I fulfill my contractual obligation and ask to be taken off the schedule.

The main reason I bailed out was because of my other work. You know. The work that pays enough to live well and afford things like a helicopter. The books.

In September, I flew one week, took the next week off for vacation (covered elsewhere in these blogs), and flew the next week. Somewhere around the middle of that third week, I got a desperate e-mail from my editor. I’d gotten 2/3 of my Excel QuickProject Guide done before I started my three weeks away from home. She had the frightening news that if the book wasn’t printed by November, Barnes and Noble would cancel their order for it. Talk about a wake-up call. Or wake-up e-mail.

So although I really LIKE flying at the canyon, I had to remember where the money was coming from and stop neglecting it. The truth of the matter is, I made more money writing any ONE of the books I finished this summer than I did for the whole summer as a pilot.

What’s odd about THAT (to me, anyway) is that flying a helicopter is a highly skilled task. Sure, anyone can be TAUGHT to do it, but it takes thousands of dollars worth of training to earn the necessary ratings and then at least 1,000 hours of flight time to get a real job doing it. That’s quite an investment in time and money. Contrast that to writing the computer books I write. Yeah, I spend time learning the software and sure, I have to buy hardware and software to outfit my office, but it doesn’t nearly approach the commitment I made when I decided to fly professionally. So I get more bang for the buck (or perhaps I should say buck for the bang?) when I write than when I fly.

But flying is a lot more fun.

The other reason I bailed out is the Jeckle & Hyde personality swap of one of Papillon’s middle managers. I used to think he was a good guy. But we had a little run-in when I thought he was being extremely unfair to me and he reported me to the big boss. The big boss and I had a chat. I explained my position and stuck to it. The big boss didn’t seem to think I was being outrageous. He probably didn’t think the middle boss was being outrageous either, though. Frankly, it was a case of two wrongs not making a right.

But what’s weird about it is the way the middle boss began treating me afterwards. It came to a head on my last day when he tried to pick a fight with me on the flight line. Wow. I don’t need any of THAT. Not for what I was being paid.

I had an exit interview with the big boss. That’s not what he’d call it, I’m sure. That’s a term from my corporate days, when a person had a final meeting with a boss or HR person to discuss things about the job. I told him what I thought about the job and the middle boss and all kinds of things. He listened. That’s all I wanted. He even took a few notes, which is more than I expected. I told him he could call me if he needed me and I thanked him for the opportunity of flying at the canyon. It had been a privilege, one I’ll miss. And then he thanked me, which made me feel really good.

So now I’m back in the real world of deadlines and phone calls and sitting on my butt in front of a computer all day long. I finished the delayed book yesterday, after only two more days of work. My editor is breathing a sigh of relief. I’ll write two articles I owe to InFormIT for their Web site. I’ll take care of all the bills I’ve neglected over the past month. I’ll do my taxes. (Hey, no comments. I do know it’s almost October.) I’ll sell my R22 and apply for a loan for the R44. I’ll start the next book on my schedule and knock it off in record time.

And next year, I’ll have a different summer job you can read about here.

A Mid-season review of my job at the Grand Canyon.

The other day, a fellow helicopter pilot called me to ask about my job at Papillon. His name is Dave and he’s an R22 owner/pilot like me. I’d met him last year (I think) at the airport in Wickenburg when he came through with his helicopter on a flatbed trailer. He calls himself a “scenery collector” and flies around the country taking photos of the scenery — especially interesting geologic formations — from the air. Now he works as the Chief Flight Instructor for a flight school/aerial photography outfit in Florida, but he’s always thinking ahead.

Dave had seen an ad for a job flying A-Stars in Hawaii. He thought that might be a nice job. (Oddly enough, I think so, too.) Trouble is, he has little or no turbine experience and he knows he can’t get a job like that until he gets some.

Dave was in St. George, UT recently and ran into one or two pilots I know. I don’t know if it was Rod, who flies a helicopter for fire contracts for Papillon or Dusty and Craig who work fire contracts with a SEAT. It might have even been Robin, who runs the helicopter flight school in St. George, or his brother Job, who runs the Millionaire FBO there. (I never realized I knew so many people in St. George. I’ve only been there twice.) Anyway whoever it was reminded him about me. He looked me up on my Web site and gave me a call. By some miracle, I was at my desk and answered the phone.

We had a nice chat. He said he called to find out about working for Papillon. He told me about the Hawaii job and brought me up to date on what he was doing. He said he was thinking of applying at Papillon to get some turbine time. What did I think of working there?

So I thought about it. I’d already been thinking about it, on and off, for the whole summer. But this time, I thought about it in a way that I could provide some kind of conclusion or recommendation.

And this is what I told him.

Working at Papillon can get exceeding tedious at times. I’m the low person on the experience ladder, so I haven’t been trained to do anything except the two basic tours we do: the 25-minute tour in the Dragon Corridor and the 50-minute tour in the Zuni and Dragon Corridors. So that’s what I do. All day long. On average, I make 10-14 trips into the canyon a day. Not much variety.

What can make the work interesting is the weather. Spring brings high winds, sometimes with gusts up to 50 knots before we shut down. That generates turbulence in the canyon when all that wind is rushing over all those weird formations and buttes. Summer brings isolated and scattered thunderstorms, mostly in the afternoon. The challenge is navigating around them without flying into a no-fly zone. Of course, when you get a bit close to one, it’s a bumpy ride. And if you fly under a storm in one of its early stages when you’re out in the canyon, you can expect severe updrafts or downdrafts. Good thing there’s that big ditch under you. And I believe I’ve already gotten a glimpse of what the autumn will bring: low clouds that float below us in the canyon or as ground fog on the north rim. Very pretty, but there will come a day when I have to fly around them, too.

The pay isn’t very good. I won’t get specific, but I will say that I could never survive on that pay. I’m not sure how the rest of the pilots do it. I’m very glad I have another job that I can do on my off weeks to make the money I need to maintain my lifestyle.

And living conditions in Tusayan or Valle are not very pleasant. Imagine sharing a double-wide trailer with three other pilots. Or sharing a fifth-wheel trailer with someone you’ll become very well acquainted with. The closest supermarket is 60 miles away. The closest movie theater (other than IMAX, which plays the same movie all the time) is about 100 miles away. Night life is limited. And everything in the area is extremely overpriced.

Doesn’t sound very good, does it? Well, I’m not finished. There are definite benefits to working at Papillon.

First of all, Papillon is willing to hire piston pilots with as little as 1,000 hours of PIC time. It will train those pilots to fly Bell 206 L-1 C30P Long Ranger helicopters, using a training program that’s very similar to the coveted Bell Transition Course. But rather than take the course in a classroom crammed full of other pilots, Papillon’s training classes are typically 2 to 6 people at a time. And if a pilot needs special attention (as I admit I did for a few things), he’ll get it. The Bell course costs about $6,000 plus living expenses while you’re in Texas for a week. Papillon’s course is free and they pay you while you take it. So there’s a definite benefit to getting transition training with Papillon.

But what’s better than just the training is the extremely challenging conditions you’re thrown into right after you finish. I’m talking about those winds plus flying at high density altitudes (Grand Canyon airport is at 6600 feet) near max gross weight. Only days after learning what torque was, I was battling to keep it under 100% when I took off. And by this time in the summer, it’s common to log 6 or more Hobbs hours a day. Every day. So building time is a definite part of the package.

And, of course, there is the end-of-season bonus that comes when Papillon cuts its pilots loose in October. That makes the pay a little more palatable.

I told all this to Dave. I told him that if he was willing to dedicate an entire summer to Papillon, he’d get the experience he wanted and needed to move on to a turbine helicopter position somewhere else. And, if he didn’t drop out in the middle of the season, he’d earn the respect of Papillon’s management, which could then be depended upon as positive job references.

I think he realized the benefits and the drawbacks. Like me, he doesn’t have to depend on a job like this to survive. He’s still thinking about it, but I have a feeling that unless something else comes along, he’ll be flying at the GC next year.

As for me, one season is enough. I know where I stand with the bosses. They consider me a “Sunday pilot” because I didn’t come to them with a strong background in commercial flying or flight instructing. It doesn’t matter that I have more cross country or solo time than any of their other piston pilot converters. It doesn’t matter that I made solo cross-country trips from Wickenburg to destinations in the Los Angeles area, the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the western side of the Rockies in Colorado. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been doing tours and rides for the past three years when their other pilots were building time by teaching students how to hover. It doesn’t matter that I can perform as well as — or better than, in some cases — any of the other pilots, sitting in a cockpit for 6 hours straight sometimes, conducting tour after tour. No matter what I do or how I perform for the rest of the season, nothing will change that. So the chances of me getting more training and more varied assignments next year are pretty much nil. And I cannot bear the thought of cranking 50 to 80 passengers a day through the canyon every work day next summer.

So what will I do next summer? I’m thinking about barnstorming in my new R44…anyone want to come along for the ride?