Musings of a helo driver... (Vanity)

Anything that screws its way into the sky flies according to unnatural principals.

You never want to sneak up behind an old, high-time helicopter pilot and clap your hands.

He will instantly dive for cover and most likely whimper...then get up and smack you.

There is a reason for this. Come to think of it, there are not many old, high-time helicopter pilots

You can always tell a helicopter pilot in anything moving: a train, an airplane, a car or a boat.

They never smile, they are always listening to the machine and they always hear something they think is not right. Helicopter pilots fly in a mode of intensity, actually more like "spring loaded", while waiting for pieces of their ship to fall off.

Flying a helicopter at any altitude over 500 feet is considered reckless and should be avoided.

Flying a helicopter at any altitude or condition that precludes a landing in less than 20 seconds is considered outright foolhardy.

Remember in a helicopter you have about 1 second to lower the collective in an engine failure before the craft becomes unrecoverable. Once you've failed this maneuver the machine flies about as well as a 20 case Coke machine. Even a perfectly executed autorotation only gives you a glide ratio slightly better than that of a brick. 180 degree autorotations are a violent and aerobatic maneuver in my opinion and should be avoided.

When your wings are leading, lagging, flapping, precessing and moving faster than your fuselage there's something unnatural going on. Is this the way men were meant to fly?

While hovering, if you start to sink a bit, you pull up on the collective while twisting the throttle, push with your left foot (more torque) and move the stick left (more translating tendency) to hold your spot. If you now need to stop rising, you do the opposite in that order. Sometimes in wind you do this many times each second. Don't you think that's a strange way to fly?

For Helicopters: You never want to feel a sinking feeling in your gut (low "g" pushover) while flying a two bladed under slung teetering rotor system. You are about to do a snap-roll to the right and crash.

If everything is working fine on your helicopter consider yourself temporarily lucky.

"The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by an incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter. This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to."

Having said all this, I must admit that flying in a helicopter is one of the most satisfying and exhilarating experiences I have ever enjoyed: skimming over the tops of trees at 100 knots is something we should all be able to do at least once.

And remember the fighter pilot's prayer: "Lord I pray for the eyes of an eagle, the heart of a lion and the balls of a combat helicopter pilot."

Many years later I know that it was sometimes anything but fun, but now it IS something to brag about for those of us who survived the experience.

this isnt military related but I would like to share a helo experience and hope it does not sound too presunptious

around 1981 I had aseasonal job with the Forest Service doing wildland firefighting

I got to go on Helitack for a while at the end of the season to be a crew replacement

I just did a search of where the helicopter is and discovered Don crashed that Bell 206B long ranger and died in 1986 , he actually let me fly it by the stick over the san Jacinto mountains for about 10 minutes one day

we had some good times , he was a good pilot but I suppose he just put his head in the lions mouth one too many times.

RIP my crazy buddy Don Land ells !!!!

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-10-15/spo...elicopter-pilot .

not sure if I can be sad for Don he died doing what he loved , just sad for the passengers

once when we were flying out crews and it was down to just him and me last flight of the day , he asked if I was up for a hell ride, I said "Hell Yah"

we buzzed through the trees in a meadow near the top of the Palm Springs Tram and skirted treetops inches from the skids at max speed , then he flew over the ridge crest where the mountain drops straight down into Palm Springs, there was a steady marine influence wind coming off the top of the ridge spilling into the desert heat upift,

Don said "hold on to your ......" and started to ascend the side of the cliff verticle with the nose of the helicopter facing up, we were scarcely 50 feet from the side of the nearly vertical granite cliff and the helicopter blades were at a nearly vertical plane climbing slowly up the side , the craft was shaking under full power and heavy rotor cyclic to maintain maximum torque , as we neared to crest the aircraft caught the stream of air spilling over the top and lifted violently horizontally when the rotors hooked up so we had the effect of being shot from a catapault horizontally through the air while laying back and looking straight up at blue sky, he then hit full rudder and a rebel yell and we were looking down at Palm springs from about 8.000 feet, what an indescribable thrill , I actully had a thought he was suicidal at that point and for a time thought "what a way to die" and I thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest and explode during the whole ordeal, then he told me that I was absolutely not allowed to tell anyone about our little joy ride or he could lose his Forest service contract and he would make life very difficult for me and I assured him he had my word ,

but I think its OK to tell the story now, he'll have to reach out from the grave to wring my neck

As a young man, while I was along for the ride performing these stunts, I remember thinking we had a good probability of dying but I didnt care and figured it would be an awesome way to go out and was way worth the risk ! and I think Don did too and knew I would be up for it because he saw me get crazy on my 650 Yamaha dirt sled on the helitack road, maybe thats why he requested me for the crew , now that I think about it

sorry that I have no pictures from those days , I could barely afford food, much less a disposable camera and developing

I searched through some old stuff and found this hat pilot Landells gave me , I wanted the Helitack hat but they were out of them at the time

I like to tell this story hope someone understands

Here’s a helicopter story you might enjoy:

The Loop

In mid October 1968, sometime during the brief stand down Project Delta took in Nha Trang between the Quan Loi deployment and the deployment to An Hoa, several of us recon team leaders were invited to go for a demonstration ride with one of the helicopter pilots we knew in Nha Trang. The pilot’s helicopter unit had recently traded in their old UH-1Ds for brand new UH-1Hs and he was anxious to show off his new bird. I won’t reveal the pilot’s name or unit and you’ll soon understand why.

Four of us met the pilot and his crew one morning at the unit’s helicopter revetments, boarded a brand new UH-1H, and away we went. The pilot predicated the flight by stating, “To compare this new H model to a D model is like comparing a Ferrari with a dump truck, now let me show you what this baby can do.” We made several practice insertions and lift offs on LZs we found in the mountains around Nha Trang, and we were quite impressed with the new bird’s capabilities. After about thirty minutes of flying around the Nha Trang hillsides, we flew back to Nha Trang and dropped off two of the recon team leaders who had seen enough already, and we took off again.

But this time, the pilot flew us out past Hon Tre Island and well out into the South China Sea, and he did this to make sure there would be no witnesses to what he intended to do. The pilot told us over the intercom that with the increased capability of this new Huey, he was sure he could “loop” the aircraft. When he told us that, with me not knowing the capabilities and limitations of a UH-1H, I thought, “That sure sounds exciting.” But when I looked over and saw the unmistakable expression of abject terror in the crew chief’s face, I knew then it was going to be not only exciting, it was going to be really exciting.

The pilot swore us all to eternal silence for what we were about to do, had the door gunner and crew chief pull in the M-60s and tie them down securely, and made sure we were all belted down tightly. Then he said, “Watch this,” (No, he didn’t say, “Hold my beer, watch this,” as is usually said before such stunts.) and he took that UH-1H up to about 5,000 feet and looped it, or at least I think he looped it.

The whole thing was probably over in less than half a minute, and for most of the event my memory is a blur. My memory isn’t blurred because of the forty years of time that’s passed since then, it’s because the incident was actually blurred. I have a clear memory of the pilot taking the Huey up to about 5,000 feet altitude and our airspeed increasing to well over 120 knots, but then it starts to get blurry. I remember the pilot putting the Huey into a steeper climb than I ever thought possible in a Huey; I remember being upside down; I remember the sensation of falling like a rock while upside down, and I remember hearing the engine RPM revving to a speed I had never heard before. I’m not sure how far we fell while upside down before the falling sensation changed to feet first, but I’m pretty sure we fell through most of our 5,000 ft of altitude before we finally regained stable flight.

As soon as we had leveled out and were skimming along across the wave-tops, the pilot’s calm voice came over the intercom and said, “See, I told you I could loop this baby,” as if any of us had ever doubted him. I glanced over at the crew chief again and saw that he was petrified with fear, and I didn’t want anyone to think Mrs. Taylor’s idiot son could ever be frightened by such a mundane stunt as looping a Huey, so I keyed my mic and said, “Damn, that was fun! Let’s do it again.” When the crew chief, obviously the only completely sane person on board, heard what I said over the intercom, I could tell he was seriously contemplating exiting the aircraft without benefit of a parachute. He had already determined he stood a much better chance of surviving the impact with the water and a swim back to the mainland in shark infested water than he did of surviving another loop in that Huey.

The pilot answered me with, “Nah, it looks like this bird needs a little maintenance. I can’t get this pesky Master Caution light to quit flashing.” It was then that I noticed a bump-shudder-whine-thump noise coming from somewhere in the engine and or drive train that didn’t sound too healthy. We limped back into Nha Trang, parked that tired little bird in its revetment (talk about being rode hard and put away wet), and adjourned to the Delta Hilton for post-op libations.

By about the fifth round of Budweiser, we had all stopped arguing and agreed that the pilot had indeed looped the Huey. We had been on a heading of roughly 90 degrees, climbed steeply, pointed the nose of the aircraft backward toward 270 degrees, and then fell through the arc to a heading once again of 90 degrees. Some of us thought “loop” might not have been adequately descriptive. Maybe tumbled, maybe flipped, but looped was just too smooth a sounding word to properly describe what we had just done in a UH-1H.

The pilot probably made aviation history that day, but he could never tell anyone about it. Until now, I’m pretty sure no one else on board that helicopter that day has ever talked about the flight with anyone who wasn’t there. The pilot, now retired, went on to a long and distinguished career in Army Aviation, and I doubt if he would want a story going around relating to his wild young days as a Lieutenant in Vietnam when he would push an aircraft far past its maximum capability and think nothing of it, so I will never, under any circumstances, divulge the pilot’s name.

Yes, I know; I’ve just broken my word and revealed a secret I swore I would keep forever, but it’s been over forty years now and I didn’t give up the pilot’s name, so that should be worth something.

DJ Taylor

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