I recently saw a program on the captivating, but ill-fated mission to free the remaining Iranian hostages in 1979. If not for a haboob, or dust storm, the operation most likely would have continued to the U.S. embassy. Flying helicopters at 200 feet through zero-visibility at night cannot be easy.

Article by “thelizman”, as posted on the militaryphotos.net forum in 2004:

April 24th, 1979 Masirah

The Command of the Joint Task Force (COMJTF) was set up in a hanger that was given the codename “Red Barn”. Using codenames is an important part of military operations; their nature is to hide or obscure the nature of the individual units from intelligence collectors. Therefore, the MC-130s would be codenamed “Dragons”. The EC-130s were “Republics”, the RH-53Ds were “Bluebeard”, the carrier USS Nimitz would be “Gravel Pit”, and the mission launch code would be “Foreman”. At 12:20 HRS Zulu(1), the go code “Foreman” was sent out from COMJTF. At four separate staging areas around the Middle East, the participants of Operation Eagle Claw went into action.

14:05 HRS Z Oman

The EC and MC 130’s were operating above their maximum load weight by about 10,000 lbs. This was referred to as Emergency Max Load, and is only used when absolutely necessary. The limited resources available to this mission made it absolutely necessary. Pilots in the bladder birds (EC-130s) would have to take the full length of the runway to get into the air.

At about the same moment Dragon I rolled down the runway with Col. Kyle aboard, all eight RH-53Ds aboard the Nimitz were brought onto the deck and prepped for flight.

14:35 HRS Z Dragon I

Intelligence had indicated that the Gulf of Oman would be clear of boat traffic. While one may not naturally think of fishing trawlers and oil tankers as being a danger to a military mission, the truth is that all major intelligence services used the cover of commercial maritime fishing and shipping vessels as naval intelligence points. This allowed them to slip up to and inside of territorial waters and perform Signal Intelligence Operations (SIGINT OPS). These boats often got a free pass because boarding a civilian boat wasn’t typically a good move for international relations, especially when you sink a legitimate fishing boat.

Not surprisingly when Dragon I’s co-pilot spotted about six vessels on the surface, it cause a slight bit of panic. The pilot climbed quickly to 6,000 ft to obscure the plane in the light haze and to avoid buzzing any of the ships. As a former ally of the US, Iran had C-130’s of their own(3), so part of the mission would rely upon the similarity of US and Iranian assets to disguise the aircraft. All members of the JTF who would go into Iran carried nothing that could identify them other than their military id and dog tags. Name patches were stripped. Delta wore velcro patches over the US flag insignia on their shoulders. These patches would be removed once inside the embassy so the hostages would recognize that it was American forces that were rescuing them.

15:05 HRS Z Oman

Dragons II and III went into the air, to be followed quickly by Republic IV, V, and VI. Aboard the Nimitz, the RH-53Ds were also being launched. Bluebeard flight (2) would only be able to fly at about 100 – 110 knots with their current load, and would be overtaken by Dragon and Republic flights. All flights would stay low to the ground, flying between 250 and 1000 feet to avoid radar and long range visual tracking. Dragon I had taken off nearly an hour earlier in order to set up flight control operations and to secure the staging point. If anything was out of kilter, Dragon I could call the operation off without risking the rest of the JTF’s men and equipment.

15:25 HRS Z Iran

Dragon I was “feet dry”, meaning it had crossed over the Iranian coast. Soon, the aircraft would have to climb to 4,000 feet; most of Iran was on a plateau, and at that point 1,000 feet `off the deck’ meant 4,000 feet above sea level.

Fifteen minutes later, Bluebeard flight was also feet dry. At this point, the Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) system began to malfunction on Bluebeard 5, indicating that the helicopter was yawing to the right. Bluebeard 5 would rely upon the other helicopters for guidance.

Fifty minutes later, the remaining Dragon flight along with the Republic flight went feet dry. All of the aircraft had gone overland at a point near the town of Chah Bahar, a port city near Jaz in the Hormozgan administrative region. As each flight came overland, the temperature inside the aircraft began to climb to 100 degrees (Fahrenheit). Crewman began to strip off their flight suits to cool down, and the shipboard air conditioning systems strained to keep up.

16:30 HRS Z

Dragon I’s pilot began having difficulty making out the terrain. Through the NOGs, the Zagros Mountains in the distance appeared fuzzy and undefined. Soon, visibility was down to between a mile and a half-mile. Flying at night was difficult under the best conditions. Judging distances in the dark was hard enough without adding the loss of stereo vision when using NOGs, but whatever they had flown into – and it certainly wasn’t fog at 120 degree desert heat – was cutting their visibility. To maintain cover, all flights were following the terrain, which meant they had to hug the ground. At 110 knots, a half-mile of warning didn’t give a pilot a whole lot of maneuvering room to avoid 2,000-foot peaks.

The pilot aboard Dragon I deployed the FLIR turret. Through the FLIR monitor everything was visible in all quadrants. Whatever they had flown into had certainly made things difficult, but it was decided that it wasn’t enough of an impairment to break radio silence. Even though the Satellite Communication (SATCOM) radios they were using were encrypted, any radio traffic could tip off the Iranians or Soviet listening posts in the area. All of the other flights were equipped with FLIR equipment.

The Iranians called the phenomena Dragon I encountered “haboob”. Whenever cold air from a rainstorm rushes to the ground, it pushes the fine dusty particles of the desert sand up into the air. There, the particles hang about like a fog until they either fall to the ground or are pushed even higher by updrafts. Other than obscuring vision, haboob is mostly harmless although pilots routinely avoid dust storms to save wear on their engines.

16:55 HRS Z Oman

Red Barn’s “black box” operators were scouring the airwaves for SIGINT when one of the operators picked up a warning about a blacked out aircraft heading for Chah Bahar. For a moment in time, there was some concern that their cover had been blown, but both Dragon and Republic flights had long since passed that point, and were heading well away from Chah Bahar. It was decided that it was most likely a Iranian C-130 operating under blackout (a common practice for military aircraft in the Shah’s Air Force). The report had also been made to the gendarmerie (the equivalent of the local sheriff) instead of the defense forces.

17:00 HRS Z Bluebeard Flight

Bluebeard 6 had a warning light come on in the cockpit. The “Blade Inspection Indicator” (BIM) indicator light required that the pilot immediately set the aircraft down. The rotor blades on the H-53s aren’t solid, but are instead hollow wings. The blades are filled with nitrogen under pressure so that when a crack forms in the blade, the nitrogen loses pressure tripping a sensor. BIMs were usually a malfunction in the sensor, but procedure required that the pilot set down and inspect the rotor. If no cracks were visible, the aircraft could operate up to 15 hours, but experience told pilots they typically had less. Visible cracks immediately grounded the helicopter. The H-53 was a five bladed helicopter, but the loss of any portion of any single blade would severely unbalance the rotor, causing a crash.

On setting down, the pilot found that the BIM was real. Bluebeard 8 had circled around to provide assistance, and in fifteen minutes the entire force had transferred their equipment and all classified materials over to the other chopper. Bluebeard 6 would have to be left behind, and Bluebeard 8 was now 20 minutes behind the rest of the flight.

17:00 HRS Z Diego Garcia

Diego Garcia was a British Territory. The US and UK used Diego Garcia as a base for its fixed wing bombers in the region, giving tactical range control over most of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It was a long flight, so in order to have mid-air refueling the KC-135 Stratotankers would have to lift off now and rendezvous with the C-141s and C-130s in Daharan, Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, the airfield assault team was taking off from Wadi Kena in Egypt. Their flight plan called for them to head south along the Red Sea, turn west-northwest and fly straight through Saudi Arabia to Daharan for refueling, then on to Manzariyeh for the airfield assault. They would never make it to that point.

17:45 HRS Z Over Iran

Bluebeard flight was now hitting the haboob. The next 35 nautical miles was described by one Marine pilot as “the inside of a bottle of milk”. After emerging on the other side, the pilots got reoriented. Radio silence was broken over the SATCOM to advise the formation to put more space between helicopters. The pilots were trained for flying blind under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), but more room still meant more safety.

Meanwhile, Dragon I was nearing the Desert I area. On a previous mission, a small team of Air Force Combat Controllers had flown in on a small prop plane to survey the area. They had also installed a special runway lighting system consisting of five highly directional lights which could only be seen well with FLIR or NOG equipment, or up close. The CIA-built landing lights were to be activated by remote, but it was an unproven system that had been sitting in the desert for over a month and running off batteries; not everyone was confident it’d work. The on signal was sent, and for a brief second the crew scanned the ground in anticipation. One of the crew spotted the lights thirty-degrees to the right. They had worked! Cheers and applause erupted aboard Dragon I.

In order to land, the FLIR turret would be deployed again. As the turret popped out, the screen lit up to show a small truck speeding down the main road. Dragon I had to pull out of its landing approach, and for a moment Col. Kyle wondered if the driver had seen the landing lights come on.

On the second approach, the pilot turned the FLIR off to drop the gear. Col Kyle suddenly realized that the nose gear door would get jammed against the FLIR turret if it were still deployed. He cursed to himself for not seeing this in the planning.

Without the FLIR, judging the distance to the ground was difficult. On approach, the pilot called for more power to slow the planes descent, but it was too late. Dragon I came in hard, and bounced a few times. In the cargo bay, Charlie Beckwith got bounced around and wound up under the RAT patrols jeep. As he crawled out, he made a joke to the effect of `any landing you could walk away from is a good landing’. Before Dragon I even came to a complete stop the cargo door was down and RAT patrol and Delta forces were already swinging into action. The Rangers, led by Wade Ishimoto, sped up the road to set up a roadblock.

Back with Bluebeard flight, Bluebeards I and II lost sight of the rest of the formation and had turned around to make a landing in the clear, and reorient themselves.

18:15 HRS Z Desert I

Desert I was picked because it was secluded and not heavily traveled. Someone probably should have informed the Iranians of that fact, because within minutes of having to abort their first landing the Rangers were facing down a bus full of forty Iranian civilians. A few warning shots didn’t manage to convince the driver to slow down, but Ishimoto’s 40mm grenade managed to convince him it was in his best interest to stop for the roadblock.

Col. Kyle had planned on taking a few detainees, but not civilians, and certainly not 40 of them. The decision was made for the passengers and their luggage to be loaded up and taken to Manzariyeh, where they would then be taken back to Egypt. There, they’d be put on a plane back to Iran. Letting them go wasn’t an option, since any one of them would likely blow Eagle Claw’s cover.

At the roadblock, the Rangers were trying to calm the detainees. Maj. Tyrone Tisdale, a fluent speaker of Farsi, began reciting poetry by Omar Khayyam, and that seemed to help as from the back one of the detainees yelled out in perfect English “It’s about time you came, Yanks.” Post revolutionary Iran was a mix of loyalists and revolutionaries, and many expected an American invasion to restore the Shah.

Back at the staging area, Col Kyle decided to send a message to Red Barn advising them of the detainees, when he found out that the SATCOM link to Red Barn and Gravel Pit was no longer getting good reception. The message would have to be sent by UHF, which wasn’t secure.

18:30 HRS Z Desert I

It must’ve been rush hour, because vehicle numbers 3 and 4 were approaching the roadblock. This time it was a short fuel truck followed by a pickup. Ishimoto’s team fired warning shots, and then the truck sped up. A few rounds into the engine block damaged the truck, but the driver was hell bent on ramming the Rangers. Ishimoto broke out a Light Antitank Weapon (LAW, basically a bazooka) and fired off a round. The projectile struck the ground below the truck (its not clear if Ishimoto was aiming for the truck or trying to make a crater in front of the truck) and bounced up into the fuel tank.

Back at the staging area, everyone heard the loud “WHUMP”, and turned to look at the mushroom cloud. “That’s a gasoline explosion,” Beckwith stated as if he were commenting on the weather. Seconds later, Ishimoto came up on a dirt bike and filled them in on what happened. The driver had made it out right before his truck exploded, and escaped in the pickup trick that was following it.

There was great concern that the cover had been officially blown at this point, but Beckwith made an observation. The truck that was following was meant for the drivers escape. They were smuggling gas; American moon-shiners used the same tactic. He wasn’t about to go complaining to the gendarmerie about his contraband gas getting blown to hell. But there was still the issue of an exploded fuel truck in the middle of nowhere. They decided they would have one of the Rangers ram the bus into the wreckage to make it look like an accident.

18:45 HRS Z Bluebeard I/II

After a few minutes of reckoning, they decided that they were too low on fuel to return to the Nimitz, and would have to forge on to Desert I. The TACAN transmitter at Desert I would be up soon enough, and they could follow the beacon in for a landing.

After five minutes in the air, Bluebeard II had a system failure in the secondary hydraulic lines. Although it was not the primary system, backup hydraulics are important. If the bird lost its primaries, the controls would lock up and the helo would crash. The pilot made the call to keep flying to Desert I, set the MH-53D down there, and check on the problem.

Back with Bluebeard flight, Bluebeard V was having major problems. For starters, the co-pilot was having a bad case of vertigo from using the NOGs. Another crewmember was about to take over for him, but the co-pilot was able to ‘tough it out’ and do his job. To add to that, the gimbal stopped working, and the backup indicator was sticking on turns. Without the gimball and its backup it would be very difficult to tell if the aircraft was flying level and straight. Bluebeard V then lost sight of the lead helicopter in the haboob.

After a few minutes, the decision was made aboard Bluebeard V to return to the Nimitz. The situation was degrading rapidly, and if it got any worse they may not make Desert I. Getting back to the coast gave them a better chance of rendezvousing with the Search and Rescue choppers stationed aboard the Nimitz.

Because radio silence was still being observed, nobody thought to radio to the lead and advise them of the situation. Bluebeard VII later circled back to look for V, but gave up on the search after ten minutes. JTF had now lost two helicopters, but that still left enough for the mission.

19:25 HRS Z Desert I

The remainder of Dragon flight and the Republic flight were landing now. The burning beacon which had been a fuel truck both helped and hindered the landing, and more than one C-130 had to retry their landing in order to avoid the flames and updrafts. The fire made the NOGs useless, and the FLIR turrets had to be retracted for the landing. As the final Republic flight was coming it, things were getting congested at the staging area. Delta troops were dragging their equipment onto the road to make room for the last C-130, and one Delta jumped on the SATCOM to warn the final C-130 about how close things were. Col Kyle watched him call out over the SATCOM in plainspoken English without encoding the message. Suddenly, he realized the stupidity and wastefulness of encoding messages that were going over a secure encrypted channel. This was another aspect missed in the preplanning, probably because the SATCOM units were added at the last minute.

As the C-130 touched down, the pilot feathered the props making the blades essentially backwards, and then went full throttle. The behemoth transport lurched to a stop with room to spare.

All engines were running on all aircraft. They were kept running at low power because if they couldn’t start themselves they’d have to be abandoned. It wasn’t uncommon for a perfectly good aircraft to have trouble starting, and require an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) to give them a boost.

21:00 HRS Z Desert I

Bluebeard flight started arriving, and the refueling operation started immediately. But when Bluebeard II landed, the pilot shut it down for inspection. It was discovered that a nut was cracked on the primary hydraulic booster and it was leaking fluid. Combined with the failure of the backup hydraulics, if this leak got much worse the controls would lock up and the helicopter would crash.

The JTF was down to 5 helicopters now – not enough to pull the mission off. Between the two extra crews, and the lost equipment, there weren’t enough resources to pull this off. Col Kyle and Charlie Beckwith began racking their brains to figure out if the mission could go on. After a few minutes, word was sent back to Red Barn: ‘Operation Scrubbed.’

The task force began hurriedly reorganizing and loading up the chopper crews on the Republic birds. Dragons I and II were sent back along with Republic IIV while Col Kyle supervised the refueling of the remaining Bluebeards from Republics IV, V, and VI. Bluebeard III began to lift off when it was surrounded by a whirlwind of dust from its own rotor wash. The rotor blade struck Republic IV’s tail with a loud crash that immediately drew everyone’s attention.

The entire task force stood transfixed as Bluebeard III spun around in the air and came down on the EC-130’s wing. The wing broke and exploded as fuel spilled out, and the chopper flipped into its side. Secondary explosions rocked Desert I sending shrapnel flying into Bluebeards I, IV, and IIX. Republic IV had fourteen people on board, and the ones who survived the crash began scrambling out -some on fire. Several members of the task force ran to the crash to help rescue the crewmembers from the airplane, while others began running to get away from the heavily damaged Bluebeards on the ground.

All of the choppers had taken heavy damage from the explosion, and the only fully working Bluebeard was VII. The task force had to get the hell out now, and one chopper wasn’t worth slowing everyone down. Col Kyle began directing everyone onto the C-130s, and in minutes the planes were speeding down the desert runway. Looking back, Kyle observed that the rotor blades on one of the Bluebeards were still turning. In the rush to get out, the crew didn’t even have the luxury of turning the engines off.

Everyone’s heart began to sink. The tremendous weight of mission failure was bad enough, but there were 8 fallen comrades back at the crash site. The fire made it impossible to retrieve them, but in military ethos you never leave a man behind. There were also classified documents on the remaining helicopters that were supposed to be retrieved or destroyed. A request for an airstrike was called out to Red Barn, but COMJTF turned the request down. If there were any survivors at the site that had been missed, they would be killed, and the fighters might encounter Iranian aircraft – an unacceptable escalation. The flight back to Masirah would take about 4 hours – plenty of time to rethink every minute of the mission.

02:00 HRS Z Masirah

The JTF survivors were tired, sweaty, and exhausted. Worse yet, they had failed in their mission, lost their buddies, and were forced to leave them behind. The operation was a complete and utter secret, so naturally everyone on the airbase knew about it by now. From the British side of the base, a jeep came speeding up to the Red Barn area. Two British pilots got out, unloaded a few cases of cold beer, and then drove off without saying a word. Scrawled across the top of the box were the words “From us all, to you all, for having the guts to try.”