A little more intro...

Strapped that sexy AW139 on this morning and blew off into the oh-so-blue African sky!  The rigs we fly to are after that liquid gold, but for me....I just want to get into the air with this new toy.  Powerful, fast, quiet and smooth, and far more modern than anything I've ever flown, a sexy little Italian sportscar.  Quite abit smaller than the old S61s and Super Pumas I've been on, but destined for popularity, and that means more oppurtunities, more places to see, and quite simply, it's fun!

 I don’t know if I’ll get back to Mtwara for another tour or not. I have five weeks left of this tour, and I was told it’s just a temporary posting to cover someone’s sick leave. I had just finished up a Super Puma job in Romania, where I somehow got roped into being the manager of the operation, and with no new work on the horizon for the old girls, I was lucky to get checked out on a popular new type, the AW139. The course was in Newark, and it was fun, the highlights being catching some wild jazz at the infamous Zebra room in Harlem, and I managed to bring the family down for a week of kicking around Manhattan too. After that, ink still wet with the new endorsement, I was a pilot without a base, but they were looking for someone to cover in Mtwara, Tanzania, and well....here I am!

After decades feeding Canada's Northern hordes, the mosquitoes don't really bother me much, but so far I've smacked three of the little suckers in my room quite full of blood, presumably mine. The mozzies, as the Brits here call them, aren't nearly as bad as I expected for Africa, but a good percentage of them do carry malaria, and apparently one strain that will kill you. Not many bother with the malarone though, the nightmares the antimalarial drug induces are surreal, and realistically, who wants to live for ever?

I remember deciding I wanted to be a helicopter pilot, or at least I remember the thought process that helped me decide my fate, and I wasn't yet a teen. To see the world through a bird’s eye, I dreamed of being a pilot.  I was pretty obsessed by those noisy fling-wing contraptions for as far back as I can remember.  The whole idea of flying planes ran through my head briefly, but I figured the only time you’d really get that bird’s eye view would be on take-off and landing, and I wanted to be free of the world’s bonds yet close enough to taste her.  Low and slow as a bird cruises amongst the tree tops is where I wanted to be.  And birds don’t need a damn runway.  Needing a mile of paved concrete at both ends of a trip seemed silly when helicopters were roaming the earth undeterred by such nonsense.  It was beyond cool for me, and I wanted it badly.

My first job, at the tender age of eighteen, was in Northern Ontario.  There was abit of a lull in the industry and there were guys with years under their belts fighting to find work, but I was cheap to employ, and I had no qualms about dragging logs out of the woods for the more experienced guys to practice slinging, dry-walling the hangar offices, babysitting the boss’s kids or waxing his Suburban.  I just gave it everything I had all the time and before long  I’m ferrying aircraft to and from jobs, and even in that first year, I found myself in bush camps in the North, greasing and oiling my own machine, flying, and of course, wearing the Ray-bans.  Even in the cockiness of my youth, I was concerned about heading off on my first real bush job by myself, but the Chief Pilot gave me some advice that stuck with me to this day; "If there's guys out there doing it, how hard can it be?  Just get on with it." I've found you can apply that logic to everything. 


Then came an opportunity that really got things rolling; some pilot’s vacation needed covering so I got promoted to a Jetranger helicopter on this contract in North Eastern Quebec, and the customer requested I stay on the job as opposed to the guy I had temporally replaced.  Perhaps his wearing his flight suit, sunglasses and yes, white scarf, to the bars in the evenings, had something to do with it.  He had taken the expected cockiness a tad too far, and scared more than a few passengers with his antics in and out of the air.  So I lucked into a high flying job, and ended up with over one thousand hours of flying in my logbook before I turned twenty, and I spent the next six years flogging around North-Eastern Quebec, learning French from les bucherons, and met my wife at a club in Sept-Iles.  Pilots and night clubs....a match made in heaven.

Even dreams turn sour at some point, and after years of bush flying, I was finding being away from civilization for months on end more and more difficult to take, and after a brief stint in University tackling an Engineering degree with hopes of becoming a test pilot, I landed an air ambulance job on a Bell 222, think Airwolf without the whisper mode, in North Eastern Ontario.  I was home every night, sleeping in my own bed, flying a twin engine helicopter in pretty much any weather, day or night, and while it never felt overly heroic, we were saving lives.  I ended up managing the entire operation at some point, and there were adventures aplenty, but the schedule and pay and small town mentality eventually wore us down, and I was hungry for new challenges, so we packed everything up and headed East.