So, I’m a Washington neophyte. My wife and I moved here about a month ago. On a couple of occasions, I’ve seen one of those helicopters that’s white on top and green on the bottom (a VH-60N?).
We went to a nationals game the other day and one of these helicopters flew by two or three times.
Someone told me, though, that if it’s the president, there will be four of them together. Is that true?
Not sure about 4, but I know they always have 2 when the president travels on them. What I heard was the 2nd one is a sort of decoy so that if someone tries to shoot them down they don’t know which one he is on.
I believe I saw it in Little Rock when Clinton was in office. It was followed by several smaller helicopters.
The Marine sqaudron which hauls the president has several identical looking helos. Not sure if they have 5 or 15, but it’s in that ball park. And they each fly around a bunch without the president on board.
Any one of them is “Marine One” if, and only if, it has the prez on board. So when they fly from the base to the White House to pick him up they’re just “Marine 12345”, or whatever number is painted on it. Once the president gets aboard, they’re “Marine One”. And they revert back to plain old “Marine 12345” once they deliver him wherever he’s going.
Bottom line: It’s likely you saw one of those helos. It’s much less likely the President was aboard.
My understanding, from watching a NatGeo show about it, is that whenever the President is in M1, there are always at least 2 others. All corresponding footage I’ve seen (except in poorly thought-out movies) shows a total of 3, the idea being that you can never really know which one the prez is in, so if you’ve only got one stinger missile you’ll have to roll the dice.
That doesn’t mean you couldn’t occasionally see one on its own. There are a fleet of “marine ones,” made up of two models (a small one for shorter trips and a large one for more serious distances). The Marines who fly those things require a ridiculous amount of training and practice (landing a helo perfectly on three metal plates placed by hand on a grass lawn with barely any clearing can’t be easy). So you could be seeing a pilot out on a training run, or a mechanical test after some engine work, or possibly shuttling someone less important around.
Since it was green and white, and there’s a decent chance that it’s illegal for another aircraft to have that color pattern (in the same way it’s illegal for a civilian auto to have a police car-esq color scheme), there’s a good chance it wasn’t a news chopper or something. You said it was at a ballgame, don’t they have military fly-overs for games frequently as a feature/attraction/celebration etc?
You’ll see them around DC, near the Navy Yard (where the Nats stadium is) and elsewhere. I see them a lot near Walter Reed, they are the Marine helicopters, but as noted, it doesn’t mean that the Pres. is on it.