Mike Durant
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And the air mission commander calls on the radio and says, you better put it on the ground.
I'm like, hmm, there's a freaking firefight going on down here.
The airfield's right there.
I mean, I can see it.
No, I'm going for the airfield.
And that's my prerogative.
I'm the pilot in command of the aircraft.
I mean, at that point, I am officially in charge of what we're doing.
And it didn't matter if the president himself called me.
I have the authority to do what I think is right.
So we start flying.
And then I start to hear this whining.
And it builds up very rapidly.
And what had happened was the RPG hit the bottom of the transmission.
We call it a gearbox.
Underneath the tail rotor, it connects to the tail rotor.
It blew part of it off.
And now it's got no oil.
So it's just gears that are probably damaged, turning at a super high rate of speed.
And they just disintegrated.