Francis Meyrick

Part 8 Fear and Panic: “Eyes of Dead Man “

Fear and Panic are two different beasts.
A helicopter pilot does well to ponder the difference. And research, study, envisage ugly scenarios, prepare mentally for them, and try hard to never be surprised.
In this last endeavor, believe me, he will fail.
I was lucky in some ways. Before I arrived in the Tuna Fields, my nerves had been stretched taut many times. I was -and am- a determined, pretty cool, methodical thinker under extreme stress. But lest this sound like a vain boast, or foolish self congratulation, let me quickly add my ability to cope is due to (all too frequent) practice. And let me also frankly confess to having been -too often- scared to death. When you think you are a dead man, your body reacts. Afterward, people who see your face, without a word being spoken, can often tell. It’s in the pallor of the skin, the gray, and in the eyes, hollow, sunken, haunted, bloodshot, and staring. Eyes that have seen…. the approaching shadow.

I remember being in free-fall. Coming down at one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
It was in France somewhere, at one of the many state supported schools. In those days we had simple gear. There were no automatic opening devices. If you didn’t pull your ripcord, you were dead. If the parachute didn’t deploy properly, you were on your own. You simply had to perform the emergency drill.
And thus it was, that all had gone too well for too many jumps. I was getting used to normal deployment.
On this particular jump, down from 10,000 feet I seem to recall, I was beautifully stable. Comfortable. And coming down right over the drop zone. I checked my altimeter. Time to pull. I was almost disappointed. I felt so comfortable, so good.
Oh well…. And I pulled the main ripcord.
There was a pause.
And nothing happened…
I continued on down, in free fall, at a hundred and seventy six feet per second. I had twelve seconds before impact. But, allowing for the time required for a parachute to open, I had a lot less time than that to react. I remember being shocked and incredulous. But more than that, vividly, to this day, I can remember the instant butterflies erupting in my stomach. And I knew, with an absolute certainty, that if I panicked – and I was about to- I was dead. I remember the tremendous effort. To squash down the rising terror. To think of, and proceed with the emergency drill. And throw away the main ripcord. To reach for the reserve parachute. To locate the ripcord handle… I remember my fingers fumbling. And Terror sinking its teeth into me.

I remember the airshow. I think it was in aid of the Boy Scouts organization. A fund raiser. I had been invited in my Christen Eagle biplane. I had a lot of time in biplanes. I had taught aerobatics. Or ‘stunt flying’ as the general population like to say. I enjoyed vertical rolls, loops, Lomcevaks, and snap rolls. I could pass along the crowd line inverted at any height you cared to ask for. I adored hesitation rolls, barrel rolls and Cuban Eights.
But I was no fool. I had seen pilots killed. I knew pilots who had been killed. Too many. And I had learned an important truth, and I tried to pass it along to my students. When it came to doing air shows in an aerobatic aircraft, I would repeat the advice I had received many times from the old pro’s.
Never do an unrehearsed encore…
Fly the routine you have practiced. Stay disciplined. Focus on what you know. Leave the fancy dancy clever stuff that you are still practicing… for another day. Another airshow.

I taught that. And I applied it. I flew the air shows with increasing discipline. Until that day… the Boy Scout Airshow.
The last maneuver, the very last one, I forget what it was, but I performed it flawlessly. The whole show had gone like clockwork. It wasn’t a competition, but if it had been, the judges would have scored me high marks. Good positioning, clean, and crisp. And there I was, soaring out of the last pre-rehearsed maneuver, a little higher and a little faster than I had expected.
Good…
More height is good. More speed means more energy available. Also good.
Oh, what the hell…
And I proceeded to break the golden rule. I had been practicing a new stunt. A loop with two snap rolls at the top. A “Double avalanche “. I could fly a loop with a snap roll at twelve o’clock. At the very top of the loop. It’s harder to place one at eleven and the other at one ‘clock. But it looks good…. I’d been practising it. But it was not part of my regular routine. But now, with both speed and altitude in hand….
what the hell….
I know the first snap was perfect. It was with extreme confidence that I pulled over the top of the loop, inverted, and kicked the second one…
Oh! Shit! F..ck…!
To this day, I don’t know what happened. Did I over-rotate? Did I place it wrongly? Too late? I don’t know…
But I do remember, vividly, the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, as I started to pull out.
The nose of the aircraft was pointing almost vertically down, and I was pulling back on the stick, trying to fly the last quarter of the loop.
But…I was too low…
I couldn’t make it. I knew, I couldn’t make it. I’d flown hundreds and hundreds of loops. I was pulling as hard as I dared, but I could feel the wings shuddering. If I pulled any harder, I risked an aerodynamic high speed stall. I was -desperately- trying to milk my way around the last quarter. Pull back, feel the shudder, relax the back pressure a fraction, pull again…
The ground was coming up, and I wasn’t going to make it. Fear erupted through me. I was going to crash and burn.
I had screwed up.
And now I was going to die…

I remember the moment when the young British Army soldier was going to shoot me.
I couldn’t blame him for being angry. I had indeed, broken the rules of engagement. This was Northern Ireland, in the early seventies, during the height of “The Troubles “. British soldiers were being killed regularly by the Irish Republican Army.
And now I, the dozy one, had gone and pulled off a neat trick. I had used my heavy motorcycle to ram, and knock over, a British Army Soldier at a check point. It was an accident, but he wasn’t to know that. The IRA were known to be using motorbikes to transport explosives. Now he was down on one knee, in the classic sniper position, rifle raised, aiming straight for my chest. From that distance, thirty to forty yards, where I had slithered to a screeching stop, I didn’t think he would miss. I also knew there were more snipers in the woods, hidden amongst the trees. That was their standard procedure. To combat IRA surprises.
My heart stopped, and I was frightened to death. I couldn’t breath. It seemed a strange place to die. This muddy road, dark and wet, with trees on both sides. A musty smell in the air. Slowly, slowly, I forced myself to think. Fearful to make any sudden moves, I raised my hands. I wanted to run. To slam open the throttle on my Triumph. To get away… I willed myself to think. My hands were up. I was stopped.
Don’t shoot….
Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed movement. Slowly, slowly, I shifted my gaze. On my left, ghostly, from out of the misty shadows of darkness, two more figures had appeared, risen up from the bowels of the damp earth.
That made it…
at least three angry rifles pointed right at me.
I knew there were probably more…

I remember that dark, dimly lit back street in the old town centre of Budapest, Hungary. I was tired. So tired.
It was after midnight, and I had been on my motorcycle since early that morning, before sunrise.
Riding.
Determined, for some young man’s reason, to head south and east.
From Ireland, in the weeks leading up to this fateful day, I had crossed on the ferry from Larne in Northern Ireland to Stranraer in Scotland. I had driven down through Scotland and England. Crossed on the ferry Dover to Ostend. Driven through Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Austria. Then, without a visa, I had bribed my way, (with ‘Lucky Strike’ American cigarettes), through the Communist Iron Curtain. This was 1970, and the Cold War was in full swing.
Past the communist border guards, the tank traps, the barbed wire, the mine fields and the AK 47’s… I drove, a young man, an adventurer and idealist, on his Triumph motorcycle.
I had read Karl Marx. I had read about Stalin. The Hungarian uprising. The Polish ghetto under the Nazis. The Katyn forest massacre of the Polish Officers by the Russians. World War One. World War Two….
Now here I was in Hungary, behind the Iron Curtain, tasting the History I had read so much about, speeding past Lake Balaton. I wanted to make Budapest. The ancient city, about which I had dreamed so much. I had crossed the Danube at midnight, and in my over tired state, I had heard the music of the “Blue Danube ” playing through my mind, clearly and hauntingly.
I was looking for a cheap hotel, when I turned down the narrow side street. The engine noise bellowed of the grimy, dilapidated buildings. the windows shuttered up. No dice. No hotel. I stopped, and started to perform a U-turn. Suddenly figures loomed out of the darkness. Three, five….no, eight to ten men barred my way. They were drunk, and seemed angry.
One lurched forward, and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. He shouted something, wild eyed, into my face.
Another grabbed my arm, and I was surrounded.
They were yelling at me, in Hungarian. It meant nothing. I didn’t understand.
Fear clutched at me. The fear of being assaulted, beaten up, maybe killed, in a large, foreign city.
Alone, on a motorcycle, in a dimly lit side street, in Budapest, Hungary.
Thinking furiously, on the verge of mind destroying panic, I willed myself to appear calm and unruffled. Then, with a faint, nonchalant smile, I pronounced one of the very few Hungarian expressions I knew. Translated, it meant:
“Good evening… “

And after all that, after all the crazy stuff I’d been through, and survived, I was going to die, right here, in the Tuna Fields.

I couldn’t see the rope that secured me positively to the large -heavy- submerged tree. There was very little slack. My captain had unexpectedly taken off his headsets and climbed out of the cockpit, completely unaware of the instant predicament. There were large waves rolling through, and I had to lift up for them, lest they snag the tail rotor and cause a crash. But worse than that was the imminent dynamic roll-over. I knew what was coming. We had talked about it in bar sessions. Between the smoke and the bullshit, the jokes and the exaggerations, the wild tales and the wind ups, nonetheless, no helicopter pilot mocks the extreme, mortal danger of dynamic roll-overs. Your controls respond differently. Erratically. As the unseen rope goes tight, the helicopter may roll, perhaps to the right. But if the helicopter is hovering (say) to the left of the anchor point, then an instinctive left cyclic input, the pilot’s normal corrective action, will further aggravate the situation. The helicopter simply can’t roll left and level. The rope is tight… Instead, a left cyclic input will cause an unwanted climb, and an equally unwanted, increased roll to the right. If the pilot panics, and inputs even more left cyclic, (perhaps with a panic collective pull) then within two seconds, the machine will swing neatly around the arc. And crash, semi inverted, with the pilot’s brain reeling with confusion. Yes, in certain circumstances, your controls are effectively reversed.
However. It gets worse. Even if you know what’s going on, you can’t just try and reverse inputs. Which sounds easy, but in practice is incredibly difficult. (Believe me.) But you’re experiencing both normal control response, and reverse response.
Depending on whether the rope has gone slack, or is tight. And depending on where the fulcrum point, the attachment point, is relative to your vertical axis. (see Note 1)
Factor in the waves. It was gusting, twenty to twenty five knots. Eight, ten, twelve foot waves. I was desperately trying to keep the rope slack. But I had to lift up for waves coming through. I wasn’t sighted that well. I had to guess. Stay as low as possible to try and keep the rope slack, but not too low that a wave caught me. Inevitably, I felt a small tug through the machine, followed immediately by a harder tug. The left side of the disc came up. Furiously, heart in my mouth, I was trying to input the smallest possible control movements. A small left cyclic input aggravated the situation. In a panic, I moved the cyclic slightly right. A totally illogical, counter intuitive, unnatural feeling. We leveled again.
And so on, so forth. I wrestled -concentrating desperately- for what seemed like hours, but what was probably only two or three minutes.
One tug from the rope going tight pitched the nose up so abruptly, that I was convinced the captain must have fallen off.
Somehow, with fear gnawing at my mind, I managed to deduce the correct sequence of normal and reverse control inputs to bring the beast back under control. This couldn’t last, and I knew it. I had already used up all my luck for the next ten years in one hit.
Factor in the lack of references. Everything is moving. There is nothing else floating there. No fixed object. You cannot reference yourself to anything. Are you drifting sideways? Backwards? Forwards? But that horrible, sharp tug, coupled to the response of your tiny control inputs, will tell you…
Normal sense…
Reverse sense..
(tug, yaw, roll).
Normal sense…
Reverse sense…
(tug, yaw,roll).
The concentration was beyond intense. One small error, and we were going to crash. The ship was fifty miles away, and they only had a rough idea of where we were. It would take them five hours to even get anywhere near. It would be long past dark by then…

He slid back in, with a satisfied grin. He was all pleased with himself. He had succeeded in untying the knot.
We were free… He looked at me, and the grin abruptly disappeared. I never said a word. Concern erupted across his face.
“Moggy? What wrong? Moggy! What problem…?? “
I was too exhausted to speak. The death mask beside him just stared hollowly out the windscreen.
“Gott! Moggy? What…what happen…?? “

Captain Chan told me afterward I was gray. He said my eyes were “like eyes of dead man “. When I finally explained to him what had happened, and how close we had come, he was beyond shocked. And terribly sorry.

I survived. We survived. Despite, between the two of us, riding the chariot simply way too close to the edge.
He saw, in his broken Taiwanese-English, “eyes of dead man “
I saw, in that eternity of frantic wrestling with erratic controls, and mind blowing horror and helplessness, amidst the wind and the waves, the spray flying, and the storm clouds racing across the Pacific sky…

in all its worth and puny fragility,

my life…

Francis Meyrick
(c)

Note 1: the rope will almost certainly be tied off from the right undercarriage gear leg. Maybe 5 to 7 feet sideways from the vertical axis. (Yep, a nice moment arm in the make) It will not be tied off from the belly hook. (Which would have been nice in one way, as the attachment point would then have been aligned with the vertical axis). If the helicopter slides over the vertical log, (remember, you are unsighted) you now have the rope running tight over the outside of the float, running back in underneath the helicopter. This situation is almost begging for a dynamic roll-over. And I knew it, while this event was happening.
Draw it, and you’ll see what I mean. (See my attempt in Ch.3-H-1)

But in trying to avoid that, you may drift the other way, (or forwards, or backwards) and the rope may extend all the way and then go tight. This situation I have tried to show you in the second drawing in Ch.3-H-1.
You will only really know the rope has gone tight when you feel the ‘tug’ and the rotor disc tips up in some way. Now your control response becomes erratic. You may experience partial reverse control, or even momentary 100% reverse control. The danger here cannot be over stated.
Note 2: it is imperative that a tuna helicopter pilot instantly appreciates the difference between a log he can clearly see (e.g. floating normally on the surface) and a rare ‘vertical floater’ which he can’t see. The second type is potentially much more dangerous.

Return to Index? (ChopperStories.COM)?

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on December 24, 2014, 9:02 am

Part (7) Routine and Sudden Terror: How to crash a Helicopter

In the Introduction to “Moggy’s Tunaboat Helicopter Manual ” I wrote this:

“But if I had never had any help, never had any advice, never had mentors…
I would be stone dead by now.
I have waltzed -innocently- into many situations where…
a small amber caution light…
…flickered on inside my retarded brain. Where a little voice said to me:
“Hang on! Jimmy 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. “

I think those words are simple, but true. A good friend of mine, Peter, is an experienced helicopter pilot. He never flew the Tuna Fields, but he did tell me lots of helicopter stories, against himself. With a quiet shrug, with a wry smile, he told me -hilarious- stories that made me laugh, wince, and feel for him. He told me stories from which I learned. And it’s pilots like that who I hugely admire. Teachers like that, who openly admit to their own humanity, their own fallibility, and are willing to share their knowledge. For no other reward, than the satisfaction of a good laugh, and the expansion of awareness in friends and fellow pilots. I have two anecdotes to relate below from Peter, and I hope you too will get a chuckle out of them.
But before I do that, I ask you to contrast Peter’s unselfish attitude, with a great many Sky Gods out there. The ones who are exalted, and who sit in judgment of us ordinary ‘working class’ pilots. They never make mistakes. Never have, and never will. They are that good. Sadly, for some bizarre reason, they often get promoted. Then they become superior officers, lead pilots, instructors, and examiners. The next step comes when they become ‘shouters’. They shout and scream, are the very devil to fly with, and if -in their estimation- you don’t cut it, well, then you just don’t cut it. There is no appeal.
I have watched the process so many times, I find it tragic but funny. I have seen people in the role of instructors and examiners, who, prior to their appointment, had zero flight time as instructors. Because of that, they had never learned to shut the f..k up, and let the student or candidate fly the aircraft. They would yell and shout, until the poor student was trying to fly the instructor’s mouth, and not the aircraft. That won’t work. And so I’ve seen perfectly good pilots humiliated, and either run off, or their lives made miserable up to the point where they quit.
Now let’s focus in on these aloof, haughty ‘shouters’. Those who sit in merciless judgment. Those who occupy the great throne in the sky, from whence they dispense their lightning bolts of judgment.
I’ve seen it so many times… one of two things happen. Firstly, stories start circulating about our Great Leader, from before he was the Anointed One. Funny stories. Crazy stories. And we, the unwashed, ragged masses, listening to the tongue lashing he gives us, are in fact quietly snickering at the memory of a story we have heard where HE screwed up in the past. He doesn’t know we know. But we do, and it makes the vicious beating he is meting out, somewhat hypocritical. He has done the same, or a lot worse, himself. If only… he would chill out, relax, and admit it! And tell us about his own faux pas, his own peccadillos, his own class bloorox bloopers…. If only he would USE those incidents as learning tools, and tell us how EASY it is to make these mistakes, because after all, EVEN HE has done it…
If only…
But no, he sends a different message, which he expects us to believe: that he is perfect. And that he is entitled to shout at us, because he is so perfect. And if we are very good, (very, very good), there is a chance, that ONE DAY, maybe, we might just be that good ourselves. And maybe (just, maybe) they will promote us. And then WE will be entitled to yell and shout at everybody, because WE will then be so perfect….
Poppycock…
The second thing that happens, and I’ve seen this happen many times, is that suddenly, out of the blue, our Perfect leader, the Stern Faced one, he who upholds the greatest values ever known to pilots, he who is without Sin….
HE SCREWS UP…!
And now he’s embarrassed. Egg all over his face. (Plus the feathers and the chicken poop)… Now what? I’ve seen them resign and run… Bluster and lie…. Angrily pretend it never happened… Try hard to forget it ever happened…
If only he’d been human. If only he had preached a different message:

“Look guys, it’s easy to screw up here. Don’t do it. Many people have done it. I can tell you a funny story where I did it. Heck, I was embarrassed! (laughter) But I learned from it! Now this is what you can do, to avoid making the same mistake I did….etc, etc ”

Had he preached to us like that, first we would have learned so much more, and secondly, we would have loved him for it, and thirdly, even if he did mess up later, there would be such a reservoir of good will towards him, he could still hold his head up high, and even turn it into a teaching prop. “See guys? There’s me lecturing you dudes, and look what I just did. (laughter) All right, so what have we all just learned today…? “
Some teachers teach like that, some (many) don’t. A great Pity, and a great missed opportunity to impart knowledge.
My friend Peter…. was great. Ace.

(Peter’s “Story # 1 “)
He was doing sling loading from an A-Star up in the mountains in Switzerland. It was a remote location, steep slopes, and the only available place flat enough to work from was unfortunately slap bang under a gaggle of high tension cables. They looked for alternatives. There weren’t any. In the end, Peter decided they could use the site under the cables, and he would just have to slide under them very carefully. The first few times, he reckons he was pretty nervous. He soon discovered however, that there was way more vertical clearance than he had at first thought. By the time he had done it five or six times, creeping in carefully with a slingload, he had gotten pretty used to it. They got into a routine.
Creep in carefully with a sling load…
Drop the load…
Creep out carefully…
Hmmmm…. well, that wasn’t so bad.
Creep in carefully with a sling load…
Drop the load…
Creep out carefully…
Hmmmmmm…. getting pretty good at this!

After three days of this, and several hundred successful slings…. the job was finishing.
On the second last drop,the foreman came over, with a big smile:
“That’s it! We’re done! We are leaving now! Thank you very much! Great job! You can go home after that last drop! Auf Wiedersehen…! “
Peter smiled, shook hands, and the image of a cool beer, with froth dripping down the side of a cold glass, served by that blond, buxom wench at the local Beer Garden, floated through his tired mind.
“Auf Wiedersehen! Thank you! Bye-bye! ”
The crew departed, and soon Peter was back with the very last drop. He slid in expertly, dropped the load, and felt relief surge through his tired body.
A job well done. A pat on the back. Homeward bound. Hey-ho…And our hero took off.
Vertically.
Straight up into the power cables…

He knew what he’d done, the moment the helicopter lurched sickeningly. He didn’t need the bright flash, and the horrible banging and clattering to alert him. His mind reeling in shock, he was now trying to control a beast that was seriously damaged, and not responding properly to the controls. His life flashed before him, and with great difficulty, he contrived to -somehow- wrestle his crippled ship back down.to earth. Panic stricken, he slammed the throttle shut, and the machine wallowed and shook as the out-of-balance rotor system slowed down.
At last, there was peace.
Silence…
He sank back, frantic thoughts rushing through his mind.
F…k!!! F…K!!!
I could have been killed!
What’s the boss going to say?
How much damage have I done to the helicopter?
What’s the utility company going to say?
Now what???

He closed his eyes, and tried to regain a pulse rate below two thousand. At least he had saved the helicopter…
The men had all gone. There was nobody there. He would just have to walk down the mountain…
At least he had saved the helicopter….

What’s that smell!!!?
He could smell smoke. Opening his eyes, he saw to his consternation that the severed high voltage power cables had set the mountain side on fire. A large fire was now rolling down the hill coming straight at his helicopter….
F…k!!! F…K!!!
And that is why this true story must be forever associated with the graphic image of our hero Peter, helicopter pilot extraordinaire, running as fast as his little legs would carry him, in a cloud of dust, like a demented madman, down a picturesque Swiss mountain, shouting at the top of his lungs at some cattle farmers down below:
” Hilfe! Gott! Help! Help! Come and help! The mountain’s on fire and it’s going to burn up my helicopter! Help! Scheisze! Hilfe!! Helllllllllpppppppp!!!!…. ”

Poor Peter. It took some explaining, but his boss forgave him. He was now, after all, a wiser helicopter pilot.
Life slowly returned to normality.
That is, until the day arrived, when story number two would carve itself, indelibly, into the Helicopter history books…

(Peter’s “Story # 2 “)
If you’ve never been to Switzerland, you need to visualize lots of mountains with pretty little villages. The houses are often like fairy tale houses, chocolate gingerbread houses, invariably neat and tidy. Around these tidy little villages go the Swiss village folk, invariably industrious and polite. Across these pretty villages, these quiet guardians of the ancient ways, would fly busy little helicopters. Including Peter. On his many errands.
All went well. Until one day he landed back at his base. His boss was standing there, waiting, arms folded.
He didn’t look quite his normal self. A trifle pale, perhaps.
Peter landed, and got out.
“Peter “, spoke his employer. “You carry a full five gallon drum of aviation fuel with you, don’t you? “
“Yes, boss…? “
“Peter, show me that drum, would you, please? “
“Sure, boss. Just a second… “.
Peter walked around to the baggage compartment, where the spare fuel was stored.
It was missing.
“Errrr…. sorry, Boss, I must have left it somewhere…. “
His boss almost snarled when he asked:
“And where do you think you might have left it…? “
“Duh… sorry, Boss, it was here this morning I think…. I have no idea…?? “
“Peter, you left it…… “
There was a pause.
“….in Mrs Muehller’s front living room. It got there via her roof, two ceilings, a ceiling fan, and the television. Your five gallons of aviation fuel is now adorning her carpets, walls, furniture, and….. the Sunday roast… “
Peter went pale.
“Moreover… “
“Moreover, I have just had Mrs Muehller on the phone. For about…. twenty five minutes. During which time… I never got a word in. It appears amongst other things that her cat will never be the same again. My head is still ringing. If you think I’m going around there, you’re wrong. I value my life. I’m going home. YOU are going around there, YOU are going to apologize, and YOU are going down on your bended knees….. what-ever it takes… to clean the mess up….. is that understood? “
“Yes, boss… ”

There are many morals to this story, (including the need to firmly secure all cargo!) but what I want to focus on is this:

routine normality, in the exciting, dynamic, fluid world of helicopters, must never be taken for granted.

Just because a task has been successfully performed many hundreds or thousands of times, does not mean that it will never hurt or kill us…. In my book, a good helicopter pilot is a defensive helicopter pilot. He is also alert to:

tiny changes in routine…

Tiny additional factors, which individually, mean nothing. But arranged together…. they can bite.
And bite hard.

Coming back to the Tuna Fields, and the whole point of this preamble, on a “Human factors ” level, I had already dropped hundreds of radio buoys successfully. I had dropped them on logs, pallets, barrels, rafts…
Nearly all these targets I could see, as I hovered alongside them. The waves are moving, and they will give you no help in figuring out where you are in relationship to an object floating under the helicopter. You can’t think:
“Okay, it’s floating between the seventh and eight wave… “
So to orientate yourself, you need to see the log or other floating object. Now it’s easy. Just watch for rogue waves, trying to snag your tail rotor.
Occasionally, you cannot see the object, because it’s so small. Your observer can. He will guide you in with hand signals, and drop the radio buoy at the right time. Even if the release rope gets hung up, and does not instantly sever the connection between the helicopter and the floating object (via the radio buoy), it’s not such a big deal, because you can drag the small object without tipping the helicopter over. No, you don’t want to drag anything intentionally, you don’t ever want the rope to go tight, but if it does, and the object is small, then you will get away with it.

But what if the object you cannot see below the helicopter weights several tons??

It was the last radio buoy drop of a long day. I was flying with a good captain, who I got on with really well.
We found a large foamer, and he was studying it intently. There was alot of large yellowfin there. All of a sudden, he pointed out a vertical floater. He did well to spot it. It was a large tree, maybe forty or fifty foot tall, but only the very tip was occasionally bobbing up above the surface. The rest was submerged. I’d never quite seen anything like that before.
(note: tiny departure from well-worn routine…)
It has to do with the species of tree, and the specific density of that wood. Some timbers float like crazy, e.g. balsa wood.
Some timbers sink like a rock. Straight to the bottom.
But some timbers…. just about dangle there…
The captains really like the ‘vertical floaters’. And I can see why. The fish really like them, and I’ve seen five hundred and six hundred ton of fish milling around such a vertical dude.
So down we went. Two old pros, just to drop another radio buoy. No big deal.
No big deal…

Needless to say, I was quite unsighted. There was no way I could see it. Only the very tip was intermittently bobbing above the surface. He guided me in with hand signals. Then he threw the rope with the hook, and missed. He pulled it back in, and tried again. This time he got it, and, for what was meant to be mere seconds (until he pulled the release rope) we were now firmly anchored to an underwater object, which I could not possibly see, which weighed many tons.
No big deal…
I was mostly quite relaxed. Anxious to get going, because it was late. It was blustery, wind twenty to twenty five knots.
The waves were eight to ten foot. The ship was fifty miles away. Daylight was slowly becoming an issue, but we had time if we just dropped this thing and got going.
No big deal…
The knot stuck. It failed to release. I could see him jerk at the rope. Jerk again. Jerk a third time…
And then something happened that I had not allowed for. Something, a possibility, that I had completely failed to factor in.
In a flash…
he took his headsets off…
Huh…!?
undid his seatbelt….
HUH…!!!???
and stepped out the door onto the float.
He was intent on untying the knot! He should have used the knife, and cut the rope! What’s a two dollar rope??
But no, with supreme confidence in my flying, and my ability to hover steadily in a gusting 25 knot wind, he was climbing out on the slippery, wet float of the hovering helicopter.
We always flew without doors on, and the noise level with no headsets was phenomenal. Even as he started out of his seat, I was already yelling at him, screaming at him, frantic, desperate, but he couldn’t hear me.
NO! NO! NO….!
It was too late. Routine normality had exploded into sudden terror.
All I had around me was waves. No reference…
There was no way I could maintain my position over that small a target without his hand signals to guide me.
There was no way I could prevent that short rope, stretched vertically below the helicopter, from going suddenly tight.
There was no way such a heavy object was going to budge. Too much weight and inertia.

I immediately knew we were about to roll over in a classic dynamic rollover, crash, and die horribly…

(to be continued – CLICK HERE)

Francis Meyrick
(c)

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Last edited by Francis Meyrick on July 1, 2015, 10:22 am

A BLIP ON THE RADAR (6)

Life and Death are real and immediate in the Tuna Fields. Men cope with the inevitable risks in different ways. Gallows humor, cruel and unkind to some, is an ever present fact of Life. No target is ever too sacred. Some would say it’s just a method of coping. ‘Men talk’. ‘Bar talk’. Others would say it’s barbaric and sadistic. The following story illustrates this. It is perhaps not for those with advanced, higher, delicate sensibilities…

BACKFLIPS

I debated calling him by another name. Maybe Jimmy, or Ted.
But I guessed he’d be offended. He’d email me with a growl, and write:
“Moggy! You son-of-a-bitch! What’s this Jimmy shit? Do you think I’m needing to hide? Dammit?? ” Carl would look the Devil himself straight in the eye, unfazed, and not back up an inch. So I’ll just call him Carl. I think he’d prefer it that way.

Carl was a Tuna pilot. Still is, I believe.
He was also an extremely highly experienced former Vietnam attack helicopter pilot. His job was ‘hunt and destroy’, and his tales were utterly fascinating. Carl is a born story teller. It’s in his genes. If you ever have the pleasure of being propped up in a bar, pleasantly mellow, and listening to him, you will enjoy his company. His eyes take on a shine, his arms wave around the sky, but somehow they never knock anybody’s beer over. I love telling a yarn, but for some reason I’m the clumsy dude who will knock your beer over. Or mistakenly, whilst demonstrating my flight path, poke the waitress behind me, plumb in the boob. You’ll hear the stories of my clumsiness, and they are all true. Especially the one about the Russian stripper the bastards secretly set me up with…
(oh, that one can keep until later…)
There are many stories around about Carl. I’m sure they are all true. The ones I describe below, I can vouch for.
That… is the way they happened….

Carl had an engine failure one day, in His Bell 47, with the Korean captain sitting beside him. We all knew he did not like the Koreans very much. He described them in unflattering terms over the radio every night. Down they went, with Carl doing his pilot thing. At fifteen hundred feet per minute rate of descent, with a loud silence from the engine, the poor Korean was -understandably- frightened. As they were coming down through two hundred feet, in autorotation, the Korean shouted he was going to jump out. Carl admits he was busy, and that he said, in his matter-of-fact, laid back, laconic style:
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you…. ”
I can just see Carl, tunnel visioning in on flying the machine and preparing himself for the flare. I know he would have been quite relaxed, nonchalant even, enjoying his tobacco chew, but concentrating 100% on the task in hand. I would have been more excited. And I know I would probably have yelled: “For fuxsake SIT TIGHT! ”
But not Carl. I doubt if his pulse even measured a ripple. It was all in day’s helicopter flying for him. He swears he never saw the captain go, and I believe him. He was too busy. He did a nice auto, judged the flare perfectly, and popped the little bird undamaged down on the Pacific Ocean.
No captain.
The ship arrived, and they went looking for him. They found the poor captain’s body, very dead, floating. They retrieved the deceased, and hoisted the helicopter up. Carl calmly fixed the carburettor problem, and soon the bird was perfectly airworthy again.

The next morning, we were all in the air. The chat frequency was solid with everybody talking about one thing, and one thing only. Next thing…. here comes Carl on frequency, perfectly happy, flying and fishing. Everybody of course wanted to hear the latest! Carl, for his part, was his usual relaxed self, and happy to fill in the details.
Yes, the captain had jumped out, presumably at around two hundred feet.
Yes, the first mate had now been made captain, and they were carrying on fishing. Once they were full up, they would be heading into port, to offload the fish, and the dead captain’s body.
“How does the crew feel about it, Carl? “, somebody asked.
“Well “, said Carl. “I can’t say I’ve noticed many regrets…. ”
“Why is that? ”
“Well, I’m not sure the crew liked him much. As for the First Mate…. he’s just been made captain…. ”
There was a pause.
“And last night, well, hell, he did something he’s never done before… ”
“What was that, Carl? ”
“Oh, he just brought me two whole crates of beer…. ”

“How do you feel about it, Carl? “, somebody asked.
The frequency went silent. You could sense the hush as a dozen pilots strained not to miss the next pronunciations on the matter from our laconic Vietnam ace.
“Well… “, he said eventually.
There was a pause. You could sense him, leisurely chewing away, quietly formulating his thoughts.
“I was actually thinking of taking a leaf out of the Old Western Frontier Gunfighters book… ”
Silence. You just know everybody is thinking:
“Huh…? ”
He continued.
“I was thinking, since I got rid of one of the little slant-eyed gits anyway, I’d go and cut me a notch out of my cyclic... ”

* * * * * *

A while after that adventure, we were all fishing together. Sometimes all the ships are really spread out, maybe hundreds of miles apart, and at other times you will find twenty ships within a ten mile square area. It was on one of these occasions, that Carl, once again, went into Tuna History. This time, he performed another trick, that to my knowledge has never been done before. Or since. It is unique in the annals of Tuna Anecdotes…
Quite simply, Carl forgot to remove his right front tie-down. That is why I always preach the “Gospel according to Moggy “, where tie-downs are concerned. In a nut shell: “They are either ALL on, or they are ALL off. ”
If Carl had been a convert, the following adventure would never have taken place. But, typically, he was a heretic, and proud of it, so he did it his way. His unique way…
Carl just took off with the tie-down still attached!
Anybody else, anybody, and they would have died, there and then. Taking off with a tie-down attached was ALWAYS a 100 per cent guarantee of a terrible crash, a smashed helicopter, and, almost always, a dead pilot and/or dead observer.
But here comes Carl….
HIS tie-down… simply….
…broke!
The event was witnessed by a stunned pilot and a mechanic on another ship, and another equally flabbergasted pilot passing overhead.
Carl took off, the right front tie-down went tight, spun the machine around – in flight- one hundred and eighty degrees in an instant, and then…. broke!
His Bell actually flew backwards for a second, in a weird ricochet-boomerang effect from the tie-down going tight.
He recovered, flew away, shook himself, and carried on fishing!
I was only a few miles away, and I missed seeing it. Sure wish I had. However, that night, on the chat frequency, the talk was, once again, of nothing else but Carl’s latest epic. The mood was one of hysterical unbelief. Nobody could believe anybody could have gotten away with such a stunt. Next thing….
Up comes Carl on frequency!
True to form, he was totally at ease with the situation. Most of us would have been still shaking, discovering Jesus, getting drunk, or contemplating the career of brothel keeper.
Not Carl….
Carl quite enjoyed the revelry. He thought it was a great adventure. He was laughing. He told us they were brand new tie-downs, and obviously had a manufacturing defect. It was that defect that had saved his life, as the normal breaking strength of the webbing used is measured in the range of many thousands of pounds. The relatively minute tug on the webbing the helicopter placed, was in no way even remotely sufficient to have broken it.
Well, somebody wanted to know, how did Carl feel about it all?
There was silence on the frequency, while Carl quietly thought about it.
We all waited. What would Carl say?
“Well “, he said.
“I was actually thinking…. ”
You could sense there was a deep thought coming…
“…of suing the manufacturer “.

* * * * * * *

A lot of us were into scuba diving. True to my somewhat more serious outlook on such matters, I joined PADI. I took lessons. And slowly and thoughtfully worked my way up the skill and knowledge scale. Basically, you start out with shallow dives. Slowly, slowly, you go deeper. I never passed a hundred feet depth until I had over 35 dives. I studied the books. The theory. I worked with an instructor. And I moved cautiously. I never hit a depth of 130 feet (the maximum depth recommended by PADI) until I had over 60 dives. I eventually qualified as a PADI Divemaster. I only once went deeper than 130 feet, and that was an accident.

Well, Carl and one of his drinking buddies decided that scuba diving could be fun as well. Their boats were in Truk Island, in the middle of the Pacific. The Japanese fleet suffered many ships sunk there by the Americans during World War Two. The wreck diving, with teeming fish life, and magnificent corals, is unique. People come from all over the world to dive there, often at great expense. We lucky tuna pilots, when our ships were there for offloading the catch, got to be there for free. It was here that Carl and his buddy decided to cut their teeth scuba diving.

There are diving schools and diving instructors available on Truk Island. Plenty. But Carl and his buddy weren’t too worried about that. They just ambled into a diving shop, pretended they were old pro’s, rented some equipment, stepped off the beach and went diving!
The niceties, the theory…. that’s for the birds. For the wimps.
And so it came to pass…. that on his dive # 5, a now expert Carl the Scuba Diver, was having great fun down at a depth of 160 feet. Him and his buddy. All went well, until abruptly…
(Hunnnnn…..mmmmmph!….)
Carl ran out of air! At a depth of 160 feet.
If you know anything at all about scuba diving, by now your eyes are wide open! Believe me, when I heard the story, mine were.
What our hero had achieved there, was undoubtedly the scuba diving equivalent of forgetting to undo your helicopter tie-down on take-off…
Now what? His buddy was not too far away, and in a few fu-fu-frantic strokes, Carl managed to swim over, and grab his buddy’s spare regulator. Thankfully drawing in air, he communicated his distress with hand signals. At this stage, with both men breathing off one tank, they both had the same thought to maybe check the remaining air supply in this one tank. Wonder of wonders. That tank was also just about empty. Had they bothered to study the theory, they would have learned that, yes, at that depth you use a LOT of air, very quickly. They looked at each other. Now what?
All they could think of doing, (and I must admit, what DO you do….?) was to inflate their BCD’s (Bouyancy Compensator Device) and perform a ROCKET vertical ascent. You are supposed to ascend very slowly, very steadily, to avoid ‘the bends’. Our two came up so fast, that, Carl admitted to me, they exploded half out of the water. Like a cork out of a bottle, they came head, shoulders, and down to their waist out of the water on that first, panic stricken surfacing.
They did now realize they were in big trouble. People have died from the bends, for doing much less than that. There is no hyperbaric chamber on Truk, to treat divers suffering from the bends. To all extent and purposes, they were in deadly trouble. They grabbed two full tanks of air, went back down to fifteen feet, and stayed there for forty minutes.
Slowly, they then surfaced. Worried, and wiser.
Wonders above wonders, both men survived their brush with Fate, and suffered no after effects!
Even Carl, the unflappable one, was a little thoughtful, as he related to me the whole story of his adventure.
The story went around our little Tuna fleet like wild fire. And I wonder how many people thought the same as I did:
“ONLY Carl could get away with that…. ”

* * * * * * * *

St Mary’s Hotel on the small Atoll of Tarawa, is a regular hang out for tuna pilots. The label “Hotel ” should be taken with a degree of Polynesian salt. True, they serve beer there, the most essential function demanded by the Tuna Foreign Legionnaires, but the rough wooden tables, the few dubious rooms, and the tales told by former occupants ( “Man, I took a shower, and the HOT didn’t work “, or “Holy Cow! I took a shower, and the water stank of urine “) made the label “hotel ” seem a trifle exaggerated. It was more of a shack in the woods. A roof and no walls.
If you stayed drinking there until late, you could watch Mary’s extended family start going to bed. They would amble in, grab a vacant table, climb up on it, stretch out, fully clothed… and go to sleep! Around them, the extremely noisy bar scene, with cheerful and boisterous tuna pilots and mechanics blowing off steam, would carry on unabated. It was a little odd at first, but you got used to it. There was no closing time. They served beer until the last protagonists staggered (or were carried) back to their respective boats. I never heard or saw a sleeping local on the next table complain, even when we were drinking AND singing.

One night, we had a busy scene going on. There was a lot of us legionnaires there, and Carl was in ebullient form.
He was entertaining us with one story after another, and I remember he was in full flow. His humor was different. Altogether on another planet. Often he had no intention of being funny. It was more a case of his extraordinary illogic, and his outlandish reasoning, that reduced us to gales of laughter.
In the midst of all this, the environmentalists strolled in.
GreenPeace had arrived.
We had watched “Rainbow Warrior ” sail in during the afternoon. And later, a high speed launch could be seen leaving the mother ship, with a lot of young people, mostly girls, wearing the same, flashy, GreenPeace jackets.
Now, they were here, and mixing in with a gang of drunken, raucous, Tuna Hunters blowing off steam.
Needless to say, it degenerated. One of the ladies was quite reasonable. She was also more knowledgeable. She accepted that fishing had been going on for as long as Man had existed, and that the issue was not the principle, but the sustainability.
With that I could fully agree, and I said so. I still hold the same view.
Unfortunately, two or three of her companions, with that peculiar haughty, snobbish superiority of the young and privileged, did not exhibit the same realism. One in particular, with a high voice, was determined to make us feel guilty. When asked by me if she knew the difference between a Yellowfin and a Skipjack, she had flushed red, and drawn loud groans from the assembled Tuna Hunters. She then admitted to me that the only reason she was on the Rainbow Warrior was that “Daddy had made a large donation “, and I got the picture there!
For some strange reason, she seemed determined to put Carl in his place, and I soon sensed her strong pacifist, anti-war leanings. Carl to her must have been the personification of the Devil, the more his war stories progressed, and his vivid descriptions of ambushing Viet Cong insurgents in the Mekong Delta in his helicopter, and his exact descriptions of the effect of explosive ordinance on real human targets. I for my part, playing once again the role of the dumb schmuck in the background, was utterly enjoying the face-off. I could only wonder where it would lead.
She tried to interrupt him more and more, and I could see Carl was not even remotely intimidated.
In the midst of a story dealing with dismembered, flying body parts, Carl, arms waving, was finally aware of her indignation, as she rose to her feet, drew herself up, and practically screamed:
“You MONSTER! Tell me, how does it feel to cold bloodedly KILL real people? What makes you so proud of it? What is your ultimate GOAL?? ”
Her indignation was real and shrill, and a hush fell over the bar.
Carl, interrupting his war story, for the first time, deigned to look over to her, calmly and without any discomfort.
“Well, Ma’am “, he said politely.
I held my breath,
“The GOAL is to hit the little yellow bastards with the right caliber, and in the right place… ”
He trailed off, and raised a finger, as if about to reveal a crucial trade secret.
“Because if you nail ’em just right… ”
He smiled, beatifically happy at the fond memories…

“They do BACKFLIPS…. ”

With that, totally unruffled, he went back to his war story.

(Exit: GreenPeace…..)

Francis Meyrick
(c)

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Last edited by Francis Meyrick on December 24, 2014, 9:00 am