Disrupting

It's good to be back in Canada for a spell.  The hunting season for white tail deer opened this week, and I was able to take the .375 H&H I bought for Africa for a walk in our local woods, albeit an hour of abandoned logging roads in my Subaru and another hour of boot leather hardly quantifies as local.  Sure my .308 would have been more appropriate, but I rather like the big calibers.  The big push is invigorating, and you know you've shot a real gun.  I seriously doubt hunting here will ever be the same after living out my dream safari in the Limpopo region of South Africa, taking a record book kudu and a record bush buck last spring, but it's still good to get out on my own in the woods.  First light, gradually being able to distinguish the pine laden hills from the sky, the frost in the dry grass, finding spore and tracking, beds freshly slept in and wondering now, up into the sun for warmth or held up in the thick?  I hear a grunt and then the snap of something moving, but not even the flash of white tail.  Such is hunting in Nova Scotia.

My family is still adapting to having me home and it's not always a smooth transition.  They have to adapt and be self sufficient while I'm away, and they settle into their own routines, routines which my arrival certainly disrupts.  Something to keep in mind if one is contemplating this lifestyle.  It's not easy.

Off to Newark and the sim tomorrow for my six month check.  I abhor travelling to the states.  Much easier frolicking through airport security in Germany, Switzerland, England, Norway, Tanzania, Kenya.    It just gets silly and no one seems to notice or speak up.  Though it's pleasant to break up the six weeks off with a little challenge in the cockpit, basically running an IFR flight in the Rome area with anything and most everything going wrong, but I'd truly love to find a steady flying gig that kept my hand in without the long gaps between getting airborne.  The things I love, I want to do more.  Flying, surfing, hunting, f........

Home

Nursing a Guiness in the Carleton in downtown Halifax, the music a little too country for my taste.  I opt for Miraculous Mule and Peanut Butter Lovesicle with earphones.  My kid is at some class she signed up and paid for herself, swinging from ribbons and fancy Cirque du Soleil gymnastics, and I'm providing the limousine service.  I'm sure it's cool and I'd love to watch but she won't let me.  Embarrassed by her Dad, go figure.  My belly is full of turkey, from the week late Thanksgiving dinner my family so graciously delayed for my arrival, though they are quick to point out they only delayed because my daughter was working throughout the holiday.  It's good to be home.

Doctor Livingstone I presume?

I've been reading about Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to find Doctor Livingstone.  The famous explorer, missing and presumed dead in deepest darkest Africa, was on the very last of his many expeditions, which actually launched from our favourite Sunday afternoon hangout in Tanzania.  I attempt to fathom Stanley's trek into the unknown, losing the majority of his porters and supplies and contracting numerous illnesses that took him to the brink of death repeatedly. Stanley writes about the experience as though it were a trip through hell itself, lasting over a year, including the sea voyage from Europe.  I just covered the same distance in nine hours with Swiss Air.  I was sandwiched between two very overweight people for the duration, so the voyage wasn't without hardship, but I honestly think I'd rather have had Stanley's adventures.

 

Shopping for watches in Zurich (no, I didn't buy one) during the four hour layover, I'm happy to be well on my way once again.  I love Africa, and yes it grows on you, but it also wears on you, if the extremely high turnover at our Mtwara base is any indication.  The heat and sand and dirt and garbage, the ripe smells and constant bombardment of sounds, goats baying and the claws of crows scratching on sheet metal, Muslim call to prayer blasted over loudhailers, and everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, rap music played far too loud, speakers clipping and undecipherable.  Nova Scotia in the woods, quiet and peaceful and calling to me with tranquility.  I'll admit to being a tad homesick.  I know too, a few days at home and I'll be recharged and missing the flying, and the adventure....

My new pocketknife for touring (and hunting and fishing and everything else);  a CRKT M21-02.  Too cool!

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I'll miss you...

While I still have two days left in Tanzania, with one bird down for maintenance and a surplus of drivers, and considering all the extra flying I've done this tour training others, I'm now off the flying schedule as of six this morning, having covered an uneventful night shift.  This life of six weeks on, six weeks off, is difficult at times.  Six weeks away from home and family living in Third World conditions, then almost as difficult, six weeks away from helicopters!  It ain't easy!

The photo above was taken in the venerable ole S61, flying offshore Nova Scotia.  I was flying between five hundred and six hundred hours a year, and never had my hands off the controls for more than two weeks at a time, if that.  I sorely miss that job.  I didn't leave by choice, my company lost the contract, and I've been touring internationally ever since.  I truly do love flying the Italian AW139, my favourite helicopter by a wide margin.  It's my first modern helicopter, and it's fast, powerful, and maneuverable, and the SAR hoisting component only adds to the fun.  I will miss taking her up into the East African sky.  With all the check rides and training, with recurrencies and new hires and guys new on type or to offshore, I've been getting significantly more stick time than most, but I still crave that Nova Scotia flying.  Fingers crossed.

 

An update on the watch.  After a taxing process and daily frustrated calls and emails to DHL and Tanzanian customs, I finally had that 771 Squadron Torgoen T16 on my wrist, for perhaps two hours.  Waterproof to 100m, I didn't take it off for a snorkel on the reef and it subsequently flooded.  Next tour Justin will bring it's replacement.  Nevertheless, I did manage to capture a few good shots...

Less than a week

There's less than a week remaining of my forty-two day hitch in Tanzania.  I do love Africa, but I am ready to go home for awhile.  Life in Africa has it's attractions.  The place certainly gets under your skin, and I know I will miss it.  Everything here is more intense, more intimate, more pressing, more real.  The complaints and concerns of Westerners pale and shame when you watch young girls stroll happily behind their mothers with twenty-five litre containers of water confidently balanced atop their head, feet clad in homemade pieces of discarded tires, children playing with toys crafted from wire and string and discarded water bottles, boys lugging impossibly heavy loads of firewood, men and women bent at the waste in the heat of the day swinging pangas to cut grass, ever wary of puff adders and black mambas.  As we bike through villages without electricity or running water, you are met with warm smiles and energetic waves and shy attempts at greetings in English, unlike in town where you are just as likely to be subjected to leering stares of jealousy.  Those leers are easily disarmed by meeting their eyes and confidently offering a heartfelt Swahili greeting, but still, the abject poverty is strongly felt.  Compassion gives way to practicality, for you have to accept that you can't help everybody, but even so, the general aura of happiness from a population with so little, is humbling to say the least.  Africa is a much needed attitude adjustment.

I ride my bike, waving at the prisoners clad in orange jumpsuits clearing brush for cassava just down the slope from the local jail, the guards standing nearby, and they all stop what they are doing and flash big friendly smiles and return my greeting.  I would not trade the experience for anything, but I am ready to get back to Canada, and my life there.

771 Squadron

Or perhaps a better title might be; "The Watch Saga Continues...."

Royal Navy makes epic rescue in perilous seas

 

My friend, Justin Morgan, is a little bit of a celebrity in SAR circles, primarily for the rescue detailed in the above link.  Now that SAR is moving into the commercial sector, with the oil and gas industry contracting SAR coverage for their offshore operations, the industry draws heavily upon SAR Techs with extensive military Search and Rescue backgrounds.  There is nothing like the experience these guys bring to the table.  Most of the SAR Techs on our particular contract, the guys who run the hoist and go down the wire to rescue folk, while we do the pilot thing up front, are ex-771 Naval Air Squadron boys.  771 Naval Air Squadron, or the "Ace of Clubs", is one of thee most active SAR Squadrons, with a history running back to the eve of World War Two.  Justin had a hand in designing 771 squadron watches, in conjunction with Torgoen, a Swiss company specializing in pilot watches.  I felt honoured that Justin felt my association with Search and Rescue, hoisting these ex-771 guys down onto heaving decks off Africa's East coast, warranted one of their coveted squadron watches. 

 

 

 

Well, it ain't quite that simple.  This is Tanzania.  Shipping and customs and duty and daily visits to DHL.  "It will be here tomorrow" we've heard for the past two weeks.  It's a beautiful pilot watch, with a rugged simplistic functionality.  I know a few helo pilots sporting Torgoens, and the 771 SAR association will make it something to be proud of, but until mine arrives, my G-Shock will be gracing my wrist for tonight's training sortie.  Ah well...





Single Engine 61

Continued from previous (below) post....

So, we are sitting in some dark Norwegian seaside pub, well into the Guinness, and I'm telling you about the time I was actually scared in a helicopter.  Sure, I've lost engines before.  Had a 206's only engine quit, but we were in the hover so no biggy, as well as a Bell 47 that I got restarted before I had to do any fancy piloting, and there was the 222 that had one engine roll back to idle power as we climbed out of a hospital helipad in the middle of the night, and there was that S76 engine that we shut down at 7000 feet IFR due to the oil temperature climbing into the red, but this one?  It scared me.

So there we were......heading South along the rugged West Newfoundland coast in a big ole S61, at about one hundred feet above ice laden heaving seas, with barely an eighth of a mile visibility in a heavy, heavy snow squall, struggling to maintain visual with the cliff face off our left, with perhaps enough fuel to make Stephenville airport, and the number two engine just gave up the ghost.  The pilot now at the controls, with some 30,000 hours one of thee most experienced guys on the planet, not appearing overly fussed about the whole situation.  I had a WAC chart in my lap and one of those new fangled GPS moving map units, trying to weigh options.  There was really nowhere to turn back to and up to now, all the squalls had been short lived.  We did not expect to be in it for long. Scouring the map, it did appear that the coast line did not smoothly lead to the airport.  There was a long point that ran perpendicular to our track, and we certainly did not have enough fuel to follow the point all the way around.  Actually, I was quite concerned about the fuel that we did have.  We didn't know why the number two engine had quit, but I was fully conscious of the fact that we had refueled from drums, and it wasn't stretching my imagination much that perhaps faulty fuel would soon be taking out the other engine and we'd end up in those ice laden heaving seas calling sweetly just below us, only to be smashed into the cliff face long before we got overly chilled.  But at present the remaining engine was plugging away happily so we elected to do the same.

The WAC chart was sorely lacking in detail, but it was obvious that we had to cross the land in front of us, to get into the bay that led to the airport.  I briefed my buddy and he shrugged and when I claimed that to our left appeared to be the best option, he pulled the aircraft up abit, banked slightly, and instead of salt water, we now had the tops of pines passing below us.  I called the powerline tower that loomed out of the snow on my right and he pulled up sharply, as we watched the wires pass just below us.  We may have lost visual for a moment but soon the tops of the pines were brushing by in the chin windows, and before long, there was our old pal the sea.  The pilot cranked right, heading up the point into the wind to maintain visual with the land, now on my side.

Now you may ask why we didn't just climb and continue IFR, but trust me, icing in those condition would have had us in a serious world of hurt in minutes.  And remember what I said about falling out of the sky if the airspeed dropped much below forty or fifty?  Keep that in the back of your mind.

So I calmly tell the pilot behind the controls that we are going in the wrong direction.  I'll never forget his calm voice asking "Are you sure?"  He cussed at my response and turned left, out to sea, turning downwind.  At fifty feet on the radar altimeter, no longer visual with land, single engine in an aircraft that requires both engines or at least fifty knots of airspeed, I watched the airspeed hit zero.  That was when I was scared.  I waited for the ice laden seas to come bursting through the chin bubble at any instant, and I felt bad that my family would be going on alone without me, but somehow the pilot in me kept calling "Airspeed. Airspeed. We got zero airspeed." 

I'm not quite sure how, but we didn't go into the sea.  Somehow that 30,000 hours of experience in the seat next to me ever so gently got the airspeed to register 20, 30, 40 then 50 knots, we regained visual with the coast, and we were heading in the right direction, but now that forty-five knot wind was on our ass.  A forty-five knot tail wind with an aircraft that needs fifty knots of airspeed to keep aloft single engine yields a speed over the ground of almost one hundreds knots, and in one eighth of a mile vis in heavy snow, trying to maintain visual reference was a genuine task, and every one of those 30,000 hours was being fully utilized.  I could hear the adrenaline in my voice as I called the mayday into the Stephenville control tower, and the tower responded with what we already knew, the visibility was one eighth of a mile.  Luckily the airport had one runway that ran perpendicular to the coast line and started right on the beach, but it was surrounded by mountains so we had one kick at the can.  I dialed up the localizer and briefed my compatriot that when I called it, he had to turn ninety degrees left and land.  I waited, and waited, watching the runway grow closer on the GPS, then the localizer needle started drifting in and I called for the turn.  There was nothing to see.  It was a complete white-out, heading into mountains with a forty-five knot tailwind, single engine.  With an impossibly cool voice the other pilot called "This is going to be fun" as he lowered the collective and I started calling radar altimeter heights.

We were grounding at eighty knots when the wheels first touched the tarmac.  Somehow we bounced and floundered with the odd glimpse of dark tarmac in the chin bubble, but eventually we got stopped and let the tail swing around putting us into wind on the runway.  We still couldn't see anything.  The low fuel light had been on for some time.  I called the tower and told him we were safely down, but we were not exactly sure where.  The snow started to lighten and we found a taxiway, and as we taxied clear the squall passed and the sun shone brightly once again.  The skies were blue.  In the end, it turned out the engine had ingested ice, probably created from the heavy snow which had accumulated in the sliding door rail, and subsequently dislodged.  It was not the first known case with the S61.

And that was definitely one of my more exciting tales.  Any pilot will tell you, it's far better to be bored. 

And there we were.....

Definitely one of my top ten "and there we were...." stories was losing an engine in the venerable ole S61 while on a longline job in the mountains of Western Newfoundland, in a blizzard no less.  It seems like a few lifetimes ago now, and best told over cold brews in a dark tavern in Norway.  Trust me, I've told many a story over cold brews in dark Norwegian taverns....

With just over 5000 hours at the time, plenty at the helm of IFR twins, but the majority single engine bush work in Canada's North, with considerable longline and slinging experience on the table, I was no spring chicken, but the pilot with me was crowding 30,000 hours, and half of that was on type.  I was still relatively new on the huge S61 helicopters, a Sikorsky certified in 1961, hence the moniker.  A tour company needed to move a new boat into the Gros Morne fiord in Western Newfoundland, and recent changes to environmental laws forbid dragging the boat over the frozen tundra, so the operator broke the boat into manageable pieces and hired us to sling the bits into the lake.  The day for the job was fraught with "streamers", intense snow squalls generated by cold artic air collecting moisture from the warmer waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, driven onto the mountainous shoreline in the constant forty-five knot winds that frequent these parts.  Overall, despite the odd "streamer", the weather was quite good.  The flight from Halifax to the staging area was uneventful, with mostly blue skies and a solid horizon, visibilities never dropping below a mile in the sporadic squalls, and we were soon geared up and longlining.

The slinging went off swimmingly, but there were more lifts than originally planned, and a transient A-Star stopped in and took some of our fuel, forty-five gallon drums driven across the province specifically for this job, leaving us rather tight.  We had planned a direct flight South across the four thousand foot mountains to Stephenville Airport to refuel for the flight home, and we could still make it with the fuel we had, but the idea of getting caught in the hills in one of the snow squalls had us recalculate our fuel for the longer route along the coast.  It would be very tight but it was definitely the preferred option considering the weather.

Sitting right seat, with all our slinging gear, a couple of engineers and various odds and ends safely stowed in the cavernous aft cabin, I pulled pitch and pushed over the nose and headed down the coast line at five hundred feet in blue skies and crystal clear vis.  We hit the first squall about five minutes later, but being over water, with a solid radar picture and a moving map GPS, there wasn't much cause for concern in the limited visibility and we were soon through it.  The next squall was not so nice.  Well beyond the point of no return fuel wise, the visibility kept deteriorating, as I struggled to maintain visual contact with the rugged cliff face on our left, the angry ice laden seas heaving below us and splashing spectacularly against the rocks.  I slowed and descended, slowed and descended, maintaining visual reference, and while far from ideal, it wasn't overly taxing considering the forty five knot quartering headwind. 

You see, despite all the hovering around helicopters do, they generally don't much like less than forty knots of fresh air coursing through her blades.  Below forty-five knots they become quite unstable and the pilot requires significantly more visual cues than faster airspeeds, and furthermore, once a helicopter slows to the point that their own downwash is circulating through the rotor disc, you can see a significant increase in power required.  For older twin engine aircraft like the S61, the loss of one engine is not a significant problem above fifty knots or so, but much below that and you may well not have enough ommph to prevent an unscheduled meeting with terra firma. So....

The visibility was now down to around one eighth of a mile in heavy snow, we were roughly a hundred feet above that unfriendly sea, and the cliffs to our left did not provide any options, so we pushed on, until....BANG....

That was the loss of the number two engine.  A quick survey of the gauges confirmed the number two engine had left the party, but with our forward airspeed and quartering headwind, it wasn't a show stopper.  The weather was the real problem.  The squall was far worse than anything we had encountered previously, and it wasn't letting up in the slightest.  As the cliff face, our source of visual reference, was on our left, I was struggling cross cockpit from the right seat, the helo crabbing further right in the strong wind, so the 30,000 hour guy took the controls from the left seat, and I cleaned up the engine failure and started looking for options on the none-too-detailed WAC chart we had, cross referencing our GPS.  Things were going to get more interesting......

To be continued......