It was a good today. I've been undergoing SAR (Search and Rescue) Captaincy Training all this week, and it's indeed a pleasure to add some skills to my repertoire. Hovering is second nature to helicopter pilots, plus I've got a background of long lining, where the pilot, me, hangs out the door watching the load slung one hundred to two hundred feet below the chopper, to gently, hopefully, place the load where required. While some consider long lining leaning towards a black art, the skills can be learned by any pilot with some training and some practice. Search and rescue brings some new challenges to the table. Unlike long lining, you don't hang out the door and watch the load, you can't even see the load, which is typically a living being, a friend in most cases, below the aircraft. Also, the land one uses as a point of visual reference is missing, replaced by heaving, bobbing, rippling, swelling, swirling, undulating, pitching, surging, tumultuous, continually moving frothy seas. You have to be able to maintain a precise hover while moving gently to the conning of the rear crew, the SAR Tech, hanging out the back door, watching his buddy on the line, and doing his utmost to move his pal over a clear spot on the moving deck of a ship at sea, and put him down safely. I'd say proper visual references, required for maintaining a steady hover, is wherein lies the rub. Today for instance, the weather was crap. Seas were almost at three metres, so the deck of the small supply vessel was rocking and rolling and heaving and humping, winds were gusty, and swinging thirty degrees as a steady stream of squall lines moved through, bringing heavy rain and visibilities down to well under a mile. This is my first attempt at live winching to a deck.
As we made dummy run after dummy run, moving in over the deck and seeing how things went prior to committing anyone's life to my handling skills, I was on a steep learning curve of how to find proper visual references for hovering. First off, the ship is bouncing all over the place, so you can't concentrate on the ship to maintain your hover, as you'll be bouncing all over the sky chasing it. You have to watch the ship, as your placement over it is critical, but you have to maintain your hover by watching the heaving sea in your peripheral vision, and depending on the visibility at the time, perhaps use the horizon as a reference point as well. It was trickier than I imagined it to be, but I coped, and the rear crew were happy enough with my performance to put a guy out on the line, move in, place him on the deck, and move back in and collect him again, multiple times. Did I mention the deck is encircled in razor wire to keep pirates, a serious threat in these part, at bay? I still tense up too much when I've got a live load on the line and I'm tight over the deck, but it was my first kick at the can. We are out again tomorrow. I have to say, it's the most fun I've had in a helicopter in a good while!
So, slightly fatigued after nearly four hours of playing over ship decks one hundred and twenty miles out into the Indian Ocean with live loads, we fly back to Mtwara, to find a crowd of kids on a school trip to the airport. All from a local orphanage, we soon have them crawling all over the aircraft and handling the controls and explaining how everything works, and the smiles and positive energy is infectious. It's shaping up to be a near perfect day.
Eventually the teachers coax the kids back to their bus, and we complete the day's paperwork, and head back to our living quarters. I find a huge dead cockroach in my room, but am too happy to mind. A few pilots and I head to the beach for a snorkel, but as each of us suffer multiple jellyfish stings within forty metres of shore, that brings the swimming to a quick halt, and we head up to the bar for a beer to watch the African sun set. It was a very good day.
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