INTRODUCTION
This manual owes its inception to a cry I have heard many times in various forms.
“I wish somebody would write a decent manual for those damn first-trippers!”
The ‘first tripper’ being a derogatory term used to describe the obvious newcomer to the field, who unwittingly has broken one of the unwritten rules, or executed a hair raising landing on a nearby ship. I have also heard the phrase “R-22 virgin”, ‘lost landlubber’ and ‘150 hour wonder’ used in the same manner, indicating the low-time fresh graduate of an R-22 school with no real commercial experience.
I was once a ‘R-22 virgin’. And very proud I was of my Commercial. By the time I made it to the ‘Tuna Fields’, I was racking up over four thousand hours, but that did not prevent me from accidentally upsetting some other pilots, and I know the phrase ‘damn first tripper’ went rapidly out over the airwaves!
My training -if you can call it that- was typical: about one hour. Another pilot had ‘walked off’ my boat in disgust, (after only two months) and my employer needed a pilot NOW. One day I was in Scotland with a promise of a job six weeks later. At three the next morning I got a phonecall from the small island of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, saying:
“Your ticket is at the airport – the boat’s waiting – we need you NOW!”
I got off the long transcontinental flight -right across Siberia and Japan- at the airport in Guam, and found myself sitting in an old Bell 47 helicopter. After barely an hour, I was pronounced fit and able. At that stage I discovered the boat had already set sail, and was some forty miles south of Guam. I was told to “head south – you can’t miss it”. I guessed I probably could…. Off I set anyway, on my little ownsome, and after investigating several vessels, I finally located my boat sailing full speed off over the horizon. Running tight on fuel, I caught up with my future home, and my first landing on a tuna boat -underway at full speed- was a self taught hands-on affair. The entire crew seemed to be out watching the arrival of their new pilot, and I wonder what the bets were. And that… was the sum total of my ‘training’.
I knew nothing. Nada. Zip.
Small wonder then that the first time the boat stopped at sea, I wondered in complete puzzlement why everybody was so interested in a dead tree floating in the water!
That was in the early nineties’, and little was I to know I would spend five years flying off Taiwanese and Korean tuna boats. I eventually moved on, flew fixed and rotary for a Arizona Sheriff’s Office for three and a half years, then a sojourn flying Air Ambulance, and after that I came to the Gulf of Mexico, flying offshore. I’ve been here for over five years again.
I think I can safely say that since my tuna helicopter flying days, a lot of air has passed around my rotorblades. I’ve learned a lot, seen a lot, and made a few whopping bad mistakes. I have come close to wiping myself out, and frightened myself severely a few times. Above all though, I avoided possible future disasters by the kindness of more experienced tuna pilots, who unselfishly shared with me some of their experience gained the hard and painful way. No, I have never crashed. Touch wood. Touch a tree. Touch a whole damn FOREST. I have never even scratched a helicopter. But if I had never had any help, never had any advice, never had mentors… I would be dead by now. I have waltzed -innocently- into many situations where a little amber caution light went off in my retarded brain. Where a little voice said to me:
“Hang on! Old Bill Saathoff was telling me about this! This is where I have gotta watch it! Hold on here now!”
And it is only in hindsight I fully realize how important those informal bar flying sessions actually were.
Many of the guys that I talked with were proud, stubborn old mules. Typical tuna pilots. Odd dogs, out of the mainstream, defying convention. Anti-authority. However, over a quiet beer, in some Godforsaken offbeat locale on some third world island, all were willing to tell on themselves, and admit their past mistakes, their learning cycles, and their prize f….. ups.
I always admired that. It takes a lot for an ex Vietnam Cobra pilot to admit where he screwed up on the tuna fields, and ’splashed out’. Jim was one such a man, who reckons that the Hughes 500 is the ‘only machine’ that he could have been in and survived his high speed crash. Moody, occasionally sullen, introverted, and quick tempered, he nonetheless -patiently- answered all my simple questions. He spent hours with me, and he taught me a lot. Rough on the outside, he revealed to me a much softer side. He cared. All you had to do was ask. Jim was a willing teacher, who sought no reward.
Another tuna high-timer was Bob, who taught me all about avoiding rotor strikes near microbursts! I will always remember Bob for his quiet worrying about the offshore bird count. “We used to have thousands of birds milling around here”, he would say. “Now it’s just hundreds. Why is the bird count going down?” He would worry about the impact of over exploitation of the Ocean’s ressources, and advocated a much more active preservation role for those many island nations who control the fishing rights over large portions of the richests fishing grounds.
Ricky from Peru, a wonderful gentleman, told me what it’s like to go playing submarine in a bell 47, and two other Hughes 500 drivers told me that a floating 500 rolls over inverted ‘real nice and slow’…. the same cannot be said for the adrenaline rush!
This manual then merely continues the tradition: an unselfish ‘passing on’ of information, tips, anecdotes and techniques that center on “the Art of flying a tuna helicopter” safely and succesfully. This manual does NOT pretend to be exhaustive, or complete, or THE way to do things. One example of a highly contentious area is the landing technique on a boat that is rolling wildly with a heavy catch off the port side, Another is the use of ’seal bombs’; many pilots refuse point blank to carry explosives in the helicopter. There are some great tales around about what happens if that little lot blows up inside the helicopter during flight. And then there are those pneumatic guns that fire steel arrows into floating logs. Just wait until they bounce, and go up through your rotor system.
Different pilots believe -passionately- in different things, but if this manual at least gives you an insight into the arguments for and against, you will be so much better prepared before you go out. And you will know what to watch for…
There is a huge amount of time and effort gone into this manual, and it is an ongoing process. But if it saves just ONE pilot’s life, somewhere along the line, and if that pilot one day drops me a thank-you note… then I will be more than rewarded. It’s now thirty-nine years since I first went solo. And for some reason, I still get a thrill out of flying helicopters. All I need is a quiet morning, first flight, and I simply can’t wait to pull pitch and get going. One of these days I guess I might grow up and stop enjoying it so much…
Fly Safe, may God go with you, however you perceive Him.
Next: Chapter 1-A: “What’s it all about? – Finding Fish!”
