Night Helo OPS

This is a collaborative effort. My son, Joel, captured the image and I did

the post processing. We don't often have the opportunity to work together

on photographs, but it is a lot of fun when we.

Cool shot!  Not often that you get to see images of night ops, no less a helo landing on the aft deck of a destroyer (almost all pictures are of night carrier ops).

It helps when the family boat is a DDG.

Looks like signalman is not on the flight deck, is this SOP for night ops?

Yes., he is on the deck above. On this type of DDG (without the hanger) the flight deck does not have a lot of room. The visibility for the flight crew is better from the position here. I have a lot of night VERTREP shots. These are all from the Persian Gulf.