Machine Has Fulfilled Sikorsky's Life-Saving Vision
by Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose"
O'Brien
If you are a young man or woman who wants to make a mark on the
world, consider doing it with helicopters.
Igor Sikorsky always envisioned the helicopter as a lifesaving
machine, and he saw the first rescue within months of solving the
thorny stability and control problems that plagued his VS-300. The
company to this day rewards a winged "S" badge to air crews who
save lives with a Sikorsky helicopter.
Helicopters save lives. We saw this in Hurricane Katrina, where
initial death toll numbers now look -- fortunately -- terribly high
off the mark. One of the reasons for that is the helicopter's
ability to pluck stranded individuals off of roofs and other
temporary refuges, and the helicopter's ability to deliver rescue
men to other roofs, where they could check for people trapped in
attics.
As the 82nd Airborne went door to door in formerly-flooded
precincts, they expected to find many dead in attics. What they
found, in many cases, was an attic with a hastily sawn hole leading
to the roof and freedom -- the mark of the helicopter.
The military hit the region hard with helicopters, flooding 375
of them into the area. Some were there already when the levees
broke. Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard choppers all came.
Two navy copter crews diverted from a supply mission to rescue
numerous people -- in an outcome reminiscent of post-Pearl Harbor
reprimands for pilots who launched without orders, the pilots were
verbally reprimanded. Their CO did his duty -- after all, perhaps
there was a follow-on mission, which the pilots wouldn't have known
about -- but the pilots did theirs, as they saw it. When you're a
helicopter commander, you're being paid for your judgment above
all.
When judgment ran head-on into procedure for military operators,
in reacting to Katrina, judgment usually won. The air bosses of the
Navy's vessels, particularly the landing ship USS Iwo Jima, threw
NATOPS out the window and allowed Army pilots to land on their
decks without going through the minuet of shipboard qualification.
This was a huge display of trust in a fellow service's pilots, a
leap of faith if you will, and it showed that the US Navy has
officers who can take a risk with the best of them.
It wasn't just the military in the skies over New Orleans,
though. Private companies flew their copters into the flood zone
and started doing what only helicopters can do. A Louisiana life
flight operation doggedly lifted critical patients from a flooded
hospital to waiting ambulances. Evergreen launched its entire
helicopter fleet towards the Gulf of Mexico -- from as far away as
Anchorage, Alaska. These are just a couple of operators that have
been cited in news reports -- the tip of the iceberg.
FEMA, as I understand it, will pay a charter rate for the actual
rescue operations these private operators undertake. But the costs
of flying the helicopter into position, and then home? The private
operator eats that. So you can see that Evergreen, for instance,
isn't doing this for the money.
"We were constantly encouraged by the sound of helicopters
overhead. Sometimes there were as many as 15 in the air at once," a
flood survivor wrote -- as nearly as I can remember, because his
photo essay is gone now -- on a photography website.
For many people in the lawless ruins of New Orleans, where the
police themselves abandoned themselves to the looter impulse or ran
away, the chop of rotor blades meant safety, meant civilization,
meant somebody cared.
So -- do you want to make a difference? Do you want to change
the world a little bit? Do you want to earn the thanks of a
grateful nation, or at least, a grateful family of survivors? The
helicopter is calling.
The nation needs helicopter pilots on both the civil and
military sides. Many of the current civil helicopter pilots are
approaching retirement age. Military retirees and resignations
can't pick up all the slack, and every one of those military pilots
who hangs up his Nomex jammies means that there's a seat in a
military bird that needs filling.
Mind, you, while a helicopter pilot may only have size six feet
he or she has to fill some pretty big shoes. The crews flying these
last two weeks in the Gulf Coast area have set the standard.
Then, there are those rescue crewmen who go down the winch to
get the survivors. The Air Force calls them PJs, for Pararescue
Jumpers; the sea services, Rescue Crewmen or Rescue Swimmers. The
public calls them: "Heroes." If you are young, and strong, and
stout of heart, this might be you.
If you don't want to crew a helicopter, perhaps you are suited
to work on them. Helicopters are complicated machines. You don't
get something for nothing in engineering, and the price of being
able to hover out of ground effect while winching a crewman and a
survivor up, is a lot of maintenance. Most helicopters need hours
of painstaking maintenance for every hour they can fly. If you're a
detail-oriented, careful person who can handle having human lives
in your hands, you can be part of a great undertaking.
Perhaps you don't have the coordination to crew copters, or the
desire to take them apart and put them back together? Well, there's
always design and engineering. The helicopter occupied some of the
best minds of the twentieth century from at least 1908 (Igor
Sikorsky's first unsuccessful machine) to its end. Some of their
names are recorded in corporation names today: Sikorsky, of course;
Mikhail Mil; Stanley Hiller.
Other names came and went as, in the corporate world, big fish
eat small: Frank Piasecki's eponymous company became the more
pronounceable Vertol before vanishing into Boeing. And still other
names are obscure: only a few of us know who Bill Hunt was, and
even many helicopter engineers never heard of B.J. Schramm.
The twentieth century was a time of great technical progress.
The good and ill that followed from this remains the object of
debate, and probably will continue to cause heated arguments in
faculty lounges long after all of us who lived in some part of the
Bloody Twentieth are dead and gone. Did the helicopter change the
world? Did the hundreds of helicopters that flocked to the ruins of
the Gulf Coast change the world? For many, many thousands of
people, they saved the world.
As I write these words, it appears that the initial statements
of local authorities that many thousands lost their lives were
grossly pessimistic. At least some of that is due to those
remarkable machines that can hold still, or even back up, in the
sky -- and the incredible men and women that design, build,
maintain and, of course, fly them. This was the helicopter's finest
hour. Somewhere, Igor Sikorsky is bursting with pride.
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