US Special Operations Command decided that downtown Minneapolis would be a perfect location for military games involving Black Hawk helicopters and dozens of troops.
Low-flying Black Hawk helicopters conducted military training exercises in downtown Minneapolis Monday night, hovering majestically outside of apartment windows of surprised local residents.
Some Minneapolis residents have taken videos of the Army’s utility helicopters as they passed over bridges, hovered outside their windows and flew over the city.
“Yep, that’s the view outside my window,” said one YouTube user as two of the giant vehicles stopped outside his 28thfloor window for 10 seconds before soaring down Marquette Ave.
The helicopters were on an urban environment training assignment ordered by the US Special Operations Command. The exercises will continue until early September, but the military is refusing to give out exact training locations to prevent crowds from gathering to watch.
In April, Black Hawk and Little Bird helicopters flew past skyscrapers in downtown Chicago for a similar urban environment training exercise, rattling some windows of downtown offices. Witnesses of the largely-unexpected event reported men hanging out of the windows, while carrying automatic weapons.
“It was frightening,” Chicago resident Jessica Hill told Fox News. “I was definitely alarmed.”
Black Hawk helicopters were first introduced by the military in 1979 and have served in combat most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Quiet Black Hawk helicopters were responsible for carrying US Navy SEALs into Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound the day of his assassination.
“Helicopters make a very distinctive percussive rotor sound which is caused by their rotor blades and if you can blend that down, of course that makes a noise that is much less likely to be heard and much more likely to blend into any background noise that there is,” said Bill Sweetman of the Defense Technology International, in a 2011 interview with ABC News.
The military aircrafts have been conducting routine training since Sunday, but were not seen until Monday, due to their presence in hidden locations, Fox News reported. As the helicopters sneak up quietly on unsuspecting residents, police have announced the exercises to prevent concerned callers from overloading the 911 system.