Category Archives: Summer Jobs

Sometimes I actually get on someone’s payroll.

A Tale of Two Passengers

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Two passengers on consecutive flights are as different as night and day.

Passenger one was a young boy, about twelve or thirteen years old. He was overweight, with pudgy freckled cheeks. He wore long, droopy shorts and a tee shirt. He sat down beside me and was buckled in by the loader. I handed him his headset as the loader closed the door and continued loading the rest of the family into the back.

When his headset was on, I gave him a cheerful hello. He responded with a very unenthusiastic hello.

“How are you doing today?” I asked him.

“Okay.” The word came out as if I’d forced it from him. It was flat. It told me he really wasn’t okay but he was telling me that he was just so I’d leave him alone.

Of course, I couldn’t do that. “Must be better than just okay,” I said. “After all, you’re going for a helicopter ride. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

He nodded glumly.

I got the thumbs up from the loader and started my passenger briefing, glancing in the back. His mom and dad were facing forward. His little sister, about eight years old, sat behind me facing backwards. They were all overweight. They were American, of course, from Colorado.

I took off a while later. We were on an Imperial Tour. That’s the long one, 45-50 minutes long. I gave them a little bit of a narration. Once, I heard the little sister in back yell out, “Look Mommy!” and say something about seeing deer. The boy beside me was looking out through the bubble at his feet at the trees we flew over. Later, he looked out the windows. But he didn’t react to what he was seeing. It was as if he was watching a television show his parents were making him watch when another show he really wanted to watch was on another channel at the same time.

At one point, he rested his chin in his hand. I had to look at his eyes to make sure he was still awake. He had long, curly eyelashes. His eyes were open, but they revealed nothing but boredom.

For heaven’s sake! He was being flown in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon! His parents had coughed up $169 (each) for this life experience and he had absolutely no appreciation for what he was seeing.

(For the record, I do it ten or more times in a day and I still enjoy seeing it.)

When they got off, I gave him and his sister each an Aero-Prop. (It’s a helicopter-like toy I give out to the kids.) His has probably already been added to the collection of junk dropped by tourists at the rim.

The next group of passengers were from England. The woman who sat next to me was probably in her eighties. She was small and rather frail looking and had some trouble getting into the seat. Dennis, the loader, helped her. She thanked him very politely, looking like she really meant it. I helped her with her headset, then said hello to her. She said hello back, then started looking at my instrument panel and the flight controls. She was really studying them. I thought she was going to ask some questions, but she didn’t. Her eyes just kept moving all over them. I started wondering whether she was all there.

I did the preflight briefing. I had a full load of six passengers, all from the same bus tour. Most of them were middle aged. Two of the women had enormous breasts. (That really doesn’t have any bearing on this story, but it is a fact.) They were all crammed into the back seats, but they looked happy enough.

We took off on a North Canyon tour. That’s the short tour, about 25-30 minutes. The woman beside me was very interested in the collective as I pulled it up. More interested than anyone else who has ever sat beside me. I started to wonder whether she might try to grab it. I didn’t let go for quite a while.

We passed the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine on its return trip to Williams. I pointed it out. The woman beside me looked. Then she untangled her sunglasses from her seat belt and camera strap and put them on. She gazed around like an average passenger and I realized that she was probably as harmless as she looked.

But as we made the turn toward Eremita Tank and she saw the canyon ahead of us, she changed. It was as if she’d been told that she was going to see something good and she suddenly realized that it was going to be better than she’d originally thought. Way better. She took off her sunglasses and, as we crossed the rim into the canyon, she began looking at everything. I’ve never seen anyone look so hard. It was as if she were trying to commit everything she saw to memory. Like she was a sponge trying to absorb everything in. And every time I pointed out something, she looked to make sure she saw it.

I thought about my Grandmother, who passed away about two years ago. For a moment, I imagined that this woman was my grandmother and that I was finally taking her for a helicopter ride. It made my eyes teary.

We were on our way back across the canyon when I saw her wipe her eyes. Her fingers were wet. She was crying. Here was a woman near the end of her life and she still saw wonder in the Grand Canyon.

And I thought about the fat kid who’d been in her seat for the last flight. He had his whole life before him but couldn’t see how incredible the Grand Canyon was — even when he was looking at it from the front seat of a helicopter.

(I’m glad I don’t have kids. I couldn’t bear to have a child like him. Or let my children associate with children like him. Small minded, spoiled, and never happy.)

I’ll think about the woman from England for a long time. The fat kid is someone I’d rather forget.

Seven Weird Things

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I think about my job as a Grand Canyon Tour Pilot and come up with seven things I think are strange about it and the people I meet.

No doubt about it. Being a Grand Canyon helicopter tour pilot exposes you to all kinds of weird things. Here are a few of the weird things I’ve witnessed lately, in no particular order.

A front seat passenger riding with her eyes closed. This happened today, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind. She was from England, an older woman probably in her early sixties. She said something to me as her friends climbed on board in the back, but I couldn’t hear/understand what she was saying. But when I asked if it was her first helicopter flight, she said it wasn’t. On takeoff, she held onto her seat bottom and the door frame. She leaned toward me when I banked left and away from me when I banked right. When we broke out over the rim on the tour, with the Grand Canyon and all its splendor spread out before us, she was holding on tight. When I looked at her face, I noticed her eyes were tightly closed. Okay, so she opened them after a few minutes and seemed calm enough. But for a while, I thought she’d do the whole tour with her eyes closed. Talk about a waste of money!

A passenger who made herself sick. I call her Captain Video. She was an American of Indian descent and that camcorder was turned on from the moment she sat down. Her eyeball was in the viewfinder nonstop for the first twenty minutes of the flight. Then she hurriedly reached for a barf bag and puked into it. It wasn’t the turbulence. It was incredibly calm that morning and there was no reason to be sick. Unless, of course, you were enjoying the view through a camcorder viewfinder. After having a good puke, she put the camera up to her face again. Five minutes later, puke. She did this for the rest of the flight. I think she must have puked seven or eight times. She even started a second barf bag. If she’d only keep the camera away from her face, she’d be fine. Heck, it was calm!

A woman who decided she was going to be sick before we even took off. While we’re on the subject of puke, I better do this one, too. She sat in the front seat and as soon as her husband got into his seat behind her, a hand came forward with a barf bag in it. She took the bag (we have them in the front, too) and turned to me. “I always get sick,” she told me. And sure enough, she did. About two thirds of the way through the short flight, she calmly opened the bag and made a deposit. And no, it wasn’t turbulent. Oddly, she did this the same day Captain Video rode with me. My first two barfs in one day.

People who remind me that they don’t speak English. Okay, so it’s always French people. Always. No one else has ever told me that they don’t speak English. It’s just French people and always women. What’s that about? The manifest I get tells me where everyone comes from and what language I should play the narrative in. I don’t speak French. I can only do my preflight briefing in English. And they seem to doubt that they’ll hear any French during the tour. But when I start up Disc 1 Track 9 and that French voice comes on, they nod, satisfied. You don’t think this is strange? That’s it’s just French people?

Working with people who are, on average, ten years younger than me. Wow. Was I like that when I was in my twenties and thirties? I don’t think so. I feel a little like a den mother. In the break room, they make bathroom jokes and watch surfing and skateboarding on television. They make rude noises to each other over the Canyon air-to-air frequency while we’re flying. They have nicknames like Clogger (think bathroom) and Crispy (I don’t know what to think). They make me feel old and out of place and rather glad that I built my life before I learned to fly.

Spending the entire day doing just two different tours in all kinds of weather. Talk about tedious. There’s the 25-minute tour and the 50-minute tour. You can make more money doing just the 25-minute tour, but I just can’t handle doing the same thing over and over all day long. Doing two different things all day long makes it marginally more interesting. The weather, however, is what keeps you awake. Springtime is full of winds gusting to 40 knots or more. (They call it quits when it hits 50 knots.) Summer is full of isolated showers and thunderstorms that keep you wondering whether you’ll find your way back to the heliport at the end of a tour. (They call it quits when visibility drops to zero, hail exceeds the size of a pea, or lightning strikes nearby make it impossible to refuel safely.) Who knows what autumn will bring?

Living in or near a tourist town. Although I don’t live in Tusayan, working here gives me a good taste of what it must be like to live here. A constant flow of people, most of whom do not speak English. High prices in every store (and discounts for locals in most, if you know the secret password). Limited nightlife, limited shopping, unlimited tee shirts, unlimited collector’s spoons. Overpriced, substandard housing. And some of the world’s most beautiful scenery, right in your backyard. But the weirdest part? Come September, the area’s population will shrivel up to a bare minimum — the year-rounders who actually do this all the time.

There you have it. Seven things. If I come up with more — which I’m sure I will — I’ll report them here.

Wind Gone, Thunderstorms Arrive

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My lessons on learning to fly in weather continue on a new track.

It’s monsoon season here in Arizona.

Monsoon season is the time of year when there’s a seasonal wind shift that brings moisture off the Gulf of Mexico up and into New Mexico and Arizona. (It may get as far north as Colorado and Utah, but I think we get most of it.) Most days start off sunny and pretty clear, with just a few friendly clouds floating low in the sky. But then the sun kicks in and puts those clouds to work. Convective activity builds them into towering cumulus clouds that move in an east to west flow (sometimes southeast to northwest; sometimes northeast to southwest). The clouds build very quickly and, after a while, gang up to form storm cells. The rain from the biggest of these clouds can start as early as lunchtime. But if they’re still around and still building in the afternoon, they turn into ugly cumulonimbus and start throwing lightning bolts and, on occasion, hail.

Fortunately, these storms are extremely localized and easy to see. Pilots flying at our altitudes (i.e., 300-500 feet above the ground) can usually fly around them. We can even get pretty close to them if we have to.

On Wednesday, my first day back to work, I got my first t-storm lesson. I was a spare pilot, flying someone else’s ship for lunch. I was returning from a tour, about 3 miles out, when a lightning bolt came out of an innocent looking cloud and struck the ground about a half mile away from me. I immediately saw smoke in the trees near where it had struck. Shit. I hurried back. When I made my 2-out call and they told me my next flight, I told them about the lightning, sure that they’d put on a weather hold. Silly me. I was told I’d better get used to it.

Later, the Chief Pilot told me that I was actually safer in the air than spinning on the pad when there was lightning around. Lightning wanted to hit the ground, not something in the air. I found his words comforting. (If they’re not correct, please don’t tell me. I’d prefer blissful ignorance on this topic.)Yesterday, I got a better lesson. I was the top priority pilot, which meant that I was going to be flying all day. That was fine with me. I’d rather fly a helicopter than waste time in the break room. The storms built up magnificently throughout the morning and by lunchtime were raining down in various places on the North Rim and far to the east. I had a lunch break and returned to fly at 1:20 PM. The storms had built up and were darker than before. I did a few flights and had no trouble staying clear — the storms weren’t on our route.

But then I did an Imperial Tour, which took me to the east. A storm I’d spied out that way seemed very close to Grandview Ridge. The tower had even commented on it. When I got out to Grandview, it was raining heavily on us, but we were on the storm’s northern edge. The lightning was still about 2 miles to our south. The temperature had dropped considerably — enough for me to close both vents — but the air was still smooth, with no heavy winds, updrafts, or downdrafts. I made a pirep to our company frequency, telling them about the storm and that it was still good to fly on the east side. Then we broke out of the cloudy area and were treated to views of a sun-drenched painted desert and the spectacle of the Little Colorado River’s flood flow turning the Colorado River brown at the confluence.

I was at the Split when I heard some chatter on our FM frequency. It appears that the storm we’d skirted had come straight to the airport. It was dumping “quarter-inch hail” on the helipad. Chuck’s voice sounded unusually perturbed as he reported all this to everyone. Visibility was zero-zero. He told the pilots on their way back to stay clear. To land near the ponds. No, the storm was moving that way fast. Land near the triangle.

What followed was chatter between the pilots in that area, deciding what they were going to do. By that time, I was over the North Rim and had a clear view to the south. Although I could see the South Rim, anything beyond it was lost in a dark gray cloud. With lightning. I got on the FM frequency and told them where I was. Should I double back and return the way I’d come so I could come in behind the storm? I was advised to continue. Although I doubted the wisdom of that, I followed orders. These guys had far more experience with canyon storm systems than I did.

The chatter started up again. AirStar, another helicopter company, had flown south to Red Butte and was able to come in from there. The pilots about to land (or landed, perhaps) decided to circumvent the storm system by flying around its western edge to the south. One by one, they made their way home and were told to shut down. Soon, I was one of only two pilots still in the canyon, now in the Dragon Corridor. The other pilot, Tyler, was about 15 minutes behind me, doing the same tour I was.

At first, it didn’t look good. There was definitely a storm system in front of me. But by the time I got to Dragon’s Head, I realized that it was two separate storms. Dripping Springs, where I had to fly, was remarkably clear, with a storm on either side. I reported this to Tyler when he asked. He sounded nervous. (But that could be his voice; he often sounds like that.) When I got to Dripping Springs, I got a good look at the storm that had hit the airport. It was a monster, right on my usual flight path, a wall of gray that completely blocked out everything. No flying through that. But I could clearly see Red Butte in the distance. I reported all this to Tyler. Someone got on the FM radio and started giving me detailed instructions how how to get it. But I didn’t need them. It was pretty obvious where I had to go. I made my call to the Tower. I told the controller where I was and what I planned — to skirt the western edge of the storm and come in from there. The controller read me the ATIS info, I thanked him, and continued in.

HailA moment later, I could see the tower. The airport looked clear. I reported this to Tyler, too. By this time, he was at Tower of Ra, still about 3 minutes from the Rim. It would be close for him, especially if the two storms decided to merge. I called our tower about three miles out and was assigned a pad. Then I called Grand Canyon tower and was given permission to cross the runway. It was raining lightly there but my landing was uneventful. All the other helicopters were already there, tied down. There was hail on the ground, making the scene look more like something out of a Christmas card than mid-summer. Here’s a photo I took later of the hail on the ground. I included my shoe to give you an idea of size. The smallest of the ice pellets was about the size of a pea. Some were about twice that size. Amazingly, there were still piles of the stuff at the bottom of gutter drainpipes at the Papillon hangar midday, the next day.

Tyler came in just as I was tying down my blades.

On Accidents That Aren’t Accidents

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How I’m spared from being the victim of the government’s bureaucracy.

If you read my jumper story (in an earlier entry of this blog) and you know anything about the FAA and NTSB and the rules and regulations they operate under, you might be wondering why they hadn’t classified the event as an “accident.”

Unfortunately, they did.

If you search the NTSB’s Web site for accident reports, using the word “suicide” as a search word, you’ll find one case very similar to mine. In that case, the jumper went up with a CFI and dove out during a steep turn that he’d requested. Although the CFI was not at fault — heck, the passenger committed suicide! — the case was classified as an accident.

And my case was going the same way.

Papillon fought back. Not just for me, but for them, too. They didn’t want an accident on their record any more than I did. Although the event met the definition of an accident (which really needs to be revised, in my opinion), common sense says that the word “accident” does not apply to a suicide. There was nothing accidental about it. (The guy purposely undid his seatbelt, pushed his door open against a 100-knot wind, and jumped.) The trick was to get the NTSB to disregard their definition and classify this as something less damaging to the pilot’s or operator’s flight records.

It went all the way to Washington, involving people from the FAA, NTSB, Department of the Interior, and HAI. I even tried to get AOPA involved, but they lamely claimed that you couldn’t fight NTSB on its accident definition. (Good thing I didn’t pay for their legal services plan.) Someone must have talked sense to the bureaucrats, because the other night I got a voicemail message with the good news: they’d changed the classification from accident to something else. What that something else is is still a question. I’ll find out tomorrow.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s this: don’t let a passenger jump out of your helicopter. Not only is it a traumatic experience, but it results in a ton of paperwork.

What I’m Learning About Flying Helicopters

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My first real job as a pilot is actually the next step in my learning experience.

Before I started working at Papillon, my only flying experiences had been in Robinson R22 and R44 helicopters, with an hour here and there in a Bell 47, Rotorway Exec, and Hughes 500c. I was a piston pilot. I knew Robinson helicopters extremely well. And I knew the basics of flying any other helicopter.

The work I do at Papillon is taking me to the next level. Actually, it may be helping me skip a few levels to get to a much higher level.

A New (to Me) Ship

The first big difference is the ship I’m flying. No, it’s not a state of the art Eurocopter or fancy NOTAR ship. It’s a plain old (emphasis on old) Bell 206L1 Long Ranger with the Allison C30P conversion. The engine conversion gives it more power than a standard 206L1. And that’s a good thing, because at the Canyon, we need all the power we can get.

Ground school covered all the details of how the ship’s systems work. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t fully understand everything I was taught. But I understood enough to pass a check ride and to intelligently preflight every morning.

Starting is a challenge. The problem is hot starts — getting the turbine outlet temperature (TOT) too high during start. It’s evidently easier to hot start when you start off the helicopter’s battery. So when you’re new at Papillon, they encourage you to start with an APU (auxiliary power unit). I’m not taking any chances. I’ve been flying for about two months and I still always start with an APU.

Learning about Torque

Another challenge is flying without overtorquing the engine. There’s a torque meter that displays the current power setting. I equate it with the manifold pressure gauge on an R22/R44. But they’re very different. If you redline an R22, the worst that can happen is that you get a rotor RPM droop. If you overtorque a turbine engine, all kinds of inspections have to be done. And if you really overtorque it, it’ll cost $100,000 to fix things back up the way they should be. Although Papillon won’t take that out of my paycheck, I still don’t want to be the one who does it.

Of course, there isn’t much of a chance of overtorquing in cruise flight. It’s when you’re hovering, taking off, or landing that it’s more likely to happen. And that’s where my re-education began.

Trouble is, the Robinson taught me that when I’m landing, I can reduce power on the way down and pull it all back in relatively quickly at the bottom, to come to a landing. Doing that in a 206 could easily result in an overtorque or a hard landing. So I learned to reduce power well before I begin my descent. Then, as I’m coming down, I increase power. The result is a smooth, controlled landing to a hover.

And let’s not even talk about what the Robinson taught me about pulling power at take-off! If I did that in the 206, I’d be overtorquing at least once a day.

Another interesting thing about torque is that pressing the left pedal increases torque. This can really get you into trouble in a crosswind. If you let it start getting away from you, rotating to the right, you can quickly get beyond the point where left pedal can stop you. This happened to me once and it almost got ugly. The trick, I found, is to lower the collective if you have to add a lot of left pedal. That reduces the amount of pedal you need to press and reduces power so pressing the darn pedal doesn’t overtorque the ship.

(If you’re an experienced turbine helicopter pilot reading this, you may be thinking, “Duh-uh.” Have patience. All this is new to me and I’m learning as I go along. If you find this too boring to read, move on to something else. Or go watch TV.)

Wind: Friend or Enemy?

I’ve also learned a lot about flying in strong winds. Someone once told me he had a flight instructor who said, “The wind is your friend.” I think that can be true. But I also think the wind can be your enemy.

Why a friend? Well, suppose you’re flying at max gross weight on a hot day and you need to take off from a helipad in a relatively confined area at 6600 feet MSL. You point your nose into that 20 knot wind, push the cyclic forward a bit, and voila! You’re at ETL (effective translational lift) and climbing. Same goes for landing. You can stay in ETL as you descend and maybe even as you hover to your helipad if there’s enough of a headwind.

Why an enemy? Well, what if that 20 knot wind at the helipad isn’t a headwind? What if it’s a crosswind? Or, worse yet, as you’re trying to set down on the pad, what if it’s a tailwind? Or what if it’s 24 gusting to 36? Or gusting to 50? (Yes, it does get that windy.)

I’ve flown in very strong winds and I’ve learned that taking off and landing isn’t always the biggest problem. At the Canyon, the problem is sometimes in the Canyon itself. Those nasty winds make nasty turbulence as they whip over the enormous rock formations. 3,000 foot-per-minute updrafts aren’t unheard of. Neither are their counterparts: 3,000 foot-per-minute downdrafts. Turbulence that smacks you from one side as you come past a butte. Or makes your helicopter seem like the car on a roller coaster.

Oddly enough, sometimes the worst turbulence are over the forest south of the rim. When you’re flying about 200 feet over the treetops, you’re really in it. It can seem pretty bad and you can feel bad for your passengers. But then you break over the rim and enter the Canyon and everything calms down. Go figure.

There’s no pattern to it. All the pilots have their own theories of how things should be when the wind is blowing from one direction or another. But it’s not science and it isn’t reliable. You never know how it’s going to be until you’re in it. And then it’s too late to do anything about it.

Power Settings

I’ve also learned a lot about power settings for different ships at different weights in different conditions. Papillon’s rule of thumb is to set the ship’s power to 70% torque and leave it there for the whole tour. While this might work in most situations, it doesn’t work in all of them.

For example, a relatively fast ship can do a North Canyon tour in the allotted time at 70% torque, but the same ship will come in too early on an Imperial Tour at that setting. So I set the power based on speed. I’d like to do 95-105 knots for a North Canyon Tour and 90-100 knots for an Imperial Tour. The difference in torque settings is usually about 5%.

Then there’s the descent on the east side of the Dragon. Both tours require a relatively quick descent in 2 to 3 miles. On a North Canyon tour, I descend from 8200 feet to 7500 feet. On an Imperial Tour, I descend from about 8800 feet to 7500 feet. If I follow the rules, I should be at 70% during the descent, pushing the cyclic forward to nose down. But that also increases my speed. Never exceed speed (Vne) at that altitude is around 115 knots. If I’m already doing 105 knots in straight and level flight, a 500-1000 foot per minute descent is going to make me exceed Vne. So I need to reduce power — sometimes to as low as 50%.

Turbulence has a lot to do with power settings, too. If there’s a lot of turbulence, you have to reduce power. And if there are a lot of updrafts and downdrafts, power must be adjusted to keep you within the allowable altitude range.

Fortunately, I haven’t had much of a need to increase power during the tour yet. At least not beyond 75% or so.

I’m Here to Learn

Every day is a new learning experience and I’m glad. After all, that’s why I’m here. Living in my own semi-controlled, R22 dominated world isn’t much of a challenge. But flying in all kinds of conditions in a ship that’s far more sophisticated, is like going away to school. I’ll learn more about flying helicopters this summer than I have in the past four years.

And the paycheck is kind of nice, too.