Sea Knight pilot braved enemy fire to keep Marines supplied during siege at Khe Sanh

The chances of the Marine combat base at Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, surviving the 77-day siege that ended April 15, 1968, would have significantly lessened without Maj. David Althoff’s bold flying, say Marines who fought there.
Althoff, now a 71-year-old retired lieutenant colonel in Tempe, Ariz., flew 1,080 combat missions and logged 1,000 combat air hours in Vietnam. He piloted the CH-46A Sea Knight helicopter, the initial version of the CH-46E flown by Marines today.

Althoff and crews from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 262 — nicknamed “Tiger Airlines” — flew frequent supply runs to Marine mountain outposts that served as the eyes and ears of embattled Khe Sanh. The flying was done at low altitude where, as Althoff said in a series of interviews, “there was a lot of metal flying around.”

His aircraft was hit four times so that he had to land immediately — “and many other times when I could just barely make it back to a base,” he said. “You could sometimes count 100 or 120 bullet holes in the chopper.”

Cpl. Travis Flowers, a member of Althoff’s helicopter squadron, said, “When we inserted a reconnaissance team into a hostile area, Major Althoff would tell the guys to keep their heads and arms inside the chopper because we were going in low and fast and he didn’t want any of them getting something knocked off by a tree. He really meant it. You had to look up to see the trees.”

Althoff repeatedly credits his crew with his achievements and survival because there would have been no getting out of a hot zone without them. Sea Knight crews shared the constant risk of being hit, something that doesn’t come naturally to those trained in aviation.

”The CH-46 had superb visibility forward, but there’s no visibility aft. You need to rely on the crew chief for that,” Althoff said.

“You’re going into a hot zone,” he remembered. “They’re firing at you from 360 degrees. You start to take hits. You know you’re taking hits. The crew chief is telling you, ‘Okay, we’re leaking here. The gas line’s hit there.’ If they’re shooting into the cockpit, the gas lines are under the gauges so they’re leaking all over your feet. You can hear the bullets cracking into the fuselage.”

Second Lt. Michael Mullen, another pilot in HMM-262, said in 1968 that Althoff was “the squadron’s idol. He would never ask one of his junior pilots to fly a mission he had never flown. When we went on a hairy mission, we went with the knowledge that it could be completed because [Althoff] had already done it several times before.”

Althoff earned the first of his three Silver Stars on Feb. 1, 1968, as flight leader of a section of two CH-46s assigned to extract an eight-man reconnaissance team surrounded and pinned down by 100 North Vietnamese soldiers near Dong Ha.

Althoff holds numerous other military awards and was presented the Alfred A. Cunningham Award in 1968, making him the “Marine Aviator of the Year.”

A decade ago, he was inducted into the Arizona Aviation Hall of Fame. Althoff and his wife, Phyllis, have five grown children.

Written by Robert F. Dorr, an Air Force veteran and author, lives in Oakton, Va. His e-mail address is robertdorr@aol .com.