Erica's Questions

I appreciate all comments to this blog.  Unlike some bloggers, I do not edit or delete comments, nor even require "blogger approval" before they're posted (unless they're added after a certain period of time - it's a spam filter thing Blogger provides).  I do not mind intelligent discourse, even if the writer disagrees with me.  I appreciate all comments, good and bad.  (The woman blogger I wrote about in the previous post bans *all* comments from me.  I guess she only wants her viewpoint heard on her blog.  Oh well.)  Moving on, I don't feel the need to answer every comment, although I do read them.  So if you don't get a response from me, it's safe to say that your comment stands on its own merit and I thank you for it. 

My last post brought a response from a woman here in the Brewster area who coincidentally and conveniently asked a question I was going to deal with in this post anyway. Erica wrote:

"I have a question. The last couple of years have been deadly for you guys, especially farther south in Wenatchee, where there are power lines everywhere. It takes we growers' breath away, thinking of your lot's courage and skill, and the dangers of precision flying. So my question is this: are you guys REALLY flying with the passenger pilot sticking his head out the window, as I saw the other morning?!? Avoiding wind machines, power lines and trees is terrifying, so I wouldn't be surprised!

I went down to a neighbor's orchard three days ago, to watch that wonderful old S-55 thunder above the trees. And I took some lousy pictures. But then, I notice the right-hand side window open, and a guy or gal LEANING OUT, motioning to the pilot! This was up Jack Wells Rd., above Chief Joe."

Erica, I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but what we do is not heroic or particularly frightening and doesn’t take an inordinate amount of courage. If it involved those things, I certainly wouldn’t (couldn’t?) do it! In fact, we work really, really hard to make the job as routine as possible. In the end, we are mostly just hovering around in an open field. It’s fairly easy to do, but as you point out it does have its hazards.

Not to give you a complete training program on cherry-drying, but let me hit you with the basics. Cherry-drying is simply a matter of slowly hovering up and down the orchard at an altitude that puts about a 15 mph downward breeze through the trees. More than that can bash the cherries together and damage them (we call it, “making cherry juice”); less than that won’t get them dry.

Before we enter a field, we always, always, always scope out the wire/obstruction situation. I will go so far as to say that every dang field has a powerline running either along one edge or perhaps through it – in rare cases both. But nothing takes us by surprise, believe it or not. A lot of times there will be cherry trees quite near the wires or other obstructions (e.g. roads, houses, pickers quarters, wind machines, etc.) so we figure out in advance how we are going to dry those trees when we get to them.

A lot of times we have an observer who is a commercially-rated helicopter pilot. Contrary to what some people might imagine, we do not take joyriders. We do ask the observer to keep an eye out and warn us if we’re getting close to an obstruction. But as I said, sometimes it’s a necessity to get the job done. Happily, with the S-55 I can usually hover well above the wires. Still, we do need to keep track of their location so we don’t run into them inadvertently.

Wind can blow our downwash around. It is not always directly underneath the helicopter. Sometimes it’s hard to see the exact trees you’re drying without some extra effort.  Erica, when you described the pilot leaning out the window, I thought you were talking about me! But I do not dry near the Chief Joseph Dam, which is where you said you were.

During the course of the job, I often do slide my door/window back and lean out to see the effect my downwash is having on the trees. That’s just part of doing a good job for the customer. If I have a copilot, I’ll do that for him when he’s flying and he’ll do the same for me when I’m flying. I do it when I’m alone as well. But I am comfortable and competent hovering in this manner (although I’ll admit that it’s not for everyone).

Some fields are easy and some are harder. Nearly all of the fields I dry for my customer are on flat ground and have no wires running through them. Very easy. There is one little corner of one field where two powerlines come together, but with a little advance planning even it is not that hard to do.

Our boss has repeatedly said that the cherries are not worth dying for. So we’re conservative. We try not to take unnecessary chances. Even so, we pilots sometimes make mistakes. Hey, we’re only human! Last year we lost a pilot who hit a powerline while drying in the town of Manson. He was in the middle of drying the field, and knew the powerline was there, so we are completely at a loss to explain how he could have hit the wire the way he did.  But we take lessons from every crash, especially that one, and we redouble our efforts to not let that happen to us. 

In the end, cherry-drying by helicopter is not an incredibly challenging job – just one that takes a little understanding and planning to do it right. And in the right helicopter (like the good, ol’ Sikorsky S-55) it is quite a lot of fun!

Faith, Hope, and Bloggery

There is this woman with a blog who owns a helicopter company in Arizona. She operates a Robinson R-44, which is a popular small, economical four-seat ship powered by a Lycoming piston-engine. Every summer this woman flies her helicopter up here to Washington State and dries cherries with it. As we speak, she is located not far south of me.

In her blog, this woman often takes a strident, lecturing, know-it-all approach to her posts. We all know that writers can be very different people in person than they are on paper. In this case, the woman writes very well (and is a great photographer to boot). Nevertheless, I find her “personality” irritating. Unlike, oh, P.J. O’Rourke whom I’d love to meet, I really hope I never bump into this woman blogger in the Wenatchee Walmart.

The very first blogpost I read of hers concerned a conflict she had with a helicopter tour operator at some desolate, uncontrolled airport in the southwest (must’ve been near the Grand Canyon). Apparently the tour operator normally used two of the three front parking spots on the ramp. Instead of parking on the third front spot, this woman parked her helicopter on a spot behind the front three which was closer to the vehicle parking area than the third front spot. This interfered with the rapid approach and departure of the tour guys. They asked her to move, she declined, and it went downhill from there.

I won’t take sides because I obviously was not there. The tour pilots clearly felt that this woman was in their way, impeding the efficient flow of their operation on their airport. Hey, I know how pilots can be.  Oh, do I!

But instead of working it out with the pilots themselves or their Chief Pilot, or merely being cooperative and accommodating, this blogger woman mounted her high horse and went straight to the FAA. A lot of us would consider this a pretty chickenshit thing to do. But when you’re a pompous, relatively low-time “expert” in a field, you know better than anyone, by God! And that’s how this woman comes off in her posts.

I should ironically note here that this woman is proudly atheist. In another post, she bragged about browbeating a couple of religious proselytizers (probably Jehovah’s Witnesses) who made the mistake of knocking on her door. It was a middle-aged woman and a young girl. Our blogger says she invited them in and sat them down. Instead of a genuine back-and-forth discussion of faith, she proceeded to ridicule their beliefs and their religion, and openly try to change the mind of the young girl to a belief system that denies God.

As a person of faith, this was extremely offensive to me. You don’t want to believe in God? Go right ahead. But mocking someone because they do have faith is just childish and rude. As I’ve written before, humans have faith in a lot of things, not just a Creator. Without faith, it would be hard to get out of bed every morning. To deny this is silly. Yet atheists do. Alternatively, they want it both ways: They want to have faith in some things, just not a Creator. Yeah. Right.

In all of her writing, this blogger seems very unhappy and, you’ll pardon the term, unChristianlike. She complains a lot. A lot. Almost nothing goes her way. In fact, her blog is one diatribe after another chronicling some transgression someone has committed, or some rude thing she’s said or done to someone. She alluded to the breakup of her marriage. “…I’m going through some big changes right now,” she cryptically noted. (Gee, I wonder why, he thought sarcastically?)

It pains me to read the words of someone whose life is so fucked-up, especially that of a fellow helicopter pilot (and motorcyclist)! I know in my heart that this woman’s life would turn around if she would simply accept the fact that there is a Creator (whom most people call “God”), and realize that this Creator loves her and wants the best for her…a Creator she can call on to help her in times of stress or duress.

She would dispute this, of course, as all atheists do. She would swear that her life is just fine, thank you very much, Mr. Buttinski. “I have my own helicopter company and I’m a (self)published author and…and…” And yet it seems so empty or lacking to the outsider.

Let me ask you readers of this blog something. Does it seem like my life is bad? Does it seem like, in general, things don’t go my way or that bad shit is always happening to me? Wait – I’ll answer that for you: HELL NO! I love my life! I’d like to have more money (wouldn’t we all?) but I wouldn’t change a damn thing. Do I “owe it all” to God? No, but it would be wrong to deny His existence and influence and affect on my life. And anyway, on the other hand maybe I do owe it all to Him.  Maybe I owe more to God’s power and good grace than I’m even aware.

And so I continue to read this woman’s blog, hoping that one day she’ll “see the light” as it were and realize that there is “something” bigger than her out there. But right now, she is the biggest thing in her world. That’s a troubling philosophy, I’ll tell you what.

My faith is what sustains me, gives me the strength and courage to face and get through every day. My faith is what gives me hope that things can always get better…better even than they are now! Without faith there can be no hope…without faith hope is merely wishful thinking. This is why I feel so sad for atheists: Without hope, is life really worth living? I think not.

What I Know About Weather: Nothing

Up here in north-central Washington State, things get tense in the summer, specifically mid-June through July. The cherries are popping! The farmers don’t want rain, but the helicopter operators do. We all watch the skies warily, intently poring over weather websites. In the extended forecast, a day of rain will either be a cause of dismay or joy, depending on which side of the revenue fence you sit.

The trouble is, forecasting the weather for this area must be tough. We watch the Accuweather, Intellicast, Weather.com and Weather Underground sites. None of them agree. There is a lot of inconsistency among their forecasts. One site will call for a day of rain while another says it’ll be sunny. It tells me that nobody really knows what’s going to happen until the day it does. Or that maybe nobody really cares what goes on in this vast, unpopulated section of Washington State between Seattle and Spokane.

Take today for example. All of the weather sites were calling for rain in various amounts today. The usually-reliable Weather Underground was even calling for a 50% chance of rain last night (although none of the others were). I went to bed early (for me), feeling pretty confident that I’d be flying at sunrise. But we did not get a drop. The sun rose into clear skies. And today we’ve only gotten scattered sprinkles – not even hard enough to call it “drizzling.” Bands of rain do move in from the south, but they either fizzle out before they get here or split and go up the ridgelines on either side of the Okanogan River valley. It’s fun to watch…unless you’re a young pilot eager to build flight time. Then it’s frustrating.

I’m living in a camper some 20 miles north of Brewster, based with my helicopter in an orchard out in the middle of nowhere. Last year I was deaf, dumb and blind to the weather (to which my smartass friends would retort, “Just to the weather?”). This year I’ve got a smartphone that has good 3G service here in the LZ (landing zone), so I can monitor the weather more closely, in a detailed, real-time way (and I can make blogposts!). Last year I had to phone people with smartphones and ask, “What’s it doing?” It’s a whole lot nicer when you can actually see what’s actually happening.

And you know what? The more I learn about the weather, the more I realize how little I know about the weather. Apparently the various weather services are in the same boat.

Sitting On "Go!"

Here's my sweetie: N955TC- same ship I flew last year, parked at the LZ in Malott, Washington, ready to go to work.

This is the one we call "Marine 1" getting some last-minute adjustments at sunset before leaving the Brewster Airport.

Life is pretty slow and mundane here in Brewster, Washington. Except for when there’s the forecast of rain. Then everyone gets antsy. When it actually rains, everyone goes crazy. The farmers usually wait until the rain starts before calling to say they want to be dried. It’s no problem for the ones who have signed contracts with us, but there are some smaller farmers who don’t want to pay the up-front money to keep a ship on dedicated stand-by for a couple of months. When they call, they’re usually desperate but they’ll have to take what they can get. We do keep one ship available for back-ups, breakdowns and ad-hoc work, but...  If all of our helicopters are out drying someone else, well…oh well. We cater, obviously, to the ones who sign contracts.

The orchard owner I’m assigned to is pretty squared-away. They get their contract signed early, leaving the actual start date to be determined. Then they coordinate the beginning of the stand-by time to the first real rain after the cherries have begun turning red. If they start the stand-by time too early and the season goes long, it can get expensive for them. That’s what happened last year; we stayed an extra two weeks on the job because the cherries ran late.

On Father’s Day Sunday, we knew the forecast for Monday called for rain. If it rains overnight we have to be read to fly at sunrise, which around these parts is like 0430. Yes, 4:30 a.m.

This (Monday) morning I got up at four. I felt the top of the travel trailer I’m staying in, and it was dry – no rain overnight. But the skies were ugly and threatening, and the radar showed a big blob of green right over us, extending well south of the town of Bridgeport. But weather radar is deceptive. Light green does not always mean it’s raining on you, only that there’s moisture in the clouds which the radar beam picks. up. Where that moisture comes down (if it even does) is up to Mother Nature.

I preflighted the ship and took the blade tie-downs off; ready to punch the button when the farm manager said “Fly.” It rained for a little bit at 4:30, but it was just a light drizzle. At 5:30 it started again, more steadily this time and it didn’t let up. I knew we’d be flying. I had some breakfast and called Mikey. He was already up at his hangar as well. It had been raining harder and longer down south, so he was waiting for the inevitable signal to pull the trigger.  (We pilots have a lot of euphemisms for starting the helicopter.)

Joel, our Farm Manager stopped by around 6:00 to tell me which fields to hit (we don’t normally do all of them unless it has really rained heavily). “Let’s dry when it stops,” he said. “There’s no rush – unless the sun comes out strong. I’ll check the fields, and check the radar, and I’ll stop back by to let you know.”

I went back into the trailer and lay back down. No sense pacing or doing anything.  I think it was Winston Churchill who said, “Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” Something like that. Anyway, I agree!  And so I lay down and waited. The call to flip the switch finally came at seven. I was all done by eight.

Hurry up and wait! We do a lot of that in aviation…in all aspects of aviation…especially so in the cherry-drying business.

Mikey and Me

“Whatcha doin’?” Mike asked.
“Sitting here in the hangar, staring at S-55s,” I replied.
“Let’s go get breakfast.”
“Well alrighty then!”

After Mike bought me breakfast he dropped the other shoe. “Sayyyy, I wonder if you could help me pull the JetRanger into the hangar…after we take it and the Huey up and fuel them.”

His helicopter utilizes ground-handling wheels attached to the skids to move it about; it’s awkward and takes two people. And the fuel installation that Mike uses is remote from his hangar, way up a hill on another part of the orchard.

I’m not normally a “stick-hog.” I've got quite enough flight time, thank you, so I usually let the younger guys get whatever flight time is available, since we’re not exactly flying our butts off up here, especially before the drying season has really begun. But there were no young’uns around when Mike asked if I wanted to fly, so I said, “Sure!” Flying JetRangers is one of the things I do best. Maybe the one thing.

Mike Nehring and I are a little, um, competitive. He always likes to show me how good of a pilot he is (and he is), and I’ll admit that I get a little kick out of showing him how well I fly. So we’re always trying to out-do each other…seeing who can lift off to a hover more smoothly or who can do the smoother set-down. See, with helicopters, you don’t have to yank ‘em and bank ‘em to see who’s best like fixed-wing pilots do. Where it really counts is picking it up and setting it down from a hover, as well as general smoothness and accuracy in flight. It’s a fun sort of young-guy/old-guy competition, less painful than arm-wrestling or basketball, in both of which he can assuredly kick my middle-aged, out-of-shape ass. And it’s silly, really, grown men competing in such a way…showing off for each other. But hey, it’s what we do.

I have approximately…ohhh…maybe six or seven times the amount of flight time Mike does. But this does not mean that I am six times better than he. I’m not six times “safer” than he either. All it means is that I’ve been around longer, seen a few more things and made “a few” more mistakes. I’m more seasoned. We pilots understand this. It is how a “relative” low-timer like Mike can do the exact same job I do with a similar level of proficiency and safety.

I took the controls of his JetRanger, lifted it off just as smoothly as I possibly could, and then flew up the hill to the fuel tank. Mike’s ship flies soooooo nicely, even better than the one I normally fly down in Alabama. Our ships are only a couple of serial numbers apart, but mine has way more time on the airframe than his does, and it shows. At the fuel pad, I came whipping in to the LZ (landing zone), probably making a different approach than Mike would have. Meh- every pilot has different techniques. After tanking up, I lifted off, did what we call a “max performance takeoff” to clear the obstacles and flew back down the hill, hovering in close to his hangar door so we wouldn’t have far to push. Mike was complimentary – but then, I better know how to fly well considering how long I’ve been doing this.

Then it was his turn. We jumped into the Bell 204 and Mike showed me his stuff. As I said, he is very good, very smooth. He laughed gleefully as we turned during the take-off run and heard the rotor producing that iconic, “whop-whop-whop” noise that is so distinctive of the old Huey. I laughed too. Ah, the little things that amuse us…

Up at the fuel tank, he did make a slightly different approach – but not drastically so – than the one I made: Slower, with a more level cabin attitude all the way down to a hover. It was fine – and maybe even “better” in that I tend to come in a little faster, holding some airspeed a little longer, which is one of those (bad) habits you sometimes pick up when you get comfortable/complacent in a particular machine. (In fact, I saw Mike glancing at the airspeed indicator during the approach I made, probably thinking to himself, “Jeez, this guy comes in so hot!”)

The thing about Mike and me is that we really love flying helicopters. We treat it as an art…something to be practiced and maybe never fully perfected. We know we’re good, yeah, but we always try to be better. We know these crazy machines can kill you in a heartbeep, and we respect them for it. But we also enjoy the fact that we both do this…this…flying thing. It creates a special bond between us, as it does between all helicopter pilots. One day he will be as good as me…perhaps one day soon, because my best days as a pilot may very well be behind me, as hard as that is to accept. Hey,we all get old.

Meanwhile, we have fun trying to out-do each other in smoothness and precision.

Gone From Brewton; Back In Brewster

So last year about this time I embarked on a trip on my Harley Davidson Sportster from Pensacola, Florida to Brewster, Washington to do this cherry-drying, helicopter-flying job. I knew the ride up would be an adventure, and almost got more than I bargained for. Part of I-90 in Montana was closed (closed!) and the 150-mile detour sent me down through the Bighorn National Forest, up over a snow-covered pass, and then over a 20-mile gravel, dozer-tracked road in heavy rain. It was horrible. I barely made it into Butte, Montana suffering from hypothermia. The trip took four whole days. I chronicled, whined and complained about it in this very blog.

This year was decidedly easier. Here’s the short version: We took the car.

No, it wasn’t as exciting, but it was more comfortable. MUCH more comfortable.

Flashback: Brandon and I had stayed in Brewster long after the cherries had been picked. Eventually we had to leave. A friend called and asked if I could be in Dallas quickly to help him evaluate a helicopter he was hoping his boss would buy. So I left my motorcycle in Brewster and took off in a car borrowed from owner of Golden Wings Aviationm  Dave Smith and his wife Joyce. You can make much better time when you don’t have to stop every 120 miles or so for gas as I do on the bike. I kept the car in Florida over the winter. I told them I'd bring it back, and I did.

This year, another pilot would be driving up with me. The plan was to pick him up in Atlanta and then head northwest. And that’s pretty much how it worked. We left Atlanta around 4:00 on Tuesday afternoon. I don’t like driving at night, so we stopped early each day. But we started early too. The Trip Planner said it would be 2,626 miles if we went through Kansas to Denver, which we did. We got into Brewster right at 2:00 on Friday afternoon.

The mode of transportation this time was a 1998 Buick LeSabre four door with the 3800 V-6 (one of the finest engines GM has ever made) and 138,000 miles. We motored along in stately, quiet comfort, averaging 30 mpg. People often make fun of these huge “land yachts” that we Americans are so fond of. But I’ll tell ya, if you have a lot of miles to cover, a big ol’ American car is a pretty decent way to do it.

Our route took us up to Chattanooga and then Nashville, Tennessee, St. and then on to Louis, Missouri and then Kansas City. I’ve been across the country many times, but had never driven through Kansas. Can’t say that anymore. And it’s just like they say: Flat. We hit Denver, Colorado, then went north through Wyoming to Butte, Montana and Spokane, Washington where we jumped off the Interstate and took back roads the last 120 miles or so to Brewster, which has somehow eluded being hooked into President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. We got rained on a bit in Wyoming, and snowed on a bit in Montana, but really we didn’t worry at all about the weather.

It’s great being back in Brewster! I’ve renewed all the old acquaintances…with aircraft and people, and even reconnected with my long-neglected Sportster, which didn’t for some reason seem as happy to see me as I was to see it. On the other hand, Mikey was as happy to see me as I was to see him. It’s great to be together again. I know that might sound weird, but we’re really close. It’s like we’re a team. It was he who got me into this mess in the first place.

So let the fun begin! There should also be plenty of stories to share this summer.

Paranoia in the Post-9/11 World

The terrorists won. Plain and simple, they won. They turned the entire U.S. society into a terrified bunch of pussies, so afraid of our own shadow that we willingly accept all sorts of intrusions of our privacy…all in the name of SECURITY! It’s really pathetic.

There is a blogger – his name is Joe Sharkey. He’s been writing for a while on travel for various publications such as the New York Times. In 2006 he was aboard a new business jet being delivered from the factory in South America when it collided with an airliner in mid-air. Everyone aboard the airliner died; the business jet made a safe landing. While I severely disagree with Sharkey’s conclusions about that accident, he is an entertaining writer when it comes to air travel. And he writes a lot about the ridiculous TSA.

Sharkey’s current blogpost deals with his visit to the World Trade Center memorial in New York City. Of course he ran smack-dab into the type of security we normally see at airports, train stations and cruise ship terminals.  Apparently pictures of the WTC memorial are verboten!  After noticing that he'd taken some, the cops took his camera and deleted ALL the pictures on it, then dropped it and broke it. Read the post HERE. I will quote some of his salient points.

I wanted to tell the hump who ordered me around at the metal detector, Listen, Skippy, you are aware, are you not, that this place has already been blown up? That there is nothing left to destroy? That the threat to American freedoms is from the likes of you in your quasi-military blue uniform and your Guatemala militia manners? The terrorists have moved on. There is no opportunity at this place now.

Doesn’t matter, does it? THEY’LL COME BACK AND ATTACK IT AGAIN! So visitors to the memorial have to remove their belts as they go through the metal detectors. And of course, NO PICTURES! We wouldn’t want anyone taking away anything but memories from the place, which Sharkey notes is not a memorial to people who suffered through that terrible day in 2001.  He says:

No, we have a memorial at the World Trade Center site, the site of such courage and resolve when the enemy was real, and the memorial is to fear. And to the growing security state. And in a very sad way, it is a pathetic tribute to the murderers who sought on 9/11 to make that hideous statement about the vulnerability of America.

…Which is the price we pay for living in a so-called “free society.” Up until 9/11/01 we did not live in a police state. Perhaps the memories of Nazi Germany in WWII were still fresh – or at least still alive - in people’s minds. We cherished our freedom. But those who lived through WWII are mostly gone now. And in their place is a different bunch of scaredy-cats who will gladly trade freedom and privacy for security and the illusion of safety.

Here’s a thought: We still live in a (mostly) open, free society. As much as the government tries to pretend that they can protect us from “terrorist” acts, it cannot. Some lunatic(s) will strike again…somewhere, sometime and in some method of their choosing. It will come as a surprise and shock. And there will be those who will ask in horrified indignation: HOW DID WE LET THIS HAPPEN?!

As if there’s really any way we can stop it.