control that would normally swing the aircraft left, but the Black Hawk continued rotating. Without the tail rotor to counter the main rotor’s torque, his familiar flying response could not stop the spin. Through the windshield, sky and earth flashed past in a blur.

The aircraft was roughly 75 feet above the ground when Goffena saw it spin ten or fifteen times in the seconds before impact. Durant was working the controls; Frank, despite the centrifugal force, managed to reach the engine controls mounted on the cockpit roof. Pilots trained in simulators to eliminate torque by shutting off the engines, and Frank succeeded in moving one engine switch to idle and turning the other halfway off. Durant radioed that the helicopter was going down hard.

Crash and isolation

Super 64 struck a warren of flimsy tin huts rather than one of Mogadishu’s stone buildings. It did not hit hard enough to overturn. The Black Hawk’s shock absorbers could withstand a severe impact if the aircraft landed upright, and Super 64 did. That posture helped the crew survive the crash, but it did not make their position safe.

The crash site was about a mile from the commandos and United States Army Rangers near the downtown target area. Super 61 had come down only a few blocks from those American forces, but the only airborne search-and-rescue team had already fast-roped to Wolcott’s aircraft. There was no second team ready to reinforce Durant’s crew. No one had seriously planned for two helicopters to be shot down, leaving the rescue capacity concentrated at the first crash site just as a second emergency began.

Goffena made a low pass over the wreck and saw Durant pushing at a section of tin roof that had collapsed around his legs. He was relieved to see Durant alive. He also saw Frank’s frustrated expression: Frank had previously survived a tail-rotor crash during a training mission, one that broke his leg and injured his back and led to a continuing legal battle. The new crash had brought him back to a kind of disaster he had already endured.

A second crisis in the battle

From above, Goffena could see Somalis spilling into the alleys and footpaths leading toward the downed helicopter. Super 64’s crew was therefore separated not only from its fellow American forces but also from the rescue team already committed elsewhere, while people converged on the wreck. The contrast with Super 61 was stark: the first crash had drawn the available rescue force; the second left the men at a more distant site without an easy way to strengthen their position.

That vulnerability belonged to a wider battle in which the rules governing fire were already under strain. United States Army Rangers had been instructed to shoot only at people pointing weapons at them, but armed people were intermingled with women and children, and crowds were gathering around the fighting. Super 64’s loss was not simply an aircraft failure in isolation: it created another exposed point in an urban fight where the force’s ability to rescue its own men was limited, while armed Somalis were moving toward the crash site. The helicopter remained upright, and its crew survived the impact, but the immediate problem had shifted from keeping the aircraft in the air to reaching men stranded far from the forces and rescuers already engaged elsewhere.