Six U.S. Army helicopters make an unplanned landing in a rapeseed field in Poland

September 10, 2014 Helicopters
Jacek Siminski

Six U.S. Army helicopters have made an impromptu landing in Poland

On Sept. 10, six U.S. Army choppers landed in the middle of a rapeseed field near Gruta, Poland. Since the pilots did not know their location they received information leafleats on the municipality, in English.

The group consisted of Chinook and Black Hawk utility helicopters.

The unusual event gathered around 100 spectators. According to the information provided by TVN24 the chopper pilots lost their orientation due to the foggy weather conditions.

According to the official statement of the US Embassy the choppers, belonging to the U.S. Army 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, stationed in Germany, got a much appreciated warm welcome: aircrews were greeted by the locals with cakes and coffee.

The helicopters departed again to their destination about 2 hours later.

Jacek Siminski for TheAviationist

Choppers in Poland take off

Image credit: gruta.pl

 

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Standing contributor for TheAviationist. Aviation photojournalist. Co-Founder of DefensePhoto.com. Expert in linguistics, Cold War discourse, Cold War history and policy and media communications.

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12 Comments

    • I’d like to think it’s just the cakes & coffee, and the gorgeous Polish women that caused the two hour delay.. I know I’d have switched it off!

      Ahh dreams

    • GPS tells you where you are, but it doesn’t necessarily have a map to show you what’s around you.

      (It also reminds me of a story I once heard that during the first Gulf war the US Apache’s GPS system thought they were in Alaska rather than Iraq. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’ve heard it several times over the years.)

  2. How can a bunch of Blackhawks get “lost” in Poland? Any speculation as to what is really going on here?

  3. Story is incorrect. The flight is trained to land when the fog/weather does not allow them to safely continue VFR. It is not the safest thing in the world to do a formation inadvertent instrument meteorological conditions breakup. The landing was not due to “not knowing their location”, a silly statement.

    • Now that makes sense. Didn’t think it sounded right. And a little R and R never hurt anybody, even if it was only 2 hours.

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