What Goes Around...

Years and years ago, I bought a T-shirt that said "Helicopters don't fly, they beat the air into submission." Others say that "Helicopters don't fly, they're so ugly the earth repels them."

I don't believe there's much truth to that... I'm sure that there are thousands of people who are alive because of a helicopter coming to rescue them. Most major cities have helicopters to rush severely injured people to the emergency room.

I started out in the military as a helicopter mechanic many years ago. I went to the school and learned to maintain the UH-1H "Huey" helicopters. They were loud, relatively slow, and looked like giant dragonflies in the distance.

With their semi-rigid rotor system, those two big blades would make a "Whop Whop Whop" sound that you could hear from miles away. I had several flights in my youth with my feet pointing out into the breeze as we cruised along with the doors wide open.

Typical startup procedures called for the helicopter to run at idle for a few minutes to allow all of the systems to reach operating temperature and to allow the pilots to check everything thoroughly. One time I did see an actual "Medevac" launch. The pilots literally ran to the chopper, fired it up, lifted off, nosed over and took off in less than a minute. They put their mission to save an injured soldier above their own personal safety.

Our pilots have to be a bit aggressive in order to complete their training and to take calculated risks each day. I had great respect for their ability to handle the aircraft. Many of them had started flying almost twenty years earlier in Vietnam, so they'd had plenty of practice.

I left the unit for another assignment after about two years. I heard later that one of our birds had crashed, killing a pilot and severely injuring the other three crew members. I met one of the survivors again a few years later.

March 1st of 1997, their helicopter had suffered a catastrophic mechanical problem while they were flying fairly low and fast over a forested area. The pilot had only a few seconds to slow their descent into the trees, and when the rotors hit they flipped the chopper down into the forest below.

There were three other helicopters in the air. The crash site was far away from any roads, and they believed it would be at least an hour until help could arrive on the ground, so another pilot decided to land his bird in the forest. He literally chopped his way down through smaller branches between the larger trees.

The crew extracted the 3 surviving members from the crashed chopper and flew them directly to the nearest hospital, most likely saving their lives. (They took the second chopper back to home base on a truck because of the damage the chopper had sustained during the extraction.)

Our pilots still use incredible skill and bravery to do their duty and to fly these marvelous machines to rescue soldiers and other people in serious need of medical care. I appreciate them!