Round and Round

I could be wrong, but I suspect this pilot is having a pretty good time.  Probably not getting paid a great deal doing agricultural spraying, and probably, occasionally, scaring the bejeezus out of himself flying next to powerlines all day, but fun nonetheless.  

Faith

For an atheist, this is the manifestation of faith:  a dog doing what every evolutionary bone in his body tells him not to do, save for his belief that his handler will keep him safe.

But then again, maybe the dog realizes how impossibly cool it is to jump out of a helicopter into the water, and could care less what the guy next to him is doing.  

Happy Holidays

Christmas morning at sunrise, over the San Diego mountains.  The kid in the back has croup, hope it's not contagious. 

Scottrade Flashback

My one and only foray into commercials.  

The A Model

There is an old saying that one should never fly the A model of any helicopter, the inference being that there are kinks to be worked out.  'Kinks' is a euphemism for 'unexpected component failure'.  The Bell 222 had a kink in the form of the engine self destructing and in the process of disassembling itself would sometimes manage to take out the second engine sitting next to it.  

The photo above is the A model of the Bell 429, which I flew last week.  But just for 15 minutes, so I felt statistically safe.  Very nice avionics suite, excellent engine power, roomy cabin.  

Mechanic Humor

The 12,000 pound Bell 412, with an emoticon.  

Random Photo

Elizabeth Cook Peebles, a female helicopter pilot somewhere over the deserts of Arabia.

The local religion would have her draped in a burka and stripped of most of her rights. But by the happenstance occurrence of her being born somewhere else she's given a wink and a nod from her male passengers as they climb on board.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Surrey Dr,Bonita,United States

Disingtegration

What many might find surprising is that most helicopter accidents happen for the most moronic of reasons.  Which is why perhaps so many helicopter pilots have a feeling of invulnerability:  they cannot imagine themselves making such ridiculously sophomoric mistakes.  


As the current story goes this pilot was unable to release the cable dangling underneath his helicopter (after using it to place the steel structure that was to be used for a christmas tree decoration), and so was descending towards a low hover so someone on the ground could manually unhook it from the belly. The other end of the cable, though, was still anchored to the top of the steel metal structure, so as he descended the cable was dangling precariously close next to him, as of course the other end was stuck on his cargo hook.  


You could almost see it coming, as the ground guy pulls on the cable to free it from the helicopter, which then eliminated whatever slack the pilot was counting on for clearance and snapped the cable right into the rotor arc.  And then two seconds later the helicopter ceased to exist.  

El Commandante

This is the Commandante of the Ensenada Airport. He officially reports to the aeronautical authorities in Mexico City, meaning he reports to no one.

And so he is the final arbiter of where you can fly and land, when you can do it, and how much it's going to cost you to do so. He controls the military staff dispensing flight plans, the customs and immigration officials granting or denying visas, and whether or not the ominous drug sniffing German Shepard will come visit your helicopter.

The approval stamp in his top right drawer represents the demarkation between misery and freedom, between being told you've entered the country illegally and being allowed to briskly walk out to your helicopter and take off before he changes his mind.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Ensenada, Mexico

Coronado Landing

Me landing in Coronado, California,  one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.  

Close To You

For better or worse, one of the skills I learned while flying on the BAJA races in Mexico was to desensitize myself to operating in close proximity to buildings, powerlines, and other aircraft.  If nothing else it helps to build a much deeper appreciation for exactly how long and wide your helicopter is.  

Pilots Vs. Mechanics, Part 1

It is probably genetic, but there exists an eternal friction between helicopter pilots and mechanics, each suspicious of the other, each convinced that the other's sole purpose in life is to make their lives a miserable hell.  


After a 10 hour cross country flight across 5 states I land at my final destination, and no one is in sight as I taxi to my parking spot and land, and then pause looking around for one of our mechanics.  Of course he has not shown himself, because he is waiting behind the hangar door until I shut down the helicopter and begin gathering my belongings before he saunters up and announces he'd like me to move the helicopter 100 feet to the right. 

BAJA Craziness

The BAJA races that I fly on, now coming to you on SPIKE TV:

YouTube - RoadWarriors on SPIKE

To Move Or Not To Move

This is one of Air Methods' EMS helicopters, post-Joplin tornado.   There is a back story to it I'm sure, as there always is, but one has to wonder why the pilot did not relocate his three million dollar aircraft to somewhere else, unless the severe thunderstorms were unforecast which I highly doubt.  While hangaring it might have produced the same result given the widespread devastation in Joplin, at least there would have been a plausible, reasonable effort to protect the helicopter where now it appears there was none.   And somewhere in the debris of that hospital is an Air Methods' hazardous weather plan, directing the base on what to do in inclement weather, which if I had to guess "leave the helicopter where it is" was not one of the options.  

This Helicopter Sucks

Children's Hospital of San Diego is the nearly exclusive intake facility for critically ill infants and children in San Diego and Imperial Counties.  They have a dedicated Bell 222 helicopter, which my company operates, and as you'd expect it is staffed with highly trained nurses, doctors, and respiratory techs, and state of the art equipment.  Including a zip lock bag of vanilla scented orange pacifiers, for which no advancement of medicine has yet replaced.  

Random Photo

The Germans can make more than really nice cars.  

Human Powered Helicopter

Gamera, AGRC, Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland

Cruising the Sky

Another great video from Evert Cloetens:  Cruising the Sky on Vimeo

Eagle

This is one of the best shot, best produced helicopter videos I've seen. Fantastic panoramas in the clouds and a great 360 roll around the Eagle. And Adele is icing on the cake:

Eagle on Vimeo

Random Photo

Our 412 at 29 Palms Marine Corps Air Station.  As my friend reminds me, the Marine Corps may be a Department of the Navy, but it's the Men's Department.  


The photo is Jim Langley's, surreptitiously taken from Nibecker's Facebook page.     

Good Times

A friend just send this photo of me, next to an AStar I had just flown to the middle of nowhere in Baja California.  Drinking coffee and enjoying the mountaintop scenery, how much better could it get?  

(Photo is by Antonio Mercadoh, thanks for sending.  Ebmiggen the photo to see the famous Starbucks mug in my hand)

Hotel California

If you're going to fly helicopters, you might as well go big.  


I meant to post this on April's Fools Day, but forgot.  While the rotor blade concept is actually taken from a Soviet helicopter design, the rest of it is fictional.  But slick nonetheless.  

20,000 Rubber Balls, Part II

I'm sure golf ball dropping from a helicopter is somewhat common, but doing it from a brand spanking new 3 million dollar twin engine helicopter certainly ups the ante.   This is the same airframe, by the way, that I fly doing EMS.  The photo is worth embiggening, too.  

Dogs and Helicopters, Part 2

As a followup to a previous post, Wendi just sent me a picture of two Marine Corps dogs taking a ride in our 412 helicopter out at 29 Palms, to get them acclimated to the noise and activity.  'Cute' does not come to mind, but they are beautiful, smart, and about to have a lot of fun.  

Big Balls, Part 2

Followup from an earlier post.  For those who are curious, this is how the catenary balls are installed.  

Two Barks = A Little Lower, Please

Not to anthropomorphise the dog, but you have to wonder if there is any sense of trepidation running through his mind at that moment, a gnawing sense in the back of his head that perhaps this isn't such a great idea.  


Or maybe he realizes that the only thing more fantastic than getting to ride in a helicopter is to jump out of one.  


By inference the dog is Italian, and has been trained to retrieve persons in distress by offering them a buoy, raft, or handhold and then paddling them back to the shore (the full story is here.).

Maybe Not The Best Locale For Fuel

On many of the BAJA Races we preposition helicopter fuel at various locations along the course, in lieu of having a readily available airport or to avoid the soul-crushing lethargy and obnoxiousness of Mexican airport management.  And most of the time our fuelers do a great job at selecting fuel sites, except probably this one.   


Color commentary by Joe Koller.  

Big Balls

Even if you don't fly you've probably noticed those big orange balls attached to power lines (termed 'catenary' by the FAA) stretching across canyons and passes and the like.  The balls' purpose is to warn aviators of the catenary's presence, but as a side benefit they have determined that the balls also alert unsuspecting birds, for which evolution has not yet equipped a need to search for power lines, and have reduced aviary fatalities by up to 50%.


 The FAA has rules for where to put the balls, their spacing and their color.  This is a picture of thousands of catenary balls, ready to be installed by some very skilled and probably slightly crazy helicopter pilot on the new power line project I'm flying on.  


The casual observer may note just simple hemispheres that look a lot like weber grills, but the balls are specially designed to last awhile, because god knows you don't want to be replacing them every five years, and they are also treated to avoid the Corona Effect (a discharging of electricity that can happen when you attach two weber grill shells onto a line carrying a bazillion volts of electricity).  


For you aviator types, if there are multiple balls strung along a length of catenary, the aviation orange ones should be nearest the towers, with alternating colors of orange, white and yellow in between.  If there are fewer than 4 balls, they should all be orange.  

Tailgating

Sometimes the best seat in the house isn't in the cockpit.

Kayaks and Helicopters

A Twinstar, flown by Ivor Shier, dropping a kayaker into the rapids just preceding a waterfall.  Some more impressive pictures here, including an amazing time lapse of the jump sequence.  

The Most Assuredly Moronic Thing

 You get in your helicopter, and there is a power pole staring in your face, just off to the right and just next to the rotor arc.  You strap in, do the prestart checks, and then you look both ways before starting the rotors, and as you complete your visual sweep that same line of power poles is still staring you back in the face, still alarmingly near your rotor arc.  And as you prepare to lift off you look around one more time, and that same line of power poles, not having moved an inch in the last 10 minutes, still there in alarmingly close proximity.  So what should be the absolute last thing on your mind at that point, the most assuredly moronic thing you could possibly do with a 6 ton helicopter?  Doing anything but going straight up.  What does the pilot do?  The most assuredly moronic thing.  

20,000 Rubber Balls

What do 20,000 small rubber balls look like when dropped from a hovering helicopter?   Funny you should ask.  

Vietnam, A Personal Recollection

From Stewart, recalling memories from his tours in Vietnam (the video was sent to him by a fellow USMA classmate):   "Images stir memories, now 40 years old, of U-ies (UH-1s) and Loches (LOHs).  Never had the stick, just flew in em.  Logged 200 passenger hours, during 18 months in RVN.  First as an "LT" flying first light VRs (Visual Recons) to check for nighttime VC sabotage of QL-1 (main supply route), then as an "Old Man" (at 22) commanding a company of combat engineers.  Roads, bunkers, fire bases.  Isolated FBs (now called FOBs) required the Flying Crane, to bring in our Case 450 "toy dozers" or the bigger ones, D4s, that came in two sorties.  Required assembly on-site.

Only one airmobile insertion, to support a road-opening operation.  Cold LZ; happy campers we were.  Fired at on two other occasions, but not disappointed with no PH.  Easy to tell the experienced pilots, who got up/down/in/out quickly from the "Wobbly-Ones" (WO1) who'd just come over from Rucker.  Eager but still a bit cautious.  (Have fond memories of the "pogie-bait" they slipped us during air ops in Ranger School.  Still think of those student pilot Wobblies every time I eat a Peter-Paul Mounds.)

The other memory stirred is of an Infantryman who died too soon.  My last roommate at WP.  Jim Smith.  Prior enlisted.  Sport parachutist.  A cadet, but a father of two.  G-4 company commander.  Fair, firm, charismatic.  Name is now on that Wall.  Some mishap in a routine chopper landing in Da Nang, four decades and four weeks ago: 15Feb71.  Like others we remember, and memorialize at Lusk Reservoir, they all died too soon.  But we're grateful for the ones saved or sustained by the choppers, the men who flew them and the ones "in the doorway."

Random Photo

One of our Mercy Air Bell 222's circling over the desert.  An older but still graceful ship.  

Newly Released/Leaked Helicopter Video Footage of 9/11

A new perspective on the Twin Towers on 9/11.  As Huffington Post notes, this may be difficult to watch:  NYPD 9/11 Helicopter Footage

The Kopp-Etchells Effect

If you've never seen this phenomenon, it is mesmerizing; the interaction of helicopter blades with particulate matter in the air that creates a halo of light.  As if helicopters needed one more thing to make them even cooler.  See more here.

Helicopter Breakout!

The picture to the right is the Prison de la Sante, where a prisoner successfully broke out of jail via his wife, who landed a helicopter on the roof.  How did he manage to get up on the roof?  In part by painting tangerines to look like grenades.  


I'm still trying to pinpoint where she landed exactly.  


Wikipedia has compiled a list of all helicopter prison breakouts, and what I find amazing is that so many were successful.  What I find equally as disturbing is that so many were accomplished through hijackings; while a helicopter pilot faces many nightmarish scenarios, getting hijacked--particularly after 9/11--ranks right up near the top for me.  Link is here.

Random Photo

N549SA, one of the workhorses of the Corporate Helicopters' fleet.  I have spent many hours flying her around SoCal and Mexico.  

The EC135 helicopter I fly out of El Cajon, CA.  Elf shoes on the front, fenestron on the back, and all German in between.  

360 Degree Helicopters

This is a great website that provides 360 degree interactive views of just about everything, but in particular helicopters:  check it out here.

Me in the EC135, scene call out in the hills of East San Diego County.  

Everyone Knows It's Windy

You would think that Paul Allen would have the most qualified helicopter pilots in the world, and you would think that having two pilots would eliminate many of the bonehead decisions that often get made just before an accident.  Like deciding to take off of a pitching, rolling ship in high winds in a new helicopter that perhaps you're not entirely familiar with.  Mr. Allen was not on board, and if I had to guess his two pilots won't be anytime soon, either.  


See video of the wreckage being hauled away here.

The Twinstar

I'm not certain, but I believe this is me flying the Vildosola Racing Team several years back.  The Twinstar was definitely one of the quirkiest helicopters I have flown, and impressed upon me the need to never let your guard down.  Electrically unreliable and notoriously underpowered, it was the embodiment of  a technical requirement  being technically met:  twin engine safety and reliability, without the safety and reliability part.

Many people are under the impression that two engines will enable the aircraft to remain airborne should  one of them fail.  That was certainly not the case with this  aircraft, and is certainly not a given for the Bell 222 which I currently fly.    

As a side note, this aircraft was sold to another company some time ago, and not long after that  the new company's pilot forgot to latch one of the engine's cowlings and took off.  Ah, well.    

 The black and red aircraft in the photo are the Twinstar's single-engine sister, the AStar.  

Semper Fi

For a great video of the twin rotor CH-46 from Corporate Helicopters, click here.

Big, Bigger, Biggest

Gargantuan helicopters, these from the Soviet Union.  See more here.

Sweet

A nice piece here on helicopter futuristics from that bastion of communism UC Berkley.

Knowing Me Knowing You

As if anyone needed another excuse to love ABBA.  


Again thanks to Helicopterhysterie.  

hubris

If you're going to perform aerobatic maneuvers in an amazingly expensive, nearly brand-new helicopter, perhaps you want to get just a little bit more altitude the first few times you try it.  And maybe you want to avoid recreational lakes during the busy season. 


Thanks to Helikopterhysterie for the link.  The full story at:  NH90 Crash.