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As Taliban fighters swept into Afghanistan’s capital on Aug. 15, taking control of the war-torn country, Hawaii Air National Guard 1st Lt. Collin Chow Hoy was co-piloting a C-17 cargo aircraft into Kabul airport.
Onboard were a couple dozen soldiers with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and two “Little Bird” and two Black Hawk helicopters for the buildup of American troops that helped with the massive evacuation effort.
News agency Reuters reported at the time that the Taliban were coming “from all sides.” Gunfire could be heard around the city.
“To be honest, there was very little time to be worried,” Chow Hoy recalled of his C-17 Globemaster III’s early arrival at the last bastion of U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
“It’s one of those things where you can reflect on it later,” he said. “You just try your best to compartmentalize things during the job because if your mind is elsewhere, your focus starts to shift away from what you have to do during the moment, right?”
But there were distractions that couldn’t be ignored.
Before the big jet could land, the crew got word that a couple of Taliban pilots had landed a Cessna Caravan on the single Kabul runway — and then left it there in an attempt to shut down airfield operations.
Chow Hoy’s C-17 ended up “having to hold out in the mountains, and I was uncomfortable because the Taliban people, they are mountainous people, and you have no idea where they are,” he said.
Rockets or other munitions fired at the airport subsequently delayed the takeoff of the C-17, which was now on a low-fuel warning, before it lifted off with 54 U.S. embassy staff.
It was the first of two flight missions into Kabul for Chow Hoy. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin later said the evacuation “was the largest airlift conducted in U.S. history — executed in just 17 days.”
The plan was to evacuate 70,000 to 80,000 people. More than 124,000 were brought out, Austin said in prepared remarks ahead of last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the end of military operations in Afghanistan.
Austin said military aircraft flew more than 387 sorties, averaging nearly 23 a day. At the height of the operation, an aircraft was taking off every 45 minutes.
“Was it perfect? Of course not,” Austin said, noting, “In the span of two days, from Aug. 13 to 15, we went from working alongside a democratically elected, longtime partner government to coordinating warily with a longtime enemy.”
A chaotic scene
A Honolulu resident and member of the Hawaii Air National Guard since 2015, Chow Hoy had volunteered for a Germany assignment flying Europe missions out of Ramstein Air Base. That quickly changed to helping with the Afghanistan evacuation alongside an active duty Air Force crew. The C-17 he piloted was out of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey.
He was in the mix of the first C-17s arriving for the evacuation and had flown into Bagram Air Base before, but never Kabul.
Chow Hoy, who graduated from St. Louis School and Oregon State University, described a chaotic scene on the ground and in the air.
“We had civilian airliners rushing to get out of there,” he said. “We had, it looked like, 20 to 30 helicopters at once coming in and coming out and offloading the embassy personnel. We had C-17s that were offloading their cargo and onloading their cargo. We had the Afghan National Army flying their Apaches (helicopters) for air cover. It kind of looked like something out of a zombie movie, to be honest. That’s the only way I can really describe it.”
His C-17’s “traffic collision avoidance system” went off because of the proximity. “We had to keep an eye out. So the biggest threats came from perhaps being shot at to a mid-air collision. That’s what it turned into,” the 30-year-old pilot said.
The Taliban broke through Kabul’s defenses about 45 minutes after Chow Hoy’s C-17 landed, and big plumes of smoke could be seen around the city.
The next day would bring the alarming video of Afghan civilians running on the airfield alongside a departing C-17 with some clinging to the cargo carrier and falling off after it took off.
After about three hours on the ground on Aug. 15, Chow Hoy’s C-17 had an “insufficient fuel message” as it prepared to take off with embassy personnel. There were delays with manifests and air traffic. Incoming rockets or other munitions caused the single military air traffic controller wrangling all the aircraft on the big airfield to briefly halt all departures.
“The controller, he’s freaking out over the radio, and we were like, oh gosh, we really didn’t see anything, but due to all that, we burned a lot of gas sitting on the ground at idle,” said Chow Hoy, who is with the 204th Airlift Squadron in Hawaii.
When the C-17 did take off, it couldn’t fly at normal cruise speed. “We had to kind of slow it down,” he said, and the four-engine jet landed safely at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
The second flight in on Aug. 17 saw the delivery of about 120 fully combat-loaded 82nd Airborne soldiers with pallets of ammunition and Meals Ready to Eat — but the big plane flew out empty, Chow Hoy said.
This was after the Taliban had taken control of one side of the airport, and from “all the videos that everybody saw (of) all the people rushing the airport, they were all crammed into the terminal there, and it took forever to get all of them searched, which is why, unfortunately, it was us and another C-17 that flew out completely empty.”
Proud to serve
Pacific Air Forces in late August said a C-17 aircrew, made up of 15th Wing active-duty at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and 154th Wing Hawaii Air National Guard airmen, had assisted with multiple evacuation missions from Ramstein Air Base, but provided no details.
Chow Hoy said that as a Guardsman, “I’m extremely proud” to have been a part of the Afghanistan airlift and evacuation. “I can remember, I was in fourth grade when 9/11 happened. All of us will never forget that day. I would never have imagined in my life I would take part in the closing of the conflict.”
He also wants to “put that weekend warrior joke to rest” because, even though most Guard personnel come in for duty one weekend a month, “we do the job just as well, if not better, and I hope this is a testament to whenever the time it is to do (our) job, we do it and we do it exceptionally well.”
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