Helicopter Pilot, will travel

I soloed early in my training at Skyrotors Ltd. Almost too early, as previously described in Second Solo. Whether that little performance was a good example of how not to explain a maneuver or just a horrible warning to the other instructors not to fly with me, I’ll never know. I do know that by the time I had about 82 hours of helicopter time I had only logged about 14 hours of dual instruction. There needed to be a lot more dual instruction given and logged.

The solution was to rewrite my logbook and have instructors fly with me the last few hours prior to my commercial flight test. Several instructors would evaluate me separately and compare notes, they said. I had reason to suspect there were straws being drawn, but nobody was cruel enough to actually tell me.

You never forget your initial instructors. I was fortunate to have a couple that tried to make me a better pilot. Most if not all, the instructors at Skyrotors Ltd. were instructors by default. This was not an usual circumstance in the early and mid 70’s in Canada. Helicopter pilots had three windows to work in through the year. Break up (Spring), Summer(3 months) and freeze up followed by the long chill.

Freeze up was a shorter time span than break up .Winter liked to hang on for break up but freeze up usually arrived one night and stayed.With the helicopter flying mostly done after winters arrival pilots faced a furlough at home or alternative employment. One alternative that allowed pilots to remain in their chosen vocation was the dreaded flight instructors rating. I only say dreaded,because it was obvious to the students which instructor wanted to train and which,(the majority) were only putting in time. It is still a problem today.

I have known a lot of flight instructors but only a hand full that were really good at what they did. I certainly don’t include myself in that small group of pilots who have the gift to teach and inspire. One of the best flight instructors I had the privilege to fly with said, “Look Keith, think about instructing not just as a way to impart information, because long after much of what you have told the student is forgotten they will always remember how you made them feel”

So ,thanks Ron and Steve. What ever you did with the little time you had to make an impression ,worked. I survived my initial training and began the real learning that continues to this day.

Give a mouse a cookie? Most of us know this story. Leave a student without supervision? Ditto. You couldn’t say that we were poorly supervised as students at Skyrotors Ltd. There would have had to have been some supervision to define it as poor, or worse.

Our instructors, were for the majority, a well intentioned group who wanted to pass on the benefit of their two years or less in the industry. If this sounds shocking to some of you non-pilots you should know that most helicopter instructors in the United States today have less experience than that. Most have no commercial, real world experience at all. The difference is, today there are senior people (to some degree) at the supervisory levels of all helicopter training schools.

We had nobody. Or to be more accurate, nobody who acted in a supervisory role. The result of no adult supervision was predictable.

Let a dozen or so type “A” 18 to 2o somethings loose with helicopters that they could play with as they pleased and here is what happens:

Note: Some of you reading this may recognize your story (or stories). The fact that you are now respected industry professionals and in more than a few cases, highly placed managers merely shows how far you have progressed. Your names are safe with me.

Could you land a helicopter on top of a train car in motion? The answer turned out to be yes. The Hughes 269 had the most suitable skid gear for this little antic.

So if it worked on train cars, would it work on transport trucks (18 wheelers)? Again, the answer is yes, but the skids leave incriminating scratch marks.

If a hilltop is a pinnacle landing, what do you call setting down lightly on a fire lookout tower? Full points to all of you who said, “a stupid thing to do”.

If skiers can ski down a hill, what can a helicopter with skids do? It can most certainly scare the skiers and shortly there after the fledgling aviator.

Follow the leader. One helicopter behind the other racing down a river is a blast, when you are young and stupid. Pulling up off the river chasing the other in a tight banked turn, over a turkey farm? Not so much fun to explain back at the hangar.

Carrying passengers at the county fair over the weekend? Apparently helps offset the cost of flight instruction.

Flying your parents. Boring. Flying buddies skydiving. More fun. Oh, and give the girls watching on the ground a ride too. Anyone could get lucky with that maneuver.

Somehow we lived through this ridiculous behavior. Most of us went on to become the Chief Pilots and Operations Managers that you can barely visualize laughing, let alone pulling these kind of stunts.

Just remember that most of us old timers made it to where we are through attrition and a timely change in attitude and behavior. Don’t try any stupid stunts while working for us. We have seen way worse.

My initial helicopter flight training took place at Skyrotors Ltd. Arnprior Ontario. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but flight training for the company was a very secondary operation. I remember my flight instructor walking me into the “real ” pilots room on my first day. He introduced me to the room full of veteran pilots.

“Gentlemen, this is Keith and he wants to be a helicopter pilot.”

The remark created great peels of laughter and I chuckled too, not knowing what was quite so funny about my career aspirations.

As the weeks went by I saw new students arrive and some leave. No one actually graduated. The attrition rate amongst us was fairly high, or so I thought. There were about 12 students in class on average and we were all encouraged to attend full time. The “plan” was to graduate in early Spring and be hopefully hired by Skyrotors. With 100 hours and a type check out in the Hughes 500 or Hiller 12E we would be given our marching orders, a kick in the pants and the usual admonition to not kill yourself.

Some students never made it that far.

Gilles, was from a wealthy Quebec family. His mother had financed his training and he could care less. Gilles wanted to be a motorcycle mechanic and motorcycle racer. The instructors had twice suggested he follow his heart and do just that but Gilles would stay till the money ran out or he actually graduated.

Shortly after reluctantly being given clearance to fly solo Gilles came back from a flight boasting of his latest escapade. He had been buzzing a snowmobile on a frozen lake. The snowmobile would move one way and Gilles would head him off on a low pass and make him change directions.” Idiot” we all said in both official languages. Gilles story had no sooner been told than a noise was heard from the instructors office and two faces appeared in the classroom. One face, we seldom saw but everyone recognized the red face above the snowmobile suit. Tom Cannon, owner of Skyrotors and recently harassed snowmobiler was giving Gilles a look that didn’t require either French or English to be spoken. Goodbye Gilles, good luck with that motorcycle career.

Another student that failed to graduate shall remain nameless. Another young man from a wealthy family. His father was a successful surgeon in Ottawa. The student should never have been allowed to fly. He was an alcoholic who attended sporadically between binges and had been a student longer than some of the instructors had been pilots. Money prevails and the students father was insistent that his son amount to something. Sober, would have been something.

Skyrotors had a mixed fleet of training aircraft which included the Bell 47G-2, Bell 47G-4A, Hughes 269, Hiller 12E and the Brantley B2B.

Turbine training was in the Hughes 500. The 269 and the Brantley seemed to operate in a permanent state of “down for maintenance”. Most of us agreed that the Brantley was better off left in the Hangar and after a couple of autorotations in the Hughes 269, most students were lining up for the Bells. The Hiller scared all of us. It was a back up helicopter and back in those days most of us weanies would have rather just taken the day off, than have to fly it. We didn’t get the chance. The company put it back to work, flown by real men, who were real pilots, or so we were told.

Returning from a 4 day hiatus of alcohol induced behavioral modification, our most senior student scheduled his cross country. I’ll never know for sure why the Brantley was the helicopter chosen for the flight. I could speculate that management may have considered it the most expendable helicopter in the fleet, but I don’t know.

No matter. He never returned from his first cross country. As word got around that our worst student had not returned from his cross country, speculation abounded as to which tavern he may be parked beside. Instructors and students were dispatched for some dual instruction, (no sense having non revenue flights) to fly the route.

Along the route the aircraft was found in a clearing. It was essentially undamaged except for what we know in our business as a sudden stoppage event. It was not difficult for Transport Canada to recreate the cause of the accident. The Brantley is a helicopter built low to the ground with a correspondingly low rotor system. A person having stopped to relieve himself walking back to the running helicopter could forget that fact. The last thing that went through his mind was, of course, the rotor blade. Money can’t fix that kind of problem.