Tag Archives: helicopters

Call Me a Mouse Relocation Specialist

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I catch a mouse, take it for a helicopter ride, and set it free at Grand Canyon Airport.

Anyone who has been reading these blog pages carefully should have noted that my trailer at Howard Mesa has a mouse problem.

The problem started last season. The trailer is parked here from late spring to early fall. Last season, we didn’t spend much time here. On our last stay, when I opened the door I found that the fringe on the throw rugs was gone and there were tiny black mouse droppings all over the floor. No other sign of the little buggers, though.

We bought those noisemaker things that are supposed to keep rodents away. We plugged them into an inverter that we left plugged into one of the trailer’s cigarette lighter-like outlets. Then we left for a few weeks. When we returned, we found that although the batteries were still charged (thanks to the solar panel on the roof) and the inverter worked fine, the two noisemakers were dead. There were more mouse droppings on the floor. And the little buggers had begun chewing the white threads off the sofa upholstery.

We hooked up the trailer and took it home. Mike went at it with whatever mouse removal tools he wanted to use. That usually includes sticky pads and nasty, snapping traps. I don’t like those. I don’t like seeing dead animals. So I just avoided the trailer for the whole winter season. Mike assured me sometime in January that the problem had been resolved.

This spring, we took the trailer back up to our property at Howard Mesa so I could live in it while I worked at the Grand Canyon. It’s only 36 miles door to door, and it beats the trailers with housemates program Papillon makes available to its employees.

I scattered moth balls around the trailer’s tires. Someone told me that would prevent mice from climbing up the tires and into the trailer through openings we knew nothing about.

But when I returned to the trailer after being home for a week, guess what I found? More droppings, chewed up Kleenex, and less white thread on the upholstery. The mice were back.

Mike planned to come for the weekend. I asked him to bring the humane mouse trap. That’s a mouse trap that actually TRAPS the mouse. It doesn’t kill it. It holds it in a tiny metal box so you can do something humane with it. And I went to Flagstaff and bought another rodent noisemaker.

When Mike came, I gave him an assignment. I told him that the mouse nest must be under the sofa. That was the only place we hadn’t searched thoroughly. I asked him to check it while I was at work. When I returned at the end of the day, he showed me where all that white thread and throw rug fringe had gone. And he repaired the ductwork for the heater.

Had he seen a mouse? No.

We left after the weekend. Mike had set up the humane mouse traps (we had two) in the trailer. I closed them up, explaining that they wouldn’t be very humane if we caught a mouse and let it starve to death. Instead, I set up the noisemaker.

I returned to the trailer on Wednesday evening. Opened the door and looked inside. And guess what? No mouse droppings, no torn tissue, and the sofa looked just as bad as when I’d left it — not worse. The noisemaker was still making its weird noise. I unplugged it and put it away, then set up the humane mouse trap, with a dab of Skippy peanut butter as bait.

At around midnight, I was wakened by a snapping noise. And then a tiny rattling, kind of like a very small mouse trying to get out of a metal box. I’d caught a mouse!

The tiny rattling went on for a half hour and I soon realized it was likely to go on all night. I got up, fetched the trap, and put it outside on the picnic table. Then I settled back to sleep.

In the morning, after having coffee and getting dressed, I went outside to look at my prey. What a cutie! I would have been shattered to see such a cute little guy stuck to sticky paper. He looked scared. And cold. But I had no pity for him. Not after what he’d done to my sofa. In my eyes, he was lucky to be alive.

Now what to do with him? Sure, I could take him out to the road and let him go. But what if he was some kind of homing mouse, one that could easily find his way back to the trailer? I could drive him down the road and let him go. But that would take time, and I had to go to work. So I decided to take him to work with me and let him go there.

I’d flown my helicopter to the trailer the evening before and that was how I planned to get to work that morning. So I loaded the mouse trap with its prisoner into the helicopter, along with the odds and ends I was bringing to work. I started the engine, warmed it up, and took off. I’m pretty sure that was the first time mousie was ever in a helicopter.

I landed at Grand Canyon Airport and set down on one of the transient helipads. I cooled down the engine, shut down, and unloaded my stuff. I brought the mouse trap over to the grass at the side of the helipad and opened it up. I shook the mouse out. He landed at the base of a tall clump of grass and looked at me as if to say, “What now?” Then he was gone, into the grass.

I set the other trap tonight. Let’s see if I can get another one.

Flying in May

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A brief summary of my week so far.

I started my first full week of work as a pilot for Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters on May 11. I’m on a week on/week off schedule, and the week starts on Tuesday. I’d already worked at least 20 days since my start on April 12, but this was my first normal week after training and various days off.

I’d planned to fly my Robinson R22 helicopter up to the canyon on Monday, but winds were howling. When I called Papillon’s tower in the early afternoon, Carrie informed me that they’d already shut down for the day due to wind. I figured that if they didn’t want to fly Bell 206L-1 Long Rangers in that wind, I certainly wouldn’t want to fly my R22 there. So I loaded up the Jeep and drove up late that afternoon. I got to the camper just after sunset and spent the next few hours before bedtime putting away groceries, making the bed, and cleaning up after the mice that had moved in (again) and were living somewhere out of sight in the camper.

Tuesday morning, I found myself set to be a break pilot. That means I didn’t have a helicopter of my own. Instead, I’d fly at lunchtime for other pilots. The wind was already blowing hard that morning and, by 10:30 AM, we were shut down. At one point, the wind hit 50 knots. All the pilots gathered in the break room and waited. At first, the weather hold was until 1 PM. Then 2 PM. Then 3 PM. None of us expected the wind to die down, but by 3 PM, it was flyable. The other pilots filed out and into their helicopters and spun up. The loaders loaded passengers. I watched from the break room window with the other two break pilots. It was past lunchtime and we wouldn’t be needed at all. I didn’t fly that day.

Wednesday was a completely different story. It was still a bit windy, but not too windy to fly. And I had my own helicopter, Copter 20.

Now there’s a weird thing about these helicopters. They’re all different. They all have their own little quirks. Some are fast, some are slow. (The high skid utility ships are usually slow.) Some are clean, some are impossible to keep clean. Some are dry, some leak live sieves. (Copter 12 comes to mind.) Some vibrate on the ground, some sit smoothly. Some rattle in the air, some don’t. It’s kind of like they have personalities. Like people.

I’d flown Copter 20 before, but couldn’t remember anything about it. It wasn’t much of a leaker and it turned out to be relatively fast. So fast that I wound up catching up to Copter 8 a few times when I happened to take off right behind it. I don’t like catching up with other helicopters because then you have to pass them. When you pass them, you have to stay in front of them. And your passengers think you’re ripping them off because they’re going to get back 2 minutes before the helicopter you passed (they get back two minutes later). They don’t realize that the other helicopter is just plain slow.

Of course, I’m skipping over the weird part of the day. The fact that I couldn’t seem to start the damn helicopter. My fault. After going more than 10 days between starts, I forgot part of the procedure. Duh. Too embarrassing when the Chief Pilot has to start it for you.

It was windy, but certainly flyable. It must have been. I flew 4.9 hours. That’s a bunch of North Canyon Tours and three Imperial tours.

Thursday was another day. Less wind, and I was third priority in Copter 12. Copter 12 leaks to the point where you can say it’s bleeding. But there’s a saying around here about Bell helicopters: if it’s not bleeding, it’s not alive. When I talked to maintenance about the leakiness, they told me it was like a Harley and I shouldn’t worry about it.

Helicopters are a lot like Harleys, then. They leak, they vibrate, they’re slow, and they make a lot of noise.

Copter 12 is also fast. Fortunately, I didn’t catch up with anyone. Although I was the third priority pilot and should have been flying most of the day, things got slow. My first flight, an Imperial Tour, was the nicest flight I’d done since starting the month before. Smooth, easy to maintain altitude, and perfectly relaxing. I even had English-speaking passengers, so I could talk to them about what we were flying over and near. A good tour. The next two tours were not as good. It got progressively rougher, especially around the Dragon (west side of the canyon). I did three flights and took a break for lunch. Then, after lunch, I did another flight. That flight was weird. I started to take off and heard the torque horn. The torque gauge read 102.4. I asked for a pad and landed. They pulled the passengers off. A guy from maintenance came out. He patiently explained that torque can climb as high as 105 for up to 5 seconds before there’s a problem. If the gauge isn’t blinking, there’s no reason to stop. They loaded the passengers back on and we took off again. My door popped open just after takeoff. I had to wait until I was in stable flight over the forest and on course before I could slow down and slam the damn thing shut. How annoying. The rest of the day was spent in routine safety and drug abuse training. Then I made a trip to the big tower (covered in another TravelBlog entry). When I got back, I found that someone else had already closed out my helicopter for me. So I hung around and helped the other pilots close out theirs. Total flight time: 3.4 hours.

Today, I was a spare again. But I preflighted two helicopters with Ron, another spare. I flew an Imperial Tour for someone’s lunch and would have flown a North Canyon tour if the passengers had shown up. Instead, I shut down. That flight had been in Copter 21, which I decided I liked. I think it’s very fast, but I could be wrong; there was no one near me during the flight to judge. I did get back right on Hobbs time. I didn’t check the clock; I always forget to do that.

More another time…gotta run.

Grand Canyon Airport Tower

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I make a visit to the FAA tower without any loss of life.

Grand Canyon Airport has two control towers. (Well, three, if you count the vacant one.)

One is at Papillon’s heliport. Attached to the building and accessible by its own staircase, it rises four stories above the heliport. It’s a small, simple room with enough space for two “controllers” and two or three visitors. New pilots are encouraged to visit the tower, to get a good idea of how traffic is controlled by Papillon’s tower staff. It’s amazing, really. Not only do the tower folks keep track of all us pilots as we’re flying in and out of the airport, but they manage aircraft loading, arrange flight (and break) schedules, and open and close flight plans with Prescott Flight Service Station. It’s safe to say that Papillon’s tower is the nerve center for the whole operation.

The other tower is the big, FAA tower. It’s an impressive structure, brand new and very tall. I’ve seen lot of control towers, both as a pilot and as a passenger on an airline, and this tower ranks high in the tower hierarchy. It’s at least as big as the one in Phoenix and possibly as tall, a slim white structure with a glassed-in octagon on top.

(The old, vacant tower is one of those four-story structures that were built on many Class Delta airports. Chandler has one just like it. I’ve been in Chandler’s tower and it wasn’t much more impressive than Papillon’s. Grand Canyon Tower’s staff moved out of that building to the new one a few years ago. Now they look at it across the runway and remember the roaches that infested it.)

I’d been wanting to visit the “big tower” — as I call it — for a while. Since starting at Papillon a month ago, I’ve spent at least three hours in Papillon’s tower. I go up there when I’m not schedule to fly so I can watch the wind readings and listen to the other pilots coming and going. But the big tower was different. It was the official air traffic control center for the airport, the final word, authorized by the FAA. And it was so impressive looking from the outside. What was it like inside?

Today, I finished flying early. Most of us did, in fact — the afternoon was pretty dead. Although Papillon doesn’t like to let pilots go home early, I figured I’d ask if I could visit the big tower. After all, I could be back in minutes; all it took was a call. Permission granted from Papillon’s powers-that-be, I called the big tower to see if I could visit.

After 9/11, tower security is generally very tight. In fact, I seriously doubt whether just anyone could get in. But I introduced myself by name and told them I was a Papillon pilot. I asked if I could visit, but only if they weren’t too busy. Gary, the guy on duty, put me on hold, then came back and said yes. “Drive up to the gate and we’ll buzz you in,” he advised me.

I was out in the Jeep in a flash, zipping out of Papillon’s parking lot and driving past the terminal building. I went straight where signs advised that “All Traffic Must Turn Left” and passed a sign that said “FAA Control Tower. Authorized Vehicles Only.” Gary had authorized me. The road turned to gravel and I continued along it. Then, through the trees, I could see the tower before me, looming up out of the forest. I noticed for the first time that a low building was attached to it. And the whole thing was surrounded by a very serious looking fence with a electric gate.

A sign on the fence said something like “FAA Control Tower. Accidents or loss of life can result from loss of operations.” Something like that. I can’t remember exactly, but I do remember the phrase “loss of life.” I started wondering if my visit could distract the controllers enough to result in loss of life. I hoped not.

There were three boxes on the driver’s side of the entryway before the gate. One was a mystery box; I have no clue what it was for. Another had a camera that looked right at me, kind of like the robot in Short Circuit. The other was a speaking box with a button on it. I pushed the button and waited. Nothing happened.

I started thinking about making radio calls to the tower that weren’t answered. You know, “Copter 28 would like a Southwest departure with Zulu” followed by a lot of silence. The tower just not noticing your call. You hesitating to repeat it, not wanting to piss off the controller, who had probably heard you but was chewing his lunch or swallowing a mouthful of coffee.

I hesitated, then began to wonder whether the button was more like a mike button. I pushed it again and said, “Hello?”

The gate began to open. I waited until it was open enough for my Jeep to squeeze through, then drove through. I waited on the other side. That’s something you’re supposed to do at those kinds of gates. So that other cars didn’t piggyback in with you. It didn’t matter that I’d just driven a half mile down a dirt road and there was no one behind me. The controller could be watching from up above. And then, the next time I needed a clearance, he’d make me wait, even if he wasn’t having lunch or coffee.

I moved on when the gate closed. I noticed that there was a similar arrangement of boxes at the exit gate and wondered whether that was so that they could lock people in. I reminded myself to be on my best behavior as I drove up the concrete drive to the base of the tower.

The parking lot was paved in concrete and had at least ten parking spots. There was one car there. I parked next to it and got out.

I passed a bicycle leaning up against the side of the building as I walked to the front door. I guess you don’t have to worry about getting your bike stolen when you have a security fence with barbed wire and cameras around your place of business.

At the door was another voice box. I tried the door and found it locked. Then I pushed the button on the voice box. Nothing happened. I wondered again whether the button was a mike button, but before I could try my greeting, the door opened from the inside. Danni, one of the controllers, was there to greet me.

I’d met Danni at breakfast one morning about three weeks before. I’d gotten to Tusayan a half hour early and decided to check out the local Internet café to see if they had a wireless network I could tap into. (They didn’t.) As I ordered my latte, I noticed Marty, who’d been one of my flight instructors in Long Beach, sitting at a table with a woman. Marty had taken a job with Papillon the previous year and had come back for the season. Danni was his friend from the tower.

Danni is a really nice person. The first time she hears your voice on the radio in the morning, she says, “Good morning!” and expects a suitable response. And the last flight of the day will always get a “Have a good night!” Not very FAAish, but very nice. Kind of reminds me that we’re all in it together. We’re tourist babysitters. She helps us with our tourists while dealing with the occasionally Sunday pilot’s adventure of landing at GCN.

Danni gave me a tour of the low building. Lot of office space, a full kitchen, and equipment rooms. Everything brand spanking new and totally underutilized. We rode the elevator up to a floor marked 6 (the elevator can stop at 1, 2, and 6; there are no other numbers), then took a flight of stairs to the top level.

Ever wonder why you can’t take an elevator to the top floor in a control tower? It’s because the elevator shaft would block the view. A control tower is a big open room with windows on all sides. And this one had the best view of the Grand Canyon airport area. You could see for miles in every direction.

The room was surrounded with counter space. There were at least ten chairs, but only one had an occupant. Gary sat in the corner, in front of a laptop. A telephone receiver lay on the counter beside him. It turns out that the telephone receiver was actually a microphone, with a push to talk button between the earpiece and mouthpiece. It was on a very long curly cord, and as we chatted, he carried it around with him, talking into it now and then with his ATC voice.

Danni showed me around. I saw the radar screen, which tends to pick up ghost echoes and isn’t certified for use, but showed several aircraft in the area. I saw the wind reporting screen, which showed different winds for each of the three wind measuring locations on the airport, along with an average wind. The average was necessary because all three readings were different. I saw all kinds of screens that we didn’t really talk much about. I saw a device that printed out strips of paper with NOTAM and flight plan information on them. Danni showed me one for an incoming pilot’s flight plan. We looked at the time the pilot was expected in and realized he was due soon. He called in, got clearance, and landed during my visit.

My technical visit turned into a social call before I could stop it. Gary grew up in Wickenburg and wanted to know if I knew the people he’d grown up with. I didn’t. I’ve only been in Wickenburg since 1997; he left town in the early 80s. But that didn’t stop him from naming everyone he knew and making me come up with names of people I knew. Before long, my planned 15-minute visit to the tower had turned into 30 minutes. I told them I had to go.

Danni escorted me downstairs and outside. She told me to visit again. I promised I would.

Call Me Captain, Please

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How I got my epaulets.

Back in March, I interviewed for a job as a helicopter pilot with Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters. And before I went home later that day, I had a job.

A job. What a weird thing for me. I’ve been working freelance since May 29, 1990. I haven’t seen a paycheck in almost fourteen years. But here I was with a job. And I had to report for duty in two weeks to begin my training.

But wait a minute. I think I’m moving too fast. Let me give you some of the background.

The really old background is this. When I was in my twenties, I decided that there were four things I wanted to learn to do in my lifetime: learn to ride a motorcycle, learn to fly a helicopter, learn to speak Spanish fluently, and learn to play the piano. I got the motorcycle thing done before I turned thirty. I also turned my significant other, Mike, and my brother, Norb, on to motorcycling. I had a false start with the piano and put that aside. But in 1998, when I was thirty-something, I started taking flying lessons. I got my private pilot helicopter rating in April 2000 and my commercial ticket in October 2001. To date, I have not progressed beyond high school Spanish. But I did add another desired skill: I want to learn how to juggle.

The thing about flying is that once I started doing it, I started really liking it. Liking it enough to buy my own helicopter. Enough to do tours locally. And enough to start considering it as my next career.

Some former friends of mine told me I was crazy. “At your age, you’ll never get enough work experience to make real money at it. Why bother?”

Why bother? Why bother doing something you love? If someone is willing to pay you to do it? Frankly, I can’t understand the way some people think. Money is not a motivator here. Money is why I do things I don’t like to do. There’s plenty of that.

Since October 2001, I’ve been in “time building mode.” You see, in order to get a job as a helicopter pilot for a reputable company, I needed at least 1000 hours of flight time. That’s a lot of time. So I started doing tours in Wickenburg and at events around the state. I made long cross-country trips (to Eagle, CO and Placerville, CA, among other places). I flew around town to pass the time, made numerous trips to Deer Valley and Prescott for breakfast or shopping, and explored canyons and mountains and valleys throughout the state. Fly, fly, fly. The clock’s ticking and I need logbook entries.

PhotoThis year I had enough time to apply for a job. I sent in a resume and got an interview. Three men interviewed me on March 26. I was nervous at first, but warmed up quickly. It was like the old days of job interviews, but now, nineteen years later, I had the answers. I wasn’t some green kid who didn’t know which way was up. I was an experienced and successful business woman who wanted to explore a new world. When they asked me what I could see myself doing in ten years, I laughed. I said I wasn’t sure about ten, but in fifteen, I’d like to be flying tours in a nice place, like Hawaii. Semi-retirement, you know. I’m a bit older than the kids they’d been hiring.

Chuck, the Chief Pilot grabbed a pair of headsets and we went outside. I slid into the seat my friend Rod, who’d urged me to apply, vacated after his check flight for a utility pilot job. The turbine engine on the Bell 206L-1 C30P Long Ranger was running. Chuck took off. A quarter mile away from the airport, he told me to take the controls. I wrapped my right hand around the huge cyclic and my left hand around the industrial-looking collective. I placed my feet on the pedals. And I flew.

We wiggled a bit in the air at first. The Long Ranger has hydraulics, which my little R22 doesn’t have. But I was accustomed to flying with hydraulics in the R44 Raven I’d been leasing from a friend. Within a minute, the wiggles were gone and we were flying pretty smoothly.

He had me do some maneuvers. Gentle turns. A traffic pattern at the old Grand Canyon Airport (just northwest of Red Butte). A landing. A set down. Some hovering and hovering turns — a bit of a challenge with the 15-knot winds that were blowing that day. A take off. Another approach and landing. Then back to the heliport. When he let me do a steep approach to one of Papillon’s eleven helipads, I knew I’d passed his test.

When he called me back into his office a while later, he said, “We’d be honored to have you work for us.” Wasn’t that nice! I told him it was the nicest job offer I’d ever had and how could I refuse?I signed a contract agreeing to work until October. I got a sheet of paper telling me what I’d have to wear to work. When asked if I could start training on April 12, I said I’d be there.

On Easter Sunday, I moved up to Howard Mesa, which is covered in some detail in another blog. And I reported for work the next day. My training class had only two students: me and a Texan named Riese. Riese was married and had a 4-year-old daughter. He’d left them home in Texas. He wanted the job to build turbine time, so he could get a better job in the fall. He was a nice guy, friendly and easy to get along with. We spent the first morning filling out paperwork, watching employment videos about sexual harassment and drugs, and getting drug tested. In the afternoon, Chuck started briefing us about company operations.

The training lasted all day, every day, for the week. On Wednesday, we were joined by another new hire named Ron. Ron had worked in the Gulf of Mexico, transporting people and equipment to oil rigs, for two years. He was a typical Brooklynite: sharp, full of attitude, and eager to poke fun. The kind of person I both missed and hated.

I learned all kinds of things from many of Papillon’s long-term pilots. I learned how the Long Ranger engine and other systems worked. I learned about the rules and regulations covering flight at the Grand Canyon. I learned about the requirements of Papillon’s Part 135 certificate. I learned about the TOPS safety program that Papillon’s founder developed for the entire scenic tour industry. I learned how the work schedule worked and how to read the computer monitor with schedule information that changed throughout the day.

By Friday, I had a bad case of the sniffles. By Saturday, it was a full-blown cold. I got the day off on Sunday and wound up taking an extra day at home to recover. When I returned the following week, Riese was more than halfway through the Part 135 class and Ron was right behind him. Because of a shortage of helicopters with dual controls, I had to wait to fly. I spent the time taking one tour after another, flying with other pilots to learn the routes.

By Thursday, Riese was fully signed off and flying tours. Then the incredible happened. He quit.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to speak to him about it. He told the Chief Pilot that it was a personal matter, something to do with things at home. But he’d been gung-ho that morning, excited about flying. And he was positively beaming in his uniform when I saw him at the morning meeting. He’d even gotten a nickname from the guys: Squadron Leader. But that day was very windy and pretty turbulent out in the Canyon. Most of us think he got caught up in one of the sinkholes on the Imperial Tour and got sucked down when he should have been climbing. One part of the tour requires you to climb at least 1100 feet (preferably 1500) in a very short distance. The trick is to fly alongside a particular butte, right along the North Rim of the canyon, where there are normally updrafts you can ride up on while climbing. He may have missed the updraft (we call it the Kibby Elevator) and found himself facing the rocky cliff he was supposed to be flying over. In any case, he called for a break pilot one flight later and was gone before lunch.

That left me and Ron.

They pushed Ron through the program. But he must have made at least one of the instructors unhappy, because they weren’t very enthusiastic about finishing his training. And his Part 135 check ride was conducted in two sessions (always a bad sign). Still, they needed pilots and he had 400 hours of experience in Jet Rangers. Soon his Part 135 check ride was behind him and he was doing route training. The next day, he was wearing his epaulets.

My turn.

My Part 135 instructor’s name was Tom. Tom is a great guy: friendly, witty, and sharp. He put me at ease when we went flying. But that didn’t prevent me from flying like shit.

I was terrible. Heck, I’d flown better at my interview. I couldn’t even do a good pick up or set down. I was having trouble hovering. But Tom stuck with me and over the course of the next 4.9 hours (in three days), we worked on all the maneuvers I’d be tested on: straight in autorotations, 180 autorotations, hovering autorotations, slope landings, pinnacle landings, confined space landings, steep approaches, shallow approaches, hydraulics failure emergency landings, maximum performance takeoffs. He signed me off for my check ride on Sunday, two full weeks after my arrival at Papillon.

Dave did my check ride. He was tough. He asked all kinds of questions about the helicopter’s systems.

I could only answer about half the questions he asked. But he encouraged me to figure things out for myself. And, for the most part, I did. Then we went flying. At least I did okay on that. But not perfect. He pointed out two problems — one of them too embarrassing to detail here — then passed me.

Captain MariaI’d earned my epaulets.

Now if you don’t know what epaulets are, take a good look at the guy flying your airplane next time you catch a Continental flight to Newark (or a Southwest flight to Burbank, for that matter). Epaulets are the striped things the Captain and First Officer are wearing on their shoulders. Now I’ve got a pair. And a bunch of shirts to attach them to. Training wasn’t over yet, though. I still had to do the route training and get check rides for those. There are three main routes: The North Canyon (Green 2) route goes through the Dragon Corridor on the west side of the rim drive. It’s about 25 minutes long and very simple. The Imperial (Green 1, Green 1A, Green 2) route is a much better tour that crosses over the east rim drive just west of Desert View in the Zuni Corridor, crosses out over the Canyon in its widest part, goes over the confluence of the Little Colorado River, climbs over the north rim, and returns down the Dragon Corridor. It’s a 50 minute tour and quite complex. It’s the one that may have scared Riese into driving back to Texas. The third tour is called a Green 1 and I’m not quite sure where it goes because I haven’t been on one yet. Evidently, they’re not sold very often. As of today, I’ve finished most of my route training and can conduct tours on two of the three routes.

And Ron, well, he went back to ground school training. I’m not quite sure why — perhaps because he missed the first two days with me and Riese — but I saw him in class with the newest two recruits. And yes, he still has his epaulets. Once you get them, it’s hard to lose them.

A Job Interview

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I go on my first job interview in nearly 20 years.

I went on a job interview yesterday.

It was my first job interview since 1987. When I left the 9 to 5 world in 1990, I left the world of real employers and regular paychecks for the world of freelance work, odd hours, and irregular pay. I’m still firmly entrenched in that world, but I was ready for a new challenge. And I wanted to remember what it was like to be responsible to an employer.

So I applied for a job at Papillon Helicopters at the Grand Canyon. My interview was yesterday.
I was interviewed by a panel of three people, including the Chief Pilot, the Director of Operations, and a lead pilot. They asked me interview questions I hadn’t heard in nearly 20 years. “What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?” “What’s your idea of an ideal employer?” “How do you deal with a bothersome fellow employee?” The questions were kind of funny because although I didn’t expect them, I should have. After all, it was a job interview and that’s the kind of questions interviewers ask.

I did very well. I was nervous at first — heck, I was out of practice! — but soon relaxed. I must have told them what they wanted to hear. I know I made them smile.

I can be pretty funny when I try. And I use humor whenever possible. Life’s too short to go through it thinking everything is totally serious.

After the interview, the Chief Pilot took me flying. Yes, I got a chance to fly a Bell 206L (Long Ranger). I’d never flown one before. He took off from the helipad and headed south to a practice area near Red Butte*. He handed over the controls about a mile south of the airport. I was able to keep it in smooth flight and maintain speed, altitude, and heading. I could do turns without significant changes in altitude. I crossed over the old runway at Red Butte, read the wind sock, and entered a left traffic pattern for landing beside the sock. I made a good approach and landing. I set it down (a bit bumpy) and picked it up (smooth as silk). I did 90° pedal turns in a 10-15 knot wind. I did another pattern and landing. Then I took off for the return trip to the airport. The Chief Pilot made the radio calls. I landed at one of Papillon’s pads.

The only thing I had trouble with on the whole flight was trim. You really need hard to push on that right pedal! My set downs could use some work, too.

I obviously had very little understanding of any of the turbine engine gauges. A thousand hours in various piston helicopters doesn’t do much to prepare you for that. But I could FLY the helicopter — that is, I could make the connection between my hands and feet and the machine to control the helicopter. Enough to make a confined space landing over ponderosa pines into a relatively small heliport.

My friend Rod, who has worked for Papillon on and off for the past few years, was waiting for me when we returned. We waited in the pilot break room while the Chief Pilot went out with another candidate. The other pilots wore white shirts with epaulets on the shoulders. Like airline captains. They were eating lunch out of bags and watching a television show from Japan called Extreme Elimination (or something like that), where these people went through obstacle courses and, nine times out of ten, ended up falling painfully into water of questionable biological cleanliness. A few of the previous month’s hires were waiting with their headsets for a training flight. There was one woman (a new hire) who seemed to be a well of information about basketball. She had very small feet in white joggers. There were no other women.

A while later, the Chief Pilot returned and led me into his office. That’s where he told me they’d be honored to have me work for them. Honored. He actually said that. Wow. How could I say no?

Training starts on April 12. That gives me about two weeks to get my life in order before I’m gone for two weeks. After that, I’ll be on a 7 on 7 off schedule (at least that’s what I asked for when given the choice). This time next month, I’ll be qualified as a Grand Canyon Tour pilot.

Today, I’m canceling the rides I scheduled at Buckeye for this weekend. Time building mode is over. No need to sell myself as a pilot anymore. I’ve already got a buyer.

* For those of you unfamiliar with the Grand Canyon area, the airport is about 5-8 miles south of the Rim in a town named Tusayan. The airport has a tower, but Papillon (and probably the other operators) also have their own towers for controlling their own aircraft. The terrain there is covered with ponderosa (tall), juniper (short), and pinyon (short) pine trees. About 7 miles southeast of the airport is a volcanic rock formation called Red Butte because of its color. You can’t miss it on your way from the south to the canyon.