Info Sheet - William E. Malinovsky
see Cobra Saves LOH Crew 3 Nov 69
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MyLife Online says: William Malinovsky is 74 years old and was born on 11/21/1943. Currently, he lives in Annapolis, MD; and previously lived in Edgewater, MD. Sometimes William goes by various nicknames including william e malinovsky, william e malinosvky, w malinovsky and william a malinowski. Other family members and associates include elise malinovsky, emil malinovsky and laura malinovsky.
Cobra Mast Bumping incident that occurred when Malinovsky was doing a test flight (late 68 -69?) By some miracle he got it back to the Corral. Bell helicopter representatives came out, looked at the bird and put it in a virtual plastic bag to take back to the factory.
From Moose Marcinkowski: Bill Malinovsky and I served in the ACCB at Fort Hood in the early 70's. Lost track of him after that. He was famous for bringing a Cobra back after a mast bumping incident on a maintenance test flight. as gene Carolan said "The mast looked like a coke bottle.
From Tom "Sam" Dooling:
Bill was the Cobra Platoon Leader for much of my tour in Cobras and he and I worked pretty closely together as I was the unit/division Cobra SIP. We really didn’t have maintenance test pilots for Cobras in the unit for much of the year, so the test flying duties were divvied up amongst the aircraft commanders — and Bill did more than his share.
On this occasion, he was topping the aircraft (engine) - a procedure that demonstrates that the engine is capable putting out maximum power for a given condition (for the -13 engine, 50 psi of torque up to a determined OAT and PA). The procedure involves determining an approximate pressure altitude where the engine will no longer make its 50 psi of torque (generally ~ 3,500’ in VN). You then fly to a position about 500 feet lower than that estimate, set the altimeter to 29.92 (so you have PA), and pull in ~48 psi of torque. As you climb, the engine will start losing power producing capability (as all turbine engines do) and as you hold your power in, the N2 will start to bleed off. You bleed off about 200 RPM, check the EGT, OAT, and torque to validate against a chart. This tells you that the engine is producing its designed power (or not).
Now, as you might imagine, this Cobra just came out of maintenance, so it is unarmed and may not have a full bag of fuel. The recommended airspeed for this maneuver is 80 KTS, so as you complete this maneuver, you are climbing like a bat out of hell — and now you have to transition back to normal flight - i.e., reduce power, increase airspeed to normal cruise (100KTs). If you do this too quickly, you have the potential to do what Bill did — get into mast bumping at about 5,000’ off the ground!!! (The MTF (Maintenance Test Flight) checklist has a warning about this).
The fact that Bill recognized and recovered from this situation and was able bring the aircraft back to mother earth safely speaks volumes to his skill as a pilot (to say nothing of his innate sense of self preservation). As I recall, his first stop after landing was his hooch to change his underwear!!!
From Ray Clark: The Tropic Lightening article says there were three bullet holes in Malinovsky's Cobra. As I recall there were nine.