Francis Meyrick

A Blip on the Radar

Part 38 B: The Fisherman’s Legacy

I posted a link to what turned out to be only the first part of this story on Facebook. I belong to the two groups, “Tuna Pilots” and “Tuna Spotter Pilots”, and I usually post a link to any new story there. I also maintain a Facebook page called www.tunaboathelicopters.org and there too I have a small but steady inflow of oddballs and derelicts, who insist on “liking” that page.
142 so far. There obviously exist a handful of mental and emotional retards out there in Cyberspace, who for some peculiar reason known only to their own mis-wired synapses, seem to read my blogs. It’s a puzzle to me, and I try not to take them or myself very seriously. But then I am helped in that regard, because I am a firm believer in the Fundamental Absurdity of Man. His logic, his goals, his aims, his morality (or not), his ethics (or not), his compassion (rarely), and his fundamental decency (ha-ha) seem to me to leave a lot to be desired. Lest that sound too harsh, I hasten to add that I have encountered some really great and humane bodies, especially the buxom female ones, some of whom unselfishly lent me a hand (and other parts, perhaps) to jolly me along when things were just not too hot. Black and gloomy, even. They were kind to me, for no hope of personal gain. They were just like that. Nice. Feeling. Good people. I thank you, where ever you now are. (Married, I imagine, with too many kids, a big mortgage, an overdraft, and hemorrhoids.)

But my most common experience of occasionally sliding down the Plug Hole of Daily Life was that it was amazing how many people came along and tried to hasten my descent. It seems to me that the joy of watching your fellow Man coming a painful cropper, right on his butt, is generally much preferred by the masses than the spectacle of your Beloved Brother succeeding and doing well. Even the cheers and the applause at your occasional successes, seem too often to be laced with the poison of the Green Eyed variety, and I learned to rarely if ever completely turn my back.
Put it another way, if an intelligent, reliably enlightened, cheerful, emotional, feeling form of Life was finally to arrive on Planet Earth, it would have to be an Alien from Outer Space. And I wonder how he (or she) (or it) would feel about the attractiveness and charm of the Human Species. We really do some stupid and wicked stuff to each other.

The point of this pre-amble is that one of my Cyber buddies is a gentleman named Timothy. Underneath my posting on September 25th, on Tuna Spotter helicopter Pilot, alerting my depraved mindset readers to my latest grammatical obscenity, he posted this comment:

” Great story, Moggy. I assume you have no other info about this? Or whatever happened?”

Indeed. I started writing a short reply underneath his, which morphed into a long reply, which morphed into a VERY long reply, which in turn started to resemble a horror sequel to “War and Peace”. With mucho War, and poco, poco peace. So then I philosophically said to myself : “Oh, bugger!” and deleted my reply and just wrote “Part 2” of “The Missing Fisherman”.
So, it’s all your fault, Timothy Trout.

The question he asks… is the right question. What happened to the Missing Fisherman?
Answer: I don’t know. I never heard anything more. That’s short and sweet. Amen.
But I’m intrigued you even asked the question. You see, I’ve asked myself that question for eighteen years. The issue has crossed the dimly lit threshold of my consciousness, surprisingly perhaps, multiple times. I even wrote a story about it. If you’re reading this, you probably read it. Part A.

If you go back to the image I used to illustrate part A, you will see a mathematical formula.
Compassion = “What if that were me? (Holy crap) (poor fellow!) (what can I do to help?)“
divided by
“I’m glad that wasn’t me (oh, well, tough titty, too bad, how sad) “.

The numerical value of this equation could be represented by a factor of 1.0 where a person was (human) averagely compassionate ( top line) and (human) averagely coldly sanguine. ( bottom line).
If you divide the two values, you get 1.0 divided by 1.0 which gives:
A compassion factor score of 1.0 Our average Homo “Sapiens” (?)
If you are very compassionate, genuinely so, say a value of 5.0, and only mildly cynical and coldly sanguine, say a value of 0.5, then the equation works out like this: 5.0 divided by 0.5 =
a compassion factor score of 10.
On the other hand, if you are pretty cold blooded, underneath a convenient external veneer of compassion, and if you really don’t stop much to worry about anything except your own goals and gains, then maybe your above-line value is 0.4 (low) and your below line value is more like 20.0.
Our formula works out this way: 0.4 divided by 20.0 gives:
a compassion factor score of 0.02
(Which basically translates into the all too common “F@#k ’em. I’m all right.”)

But what if you are a truly enlightened Alien? Where then would rank your Compassion Factor Score? What if you have lived twenty three thousand earth years already, (just a young pup Alien), you have spent your entire young idealistic Alien Life studying the Universe? And what if you have traveled around the Universe, and hold the equivalent of every Doctor’s Degree and every Science Degree known to Man? And then some? Where then would your Compassion Factor Score be? Ten thousand? A million?

And what if you had first arrived in a stable orbit around our planet some five thousand years ago? Enchanted and delighted with earth’s Blue oceans, and the teeming life, and the mellow temperature range, and the awesome mountain ranges, the lush forests, and the emerging primitive tribes?

And what if you then had departed, on a mission to Orion, making a mental note to hop back a while later to plot the progress? Because you were curious about those early hominids, those primitive subsistence hunters?
Organizing even then into more complex societies?

And what if you turned up, full of expectation, eagerly looking forward to once again seeing that beautiful, enchanting, yet fragile Biosphere that you had so much enjoyed a mere five thousand years ago?
What if you turned up… tomorrow?

What would you think? As you tuned into the myriad television stations, and the Internet, and downloaded the images and the commentary? And you witnessed war, greed, envy, cruelty, environmental vandalism, ecological suicide, and teeming slums, with desperate humans hard scrabbling a bare existence, eking out an almost brutish existence, and breeding out of control?
What would you think?

Would you empathize with Man? Truly?
Would you make your Presence known? Would you rush down from the Skies, with the cure for all Man’s ills? Or would you hide? Would you sit in stunned silence, reeling in shock at the Fundamental Absurdity of Man? And at what he has done, in the last five thousand years, and is doing, in the name of a million disparate, warring, mutually intolerant so-called sacred causes?
Would you mourn the Missing Fisherman? I think you would.

And how about the cold, callous, indifferent, shoulder shrugging that met my feeble protestations? When I insisted that the family should be notified? That every effort should be made to trace his village? That even then, that boat might represent a crucial economic life line for a small community? How would you feel about that?
Would you see Man perhaps, not as a blessing, but as a blight? A scourge? A disease? To be perhaps eradicated?

* * * * *

I don’t know the Answer to your query, Captain Timothy Trout. Kind Reader of my teeming blogs. .

But I applaud your question, Amigo.

Francis Meyrick

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on September 30, 2013, 9:14 pm

A Blip on the Radar

Part 38: The Missing Fisherman

As you grow older, you inevitably witness tragedies.
It’s part of the Great Learning we experience on this little, blue, pipsqueak planet of ours, lost in the Immense Universe. We are small, tiny in fact, short-lived, but we matter. Our lives matter. Our kindness matters. None of us can save the world, or even change it in any really significant, long lasting way. But what we can do, is to strive to make our tiny little corner of the world a nicer place to be. For other people. For animals. And for all living creatures. When the world starts revolving around me in a blurred, psychedelic, un-feeling cacophony, and when nothing makes sense anymore, I often fall back on that piece of child-like simplicity.
And I marvel: Is the whole world gone nuts? How can people be so mind blowingly cruel? Holy smokes…
Oh, well. In the immortal words of the Lost Irish mystic Shameless O’Shaugnessy, from Ballygobackwards in County Kerry, Ireland:
“Jeez…! People suck!!! Oh, well… GOOD MORNING, WORLD! Make way for Mozes!”
And on we go… Never give up. Gotta get your ticket’s worth…

* * * * *

We were flying along on a calm day. It was the first mellow day after several days of stormy seas and high winds. Good visibility. Mostly overcast. Light breeze. The Pacific Ocean was misleadingly peaceful. Laid back,almost lazy waves. You kick back, a little bit. Maybe.
But a wise TunaHead isn’t fooled. The unexpected lies in wait. Always…
Our Hughes 500 was purring along, and my observer and I were relaxed.
Looking for tuna…

I saw it first. An unusual shape on the horizon. I elbowed Jimmy and pointed. Obediently, he trained his gyro stabilized fancy lookers on the sighting. He looked for a long time, but couldn’t figure it out. We discussed it as we raced towards it. Weird. What was it? Unusual floating objects always interest the Tuna Hunters. It often means ‘fish’.
I arrived overhead. It was the shiny white hull of an upturned boat. A pretty clean looking, modern boat. About sixteen feet long. With a new looking outboard engine, its propeller sticking up unnaturally in the air. What the heck…? We were eight hundred miles from the nearest group of small islands. What was he doing out here? In such a small craft? The suspicion that a tragedy had occurred quickly raised itself.
We circled the boat cautiously, and soon more evidence of disaster showed itself. A bright green fishing net was ominously tangled around the propeller. It wasn’t hard to speculate on the fate that had befallen the missing fisherman. He had thrown out his net, and somehow it had gotten seriously entangled in the propeller. He had been in the process of reaching over the stern to free up the mess, when he had probably lost his balance and gone overboard. Either he had been unable to climb back on board, or an attendant shark, perhaps attracted by the commotion, had gotten him. But either way, our unknown fisherman had not regained his ship. The fact that we were some eight hundred miles south west of the nearest island group, well beyond the endurance of the small outboard on the open dingy, was mute testimony to the probability that the accident had occurred several days prior. The rough weather of the previous few days had likely caused the vessel to subsequently turn over. It had drifted, a mute witness to the exact fateful happenings, to this very spot, where we now circled it slowly.
With the permission of the Taiwanese captain, we conducted a search in the area. We spent a good deal of time on it, with little hope of success. We strongly suspected our unfortunate fisherman was long gone.
Our ship turned up on the scene, and the mute witness was hoisted aboard. No sign of the occupant. Just the tangled net, twisted many times around the prop. It took us that long to untwist it, that it seemed likely that he was under way, motoring, when the net contacted the spinning prop. Perhaps he was busy backing up. It would have been no easy to task to sort it out, leaning precariously over the stern of the boat, riding on a choppy sea.

The discussion then raged as to what to do. The Captain, our Taiwanese Fishing Master, not universally known for his compassion and humanity, wanted to do exactly nothing. He let it be known he did not want his ship tied up for days. Transporting the small boat to the nearest harbor, and dealing with bureaucracy. I said that I was sure that somewhere a family was needing some degree of closure, and would be waiting desperately for any news. My pleas however, fell on deaf ears. Soon we were fishing again, as if nothing had happened. The ship’s mechanics calmly set to work on the outboard engine, and soon had it running. It appeared the decision was made to simply keep the vessel on board as a convenient harbor ‘run about’. I felt sorry for the victim’s family. I thought about it a lot. I wondered if he had been able to swim ashore, and had now lost his source of income. I wondered about his family, his life style. I wondered if this new looking boat was in fact the pride of his family, and had been acquired with their sustenance in mind, at great expense. Try as I might, I could not shake off the theme of my wonder. I sensed tragedy, and a man’s lonely, perhaps terrifying death. The Unknown and the Unknowable bothered me, and even now, nearly twenty years later, I have a picture of him in my mind’s eye. A vision of his home, his village, and his loved ones. I’m sure he is still remembered somewhere, and once in a while, people speak of him, and wonder what happened to him. It is Life. A Mystery. Unknowable, troubling, but endlessly fascinating.

Soon we sailed into a port in Papua New Guinea. Our new boat stored incongruously on the deck. It didn’t match either the style or the paint of the Taiwanese net boats.
A Ministry man then came on board. An official from the department of Fisheries. Raggedy shorts, stained shirt,beetle stained teeth, but that cunning glint of officialdom. The knowledge of power. He zeroed in almost immediately on the new boat. “What is THAT?”
There was no choice but to tell him the story. The gentleman nodded solemnly, but a furtive gleam crept into his eyes. Within hours he was back, triumphantly waving a stack of ferocious looking official paper work. The gist of his spiel was that our vessel was “not licensed for this boat”. It did not appear on the “approved list of equipment” as approved on the approved bureaucratic paper work.
Therefore: give it up!
The last I saw of the Lost Fisherman’s boat, freshly overhauled by our mechanics, was the Ministry man proudly setting of in it.
In (his) new boat, most likely.
It seemed an irony. I doubt very much if the Ministry man ever contacted his superiors to say that he had seized an unregistered boat. Requesting instructions. What to do with it. I’m sure it was a perk to him.
Perk of the job.
The boat is probably still fishing off the coast of Papua new Guinea. Fifteen hundred miles or so from where we found it. And somewhere, on a small island group, a village still remembers a lost son. They wonder, what happened to him.
And his new boat.

* * * * *

Humanity can be in-human. But just when you think there is no pity, compassion reaches out.
On another occasion, the story went around the combined Taiwanese and Korean fishing fleet that an open boat had been seen, drifting offshore between remote islands. Full of islanders. They were frantically waving at passing boats and helicopters. With towels, and sheets, and shirts. No wonder. Their engine had broken down, and they were out of water and food. But nobody came to rescue them. Too busy. What, deal with those stupid islanders? Their own fault for setting out in the first place!
It was later said that two helicopters flew right up to the boat on two different occasions. Hovered around. Observed the obvious distress. Reported to their ships. And flew off.
No further action.
How the Mighty Dollar rules the hearts of men…
But one Taiwanese Captain, one amongst many, heard the radio chatter and did not switch his heart off. This gentleman sailed out of his way, for hundreds of miles, and picked them all up. By the time he got there, one man had died, and a pregnant woman had also succumbed. The remainder of the exhausted occupants were saved in the nick of time, and transported by our compassionate Fishing Captain back to their home island. Where he received a hero’s welcome, and the grateful thanks of the relatives. But he lost money. Time. Fish. You wonder what the ship owner said.

What your problem!? Can you bank compassion!? More fish!

* * * * *

It seems to me that 1) the highest quality of Man is his ability to freely choose to exercise compassion. Empathy. Or not.
And 2) it seems that there is often an inverse relationship between “compassion/empathy” and “privilege”. The more privileged people are, the wealthier they are, the more educated they are, the fuller their bellies, the dumb luckier they are, the more prosperous they are… oddly, that often means they become LESS compassionate. Less feeling.
Always looking UP the ladder, towards MORE. Never looking DOWN the ladder of life, and reaching a hand down to help somebody up.
It’s not an absolute rule. Thank Goodness. But often holds true.

* * * * *

As you grow older, you inevitably witness tragedies.
It’s part of the Great Learning we experience on this little blue pipsqueak planet of ours, lost in the Immense Universe. We are small, tiny in fact, short-lived, but we matter. Our lives matter. Our kindness matters. None of us can save the world, or even change it in any really significant, long lasting way. But what we can do, is to strive to make our tiny little corner of the world a nicer place to be. For other people. For animals. And for all living creatures.
Every day is a gift…

It’s early in the morning in Intercoastal City, Louisiana, USA, as I pull pitch in my beautiful Bell 407. I’m happy to fly. Blessed.
Lucky beyond words…
In the words of The Great Wise One, the Philosopher, the Mystic, the True Believer:

YIPPPEEEEE!!!! YEEEEEE-HAAAAAAH!!!

Make way for Mozes!
(Love it, love it…)

Francis Meyrick

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on October 1, 2013, 9:10 am

A Blip on the Radar (Part 37)

THE PILOT WHO HATED ME

Truth is stranger than fiction.
Much. Stranger.
I look back, many, many years now, decades in fact, and I still see the incandescent, glowing red hot fury in the eyes of a fellow pilot. I see the angry fists, and I feel the spittle on my face. I know he is about to rain blows on my face. It’s not good. He is a big fellow, and it’s gonna hurt. That’s not too bad, I’m pretty tough, and I am also no small chappie. But this is not a good place for this.
If there is ever a good place.

I decide to clearly demonstrate to the shocked witnesses that I’m not looking for a fight. I look him silently straight in the eye, and I do not back up, but I fold my arms behind my back. My posture is showing that I do not wish to fight. Especially here. For we are standing in the hall way, outside of a court room…
How, I ask myself, has it come to this? I listen to his rant, and the accusations he hurls at me.
Indeed, how has it come to this?
One of the strangest things about this case, is that I felt – and still feel- desperately, desperately, sorry for the poor guy. If I could have helped him, in any way, I would have. He needed support. He was a pale ghost from his former self. His face was gray. Eyes sunken. A man seriously wounded, both in body and, I fear, in mind. The victim of a terrible helicopter crash.
A family man, who had lost everything.
Income, career, and health. Marriage? And now, by the looks of it, a court case.
The latter, courtesy of… me?

* * * * * *

It all started so innocently. Unspeakable tragedies often do.
The incremental steps, that lead, unfalteringly, to catastrophe, are obvious in 20-20 hindsight. At the time however, not so. Many a time you are simply not in a position to make decisions. You can make suggestions, offer input, but that is all. People placed way above us humble helicopter jockeys make the big decisions. Managers, owners, Chief Pilots, Directors…
Some of these are good listeners. Some not so. This also is a truth the helicopter lover will soon learn along the rocky path of his or her lowly career. When asked for it, speak the truth, simply and plainly. When ignored… accept that you have done what you can.

I’ll call him Brad. Big boy. Not a diplomat. Kind of brusque. A little abrasive. Defensive, perhaps? He told me a story about how he had been basically defrauded in his business. That’s got to hurt. Behind the exterior abrasive bluster… what? Vulnerability? Who knows.
Within half an hour of arriving from his long journey to a small place lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, he, although the new-hire, brand new kid on the block, had already managed to totally tick off all the mechanics in the hangar. He achieved this neat feat by spending five minutes looking at his helicopter-to-be, and then ripping in to the guys who had been working on it for the last few weeks. The boss had to go down from his office, and sort that one out. I was a puzzled observer to this, and not involved in any way. Personally, as a dual rated Pilot-Mechanic, I prefer to approach mechanics respectfully. You get more with honey than with vinegar. The worst thing possible is a pilot without an Airframe and Powerplant License, who basically starts accusing a bona fide A&P holder of being just an incompetent, hammer wielding klutz with extreme myopia. It’s not… the best way to make friends and influence people.

The next item on the agenda became even more interesting. My boss was in the habit of asking me to fly with some of these new hires. I was a dual rated airplane and helicopter CFII, and I was usually happy to oblige. On this occasion… I was wondering how it would go. Off we went, and Brad was quick to point out to me that this dual flight was entirely unnecessary. He had a lot of Hughes 500 time, and he didn’t need a check out. I politely ignored his protestations, and we flew what worked out to be a perfectly normal check ride. He was doing fine. He was smooth on the controls, coordinated, and everything was just peachy. Until… I said, happily,

“Let’s go do some autorotations!”

It should perhaps be noted that I like autorotations. I’ve probably done a fair few thousand of them, and I’m comfortable with the procedure. In the training environment, you do them all the time. You’ll do twenty or thirty a day. Sure, you’re very, very careful, and there is no recovery from “stupid”, and if you persist in “stupid” you WILL die. But once you respect that fact, they still are a lot of fun. Just don’t be “stupid”…
The reaction was not what I had expected. He flat refused. I’ve never had somebody on a check ride flat refuse to do an autorotation. It was a first for me. I tried to jolly him along. No success. I tried to insist. He got visibly ratty. I offered to fly a few demonstrations. No joy. He wasn’t having it. As far as he was concerned, he was that good, he did not need to do any.
I’ll be damned…
Oh, well. A cockpit is really not a good place for an argument. There came a point beyond which it seemed prudent just to return to base, and go and report to the Boss. I explained what had happened, and I also made no secret of the fact that I was suspicious. I wanted now to check out his autorotational skills VERY carefully. My boss (not a CFII) listened, and was clearly surprised. He promised to talk to Brad. They subsequently did so, and I was not present at that meeting. I do not know what was said, but I was overruled. The man that owned the company sided with Brad, and decided that he was a high time Hughes 500 driver who did not any further check flight.
I heard the news, and quietly “sucked air through teeth”. I wasn’t happy about it, but the decision was above me. Amen.

BOINGGGGG… (the bell tolls…)

Months went by. Brad was out there, flying and fishing. Business was brisk. All well. The whole fleet of machines was flying, flying. Making money.
We’re all making money.
Then… one day, a satellite fax came in. My boss called me in, and showed it to me. It was from Brad. He said he had noticed that the tail rotor tip cap seemed to have “a little play” in it. That’s not good, and I said so. But it was the next line that really caught my attention.

“So I’ve put some structural adhesive around it, and we’ll see what happens…”

Aaaargghhh… (sucks air through teeth).
“That’s not a good idea, Boss. He shouldn’t be flying with that. That’s not an authorized repair. He needs new blades…”
The Boss talked to Brad via satellite phone, and I was not present at that time. I don’t know what was said, but I do know that Brad went on flying. (“…and we’ll see what happens…”)

BOINGGGGG… (the bell tolls…)

A week later. ALARM, ALARM!! We’ve had a CRASH! We have a bird down.
Damn! WHO? Brad! OH!

I was flying at the time, and off Island. I arrived back, a week after the crash, and two days after Brad had been airlifted back to the Island. I landed, and rushed around to the hospital. First thing. It never crossed my mind not to. There I found Brad, black and blue, bandaged up, beaten to hell, all kinds of internal problems, back problems, obviously in severe pain.
When he saw me, tears poured down his cheeks. My heart went out to him, and I sat down carefully beside him.

“Why are you crying? Is it bad?” I found myself asking a remarkably stupid question. Put it down to the gormless Irish. You know, too many potatoes. His reply stunned me.
“You’re the first person who has come to see me!”

He explained that, apart from the Boss, none of the mechanics, none of the other pilots, none of the office staff, nobody had come to see him.
It obviously had really hurt him deeply.
I stared at him in disbelief. I knew he was not very well liked, but here was a wounded fellow aviator, who had nearly died, in serious pain, and nobody could be bothered to come and visit? I was incensed. I made up my mind to express my feelings elsewhere, when the time came.
(and I did, surely).

The conversation then turned to the accident. What happened?
Here the story soon became bizarre.
I tell it carefully, to the best of my going on twenty year old memories. I know it sounds incredible.
But… it’s exactly the way it happened.

He told me that he had been flying along at about 1100 feet. All normal. Then, suddenly, a vibration in the pedals. “What did you do?” I asked. He was propped up with pillows, and he mimed holding on to the cyclic. “I slowed down”, he said, moving the imaginary cyclic back. “Then I kind of waffled down to about 700 or 800 feet. I was doing about 40 or 50 knots…”

“Waffled down?” I kept my face straight, but behind it, I was wondering about those actions… Would I do that? I doubt it. Give up airspeed like that? Waste time? How about an immediate auto down to the surface, recover to a hover, and THEN explore what the hell is going on…??
He went on. “But the vibrations were getting worse… Then…”
In his eyes was the horror relived of what he had been through. An ordeal for any man, no matter how stout of heart. “Then, all hell broke loose. We just started violently spinning, round and round, and the nose tucked right down. I could see the waves coming up…”
I asked: “Were you in autorotation?” He looked blank. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I could hear the dull echo of an old bell ringing…

BOINGGGGG….. (the bell tolls…)

“Where were your hands…?” I asked the question gently, wonderingly, feeling desperately sorry for him.
He answered haltingly, pain and fear etched deep in his eyes.

“My hands weren’t on the controls…”

He must have seen the look of surprise on my face. He added:

“Moggy, I was screaming. So was my observer. I thought I was going to die… All I could see was the face of my little girl…”

I said nothing. I understood. The bell had finally tolled.

He went on and described the death spiral. The waves coming. The massive, bone shattering impact, nose down, left float first. How most of the air cells in the fully inflated left float had burst, and, in a truly extraordinary combination of coincidental good fortune, acted as a gigantic air bag. How he had struggled up to the surface, confused, in terrible pain. How he had swallowed so much salt water, that his lungs had almost shut down. I nodded. I was familiar with the process. A friend of mine, Walther, had died that way. (I describe that crash elsewhere.) It’s called “drowning on dry land”. You drown in the fluids in your own lungs. Brad was incredibly lucky to have survived. He told me how he had spent the entire pain wracked night up on the open bridge, outside, below the indifferent stars. Drifting in and out of a dream-like waking nightmare. Propped up like a limp doll between two unknown Korean sailors, who had remained faithfully beside him, all night long, whilst he leaned into the oncoming breeze, straining to draw tiny breaths of life giving air. His terror of going to sleep, lest he never wake up again.

And all the while, as he recounted his story, I could see those eyes. Those eyes, that were haunted. And which had seen the approaching shadow.

I returned to my employer, and, sadly, filled him in on the details of what had transpired.

* * * * * *

Fast forward to many years later. I had long since left the Tuna Fields, and was working as a pilot mechanic for the Sheriff’s Office, flying helicopters and airplanes. Chasing bad guys. The subpoena, to court, was unequivocal.
I was required to go. In due course, I found myself sitting, under oath, in a pre-trial hearing, with a stenographer typing down every word. Brad was suing my former employer for an undisclosed -large – sum of monies for his traumatic injuries, and loss of earnings. Much of the argument I was not a party to. Thus it was alleged, and apparently not wholly denied, that a mechanic at the shop had removed the reinforced abrasion strip from the leading edge off both tail rotor blades. Which is an unauthorized field modification. The manufacturer doesn’t allow it, apparently.
I could offer no help. I had not seen this being done, and I truthfully knew nothing about it at the time. There was an allegation that the mechanic had intended to use a heat gun to remove the (glued) abrasion strip. It was further alleged that this gun didn’t work. Out of fluid. Therefore… it was alleged that the mechanic had used a “quick lick” of a BLOW TORCH. Sure, it had melted the glue holding on the abrasion strip. But you are not talking “heat gun hot”. You are talking… BLOW TORCH HOT. No comparison. “Quick lick” or no “quick lick”. It was deduced that this action had weakened the internal bonding of the tail rotor. Duh.

Again, I knew nothing about this. I hadn’t authorized it, seen it, requested it.

The prosecution for our injured pilot got going, and really laid out the ground work for their case very well. By the time they were finished, the maintenance side of this screw up looked like a bunch of monkeys with hammers.

Regardless, the defense attorney, with that skilled ruthlessness of the paid liar class, quickly zoomed in on the sad saga of the non-existent autorotation, the hands-off approach, and the screaming. My boss had known of it, as I had discussed the whole thing with him. Never dreaming that I would end up in a court of Law.

By the time the defense attorney was finished drawing all the sorry details out of me, and with myself under oath, it was obvious to all, including Brad, that his case was terribly, possibly irreparably, damaged. A recess was called, whilst the leading attorneys conferred. It was at that stage, in the hall outside, that Brad accosted me, and vented his fury.

The case, indeed, went nowhere.

* * * * * *

When I reflect back on it all, the implied lessons are so obvious, that they are hardly worth even enumerating here. If something funky starts happening, shoot an auto for the ground or the water first. Once safely below ten feet, decide the next plan. Plop her down if you have any doubts.

“Waffling on down” and giving up airspeed to boot…

Sucks air through teeth…

This I know. Poor Brad was a victim. Somewhere in his primary training lay deficiencies. Somewhere along his career path, lay the seeds of a reluctance, or even a fear, to enter autorotation. Probably, indifferent instructors. It’s not uncommon. I’ve seen it before, and heard similar anecdotes. Entering an auto can be a chopper jockey’s best (and only) course of action, and it is imperative that he or she be willing to do so TOUTE BLOODY SUITE. As in CHOP-CHOP. Auto first, questions afterwards.

Poor old boy. My last sight of him was a broken man, out of aviation, doing a menial task. I’m really sorry what happened to him, and I wish I could have helped. Heck, I tried.

I even offered to do some demos… remember, Brad? Dude…

The other way I feel he was a victim is that in many lines of helicopter work accident insurance is either not available, exceedingly expensive, or just not much heralded.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ insurance…”. The macho culture is such that many pilots

“assume the non-occurrence of an accident”.

Ouch. Hence the stories of broken Tuna Heads being airlifted home, and their unfortunate parents picking up the tab. Stories of guys in wheel chairs, with terrible back injuries, and not a dime from insurance.
Not a single red cent.
It is better to plan for the worst. Where I work now I have, amongst other benefits, a “Loss of License Insurance”, which pays out basic salary for two years, in the event something happens, or I lose my medical. It gives me great peace of mind.

Somebody needs to set up a standard Life and Medical Insurance package for Tuna Pilots and Mechanics, and the employers need to educate themselves as to what is available, and make a point of offering it to their people. It’s flat wrong for employers to shrug shoulders indifferently, and state that “they are all subcontractors”, and therefore, ergo, it’s nothing to do with the employers.

These are feeling people, humans, for Goodness Sake. Not economic, expendable units.

Poor old boy. What would I say to Brad, if I met up with him again?

Dude, I wasn’t lying in court. I was under oath, and I take that bit seriously. Everything I told was true, to the best of my ability.
What else could I have done or said? Hope you’re doing better…

Peace, brother…

Francis Meyrick

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on November 29, 2014, 7:05 am