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Chapter Eleven is a turning point in the story, to a certain extent, as it takes the reader through another stint in the corporate jet business leading up to my third air medical flying job.
CHAPTER ELEVEN – ANOTHER STINT IN THE JET BUSINESS
I’d been flying the Michigan Bell 412 for a couple of years when we got some troubling news. We were to be consolidated with another nearby program. We would lose the 412 and end up with a smaller helicopter. This was going on industrywide - consolidation and cost cutting forcing a shift to cheaper, smaller helicopters and fewer bases. And it kept getting worse and worse.
I would be saddened to part company with the friends I’d made at Bronson Hospital, but after flying the 412 into the far reaches of Michigan’s dark, empty countryside I wasn’t going to do it in a less capable helicopter. This was a tipping point, one that kept coming up during my years flying medevac, when the risks reached an unacceptable level.
Management had committed to keep all the pilots from both programs but they had to be hoping some of us would drop out. I was the first.
Those days - the mid 90’s - there weren’t any good flying jobs. But I had an advantage over a lot of pilots because I was what we call dual-rated - qualified in both helicopters and airplanes, and I had management experience. It came down to finding something back in the Western US with decent money. That meant a jet job, not a thrilling prospect but the money was important.
I had become friends with Dave Hurley, who owned a jet management company on the East Coast, flying and taking care of jets for high net worth clients. He’d said we should work together as he and I were the the only two jet pilots he knew who also had track records in sales. He’d been trying to hire me, so when I called it was all done in a few minutes - salary, move plan and a VP title.
As we closed the conversation he said I should plan on going to training to get current as a jet captain. That sounded great. Jet training would be a cure for the disappointments of the 412 program.
Linda and Greg, my wife and son, were ready to move and rejoin friends in California where I was based. We couldn’t wait to get back there. It was late spring so Greg didn’t lose any school time. A couple of weeks after the change was planned we were set up in a nice home near the beach having dinners with friends we had missed.
It didn’t take long, though, before the new job consumed me and I was back in the rat race that I’d hoped to never see again.
Christmas of 2002, we traveled to visit friends. I spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on the phone with a client with whom we were closing a deal on a new jet. For tax reasons, it had to close before year end, so we were on nonstop conference calls with banks in the UK and underwriters on the East Coast trying to line up all the pieces to close the deal. Then, after Christmas the delivery process had me flying the new jet and the owner all over the U.S. right through New Year’s on a trip pattern defined by his tax lawyers.
Another time, the three of us visited relatives on the East Coast and set out on a lovely afternoon sail with family. Then, my cell phone rang and I spent the entire afternoon solving problems caused by a pilot who had quit without notice, leaving owner trips and charters uncovered. It was relentless. That evening Greg, who was by then in high school, told me how he felt.
“Dad, you work so hard, but you have no life other than your job. When I’m out there with my career going I’ll never work in the private sector. It’s so demanding, and then one day they just fire you. I going to be in the military or be a cop, like you were, where I have a predictable schedule, a career path and a life.”
I put my arm around him and complimented him on his insight. He has delivered on that promise, serving in the military and in law enforcement where he enjoys a comfortable, satisfying career.
That conversation hit home. My life was streaming by with nothing but airplane owner problems, cranky pilots and spoiled charter customers wearing me down. I thought about guys I knew in the business who were years ahead of me, who retired with not much in the bank and their health in decay, too soon forgotten by the rest of us. Then one night something happened that brought it all to a head.
We were on a demo flight in a large, long-range jet. The trip started one morning in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a stop in LA for meetings and a dinner. Later that evening we would fly to Atlanta, drop off a couple of people, then land in New Jersey at dawn. I put on an additional pilot so we could cope with the twenty-hour flying day. It promised to be a challenging trip, made worse by the constant barrage of demands from Stanley Grassley, our prospective airplane buyer and lead passenger.
About one AM we dropped off everyone in Atlanta, including the third pilot and our flight attendant, a contract employee committed to another trip. Only Grassley and a young female business analyst remained on board for the final leg to New Jersey.
As we flew up the coast in the quiet, pre-dawn skies, Grassley began making drunken advances toward the young female. She rejected them, her frightened voice echoing throughout the cabin. Corporate jets are very quiet in flight so we were getting it all in the cockpit. I heard her sharp, fearful cries as she resisted him. This was not happening on my airplane. Stepping out of the captain seat I told my copilot to mind the store and headed back to the cabin.
The lady bumped into me as she fled forward trying to get away from Grassley. I gently nudged her aside and confronted him, my cop senses on high alert. With Grassley standing there, drunk and swaying back and forth, I asked the lady if she was comfortable with what was happening. She nodded an emphatic no.
Turning to him, I said “Mr. Grassley, making advances toward this lady against her will is ...”
“You get back up front and do your pilot thing,” he growled, interrupting me and sticking his finger in my face. “What I do in the cabin of this plane that I’m paying for is none of your business.”
He came closer, glaring as he took up what he probably thought was a threatening stance. I’d been at it for almost twenty-four hours. It would be so easy to give in to my anger and forcibly shove this guy into a seat. Grassley in his boozy state seemed confident he could push me around, but I’d been here many times before with far more dangerous people than him. I drew a mental line in front of me. You were taught that in cop school, to mentally record the process of any encounter with a suspect where there was a potential for physical violence, so you could tell the story over and over again. Step one was to define the physical dimensions, thus the mental line that, if Grassley crossed it, physical force would be used.
If that happened I would take him in hand and force him into a seat where, if necessary, I would tie him in place with seat belts for the rest of the flight. He stopped just short of it, staring angrily at me.
“We’ve had a nice flight so far, Mr. Grassley, so why don’t you go take a nap until we land in New Jersey,” I said.
I waited for him to cross my line, hoping he would, but then, wobbling in his drunken state he turned, staggered down the aisle and fell into a seat.
I turned to the lady. “You’ll be OK now,” I said. “If you’d feel safer you can have the jump seat up front with us.”
She nodded in silent agreement, still shaking in fright. “I want to be up there,” she said, waving absently toward the cockpit.
The rest of the flight was peaceful. Grassley snored loudly in the back and the young lady watched the dark sky through the windshield and occasionally asked a question about the flight.
When we taxied up and stopped on the ramp she stepped out of the jump seat, shook my hand and thanked me. Then she grabbed her bag and left the plane while Grassley was still shaking himself awake. I heard him banging around in the back gathering his things, then he stomped forward and glared at me.
“You’ll never fly me again and I’ll never buy a plane from your crummy company. And I’ll tell all my friends on Wall Street how you insulted me,” he said. I thought about that transplant doc on our arrival after that long night, tossing a threat at me as he left the plane. But he had an excuse: he was dead tired and he was accomplishing medical miracles. Grassley, on the other hand, had done something terribly wrong. If that lady chose to file a complaint, he could be charged and arrested. I hoped it would come to that. I would happily testify against him.
“Thanks for flying with us, Mr. Grassley and have a nice day,” I replied, hiding my disgust and pasting on my best corporate pilot smile.
We never heard from him again and, according to the jet listing services, he never bought a plane from anyone. He was just another flake prospect in a long line of them in my life.
Grassley’s conduct was ugly and repulsive, but putting up with that kind of behavior was part of a corporate pilot’s job. But it was the opposite of what I’d promised myself would be acceptable after I left police work. Mr. Grassley would not be the last despicable character who would descend into my life. Corporate and charter pilots endure their abuse as part of their jobs. For me, thought, I had to get away from Grassley and his kind and, this time, for good.
As I was deliberating on what to do, the company’s problems erupted in a string of crises, the destructive forces that were part of that business eating away at our infrastructure and our finances. We closed ranks to defend ourselves. With all this going on, the Grassley encounter was the last straw. As we re-structured and re-organized trying to save the company, it was easy for me to volunteer to leave.
“Woody, you can’t leave,” Dave said.
“I know, Dave, but I don’t believe in this business anymore, and I’m not going to put up with anymore Grassleys. They don’t deserve the special treatment we give them,” I said.
“Of course they don’t, but the money business is full of them,” he said laughing. “And every now and then they buy a plane from us.”
Maybe he could put up with it, but I was done. I wished him well and began the search for whatever would come next.
The good news in a way: the options I would consider were narrowing as I eliminated the types of flying I would accept - corporate jets at the top of the not-going-there list. The best alternative was to go back to helicopters.
The jet business was all about fancy companies and cool offices and VP’s in fancy suits. The helicopter community, in contrast was casual clothes and boots driving pickups, what you’d expect to see at a construction site. Yearning to escape the glitz, that was fine with me. My version of the pickup thing was a BMW SUV.
The money wouldn’t be as good in helicopters but the flying was always interesting and there would be no more despicable people to reckon with. What a pleasant relief it would be to climb into a helicopter and just take off across the trees.
***
So here I was in 2006, a medevac pilot for the third time, my own career pretty much spanning the history of US air medical flying. From that long perspective, what I would experience this time around was the end point of a process that had played out over the years - the money people taking control of the medical care business and their cost cuts forcing a very different kind of medevac operation from when it all started in the early 80’s.
In the first days of training in my new medevac job we would land for fuel at airports around the Phoenix metro area. I looked across at the Challengers and Learjets like the ones I used to fly. They were beautiful planes, but watching the pilots carrying bags on board and hustling around catering to the rich passengers was a sharp reminder of why I wasn’t there with them.
I think my family was happier with our new life. We weren’t making as much money, but I had a schedule, I had planned days off every month, and my cell phone wasn’t ringing at all hours with the latest crisis. We could make plans knowing that nothing from work would get in the way. As far as lifestyle, it was better, work when you were scheduled and forget about it the rest of the time.
That sense of relief didn’t carry over into the flying, though. On the one hand, I was glad to be back flying helicopters. You’re in touch with the aircraft, its constant motion and rhythmic thrumming more sensuous and intense than the quiet silence of a jet. But, compared to the 222’s and 412’s I’d flown before, these single-engine helicopters were, in a way, more stressful to fly. Because they had only light-plane style instruments and no autopilot, flying them in marginal weather required us to hand fly an unstable aircraft and keep it level with only the barest essentials in the cockpit.
But trauma patients still fell in far off places in the mountains. Picking our way through rain and darkness in hostile terrain was as urgent a mission as it ever had been, but now, in these smaller, poorly-equipped aircraft, it was far more dangerous.
Not everyone can live with the uncertainties of medevac flying. Many nurses who were drawn to the flight nurse role because it seemed more exciting than working in an ER found that plunging into a landing zone deep in the forest at three o’clock in the morning was just plain scary. Those who stayed with it anyway chose to accept the fear in return for the satisfaction of treating trauma patients in the wild without a doctor looking over their shoulder. Their dedication and toughness while enduring the challenges makes them a rare breed, and very special.
Even so, you had to ask yourself: if they’re that fearful why choose to get in a helicopter at all? Their choice, though, is part of a complex thought process entangled in personal empowerment, all beyond my sphere of comprehension. Those nurses, though, who let that personal fear own them are harder to work with, adding more tension to what is already a dangerous, demanding mission.
When I was working in Michigan the med crew were nurses from the local ER. They were in general nice to work with. Maybe it was the small-town atmosphere, but they treated the pilots more like friends than anywhere else I knew of in the medevac world. When I first arrived several of them actually welcomed me to the program. I didn’t know quite what to make of it and wondered if they were setting me up or something. That wasn’t the case. We faced the day’s challenges together and some of them became close friends.
That’s not to say that there were never any issues. Right after I completed training in the 412 and was released to fly day shifts there was one of those encounters.
I was prepping for engine start and the nurses were loading their gear. One of them poked her head around the bulkhead and asked, “Do we have enough fuel?” Shocked at the sudden shot out of nowhere, I turned to look at her. Was she joking? Her blank stare said she wasn’t. As I stifled my initial angry impulse my mind clicked through the possible answers: “Well, I don’t know but I think we’re OK,” or others equally nasty and sarcastic. That was all in the span of a couple of seconds before I smiled at her and said, “Yeah, we’re fine.”
She disappeared back into the main compartment and I heard her and her partner in a whispered conversation. They must’ve approved of my answer, because there were no more questions during the flight. Had I given in to my anger my nasty response would’ve followed me the rest of my days working with them. As it was, that nurse and I became the best of friends, and to this day, still stay in touch. As to that day, my theory is they were nervous. They had very little turnover in that program, weren’t used to new pilots and couldn’t think of any other way to express their nervousness. Welcome to the complex world of flight nurses.
On another occasion a nurse loudly let me know she did not approve of my flying. Could her sudden outburst have distracted me enough to lose control of the helicopter? Had I been a rookie medevac pilot, quite possibly.
After I’d completed training in the AStar, the single-engine ship we flew in Arizona, I was working nights at a base in the Phoenix area, an extra shift covering a pilot who was out sick. We flew out to a remote location on a large, dusty flat to pick up an accident victim. Arriving over the scene our ambulance, along with the local police, awaited our arrival. Flying a recon pattern while checking it out with the searchlight revealed wires nearby, smaller ones - telephone or low-voltage electrical wires. I flew a steep approach to the LZ to avoid them. As we settled through about twenty feet, ghostly tendrils of dust and dirt drifted up from the surface. In the next few seconds our rotor wash blasted the dirt below into an impenetrable cloud. “Oh great,” I thought. “Brownout at three AM.”
Brownout, when dust or sand blows up around an arriving helicopter causes a lot of crashes. The pilot can’t see the ground and the helicopter drifts ever so slightly sideways or backward. A skid digs into the ground, it lurches sideways and rolls over, the rotor blades striking the ground and destroying the aircraft.
I’ve found that looking down through the chin windows in the nose of the helicopter, you can sometimes get a small but clear picture of the front of the skid and the ground under it. Sometimes the rotor wash blows so much dirt out and away from the aircraft you can see the ground right beneath the skid enough to safely ease the thing down the last few feet.
That morning, though, I lost all sight of the ground, even through the chin windows. Time to abort and pull up and out of there. I did just that and circled around for another look. The dirt cloud we’d created was now a huge, dark blob hanging over the LZ. The surrounding terrain appeared to be salt flat. If we had blown away the dusty top layer we might be fine the next time in. Figuring out how to make use of that LZ was far better than asking the ground crew to set up another one.
So, I went back in the same route and the cloud blew up around us again, but it wasn’t near as bad and I could see the ground through the chin window. At about five feet, just as I was getting ready to set the helicopter down, the nurse suddenly yelled over the intercom.
“I’m not in favor of this!”
Her piercing voice made me jump in surprise, just as I was about to execute the delicate maneuver of landing in blurry conditions. Should I ignore the shouting for the two or three seconds it would take to land, or should I pull out again?
Very rarely in the life of a 21st century civilian pilot are we called on to make split-second decisions. In the medevac world, it happens a lot, and this was one of them. I had good visual contact with the ground. The landing was not in jeopardy. So, I ignored the shouting and landed. Seconds later, sitting on the ground safe and sound, the cabin was silent and everyone just sat there.
“If you guys want to get out now, it’s clear,” I said.
No one answered, but without another word they jumped out and walked to the ambulance. I stayed in the aircraft with the power at idle. The dust settled and, through a latent mist of grit, I watched the police waving flashlights at the passing cars. A sharp smell of ozone in the air drifted through the cabin, a product of static electricity from the dust we’d blown around.
A few minutes later the med crew pushed the gurney toward the aircraft and loaded the patient. They climbed in, closed the doors and took their seats.
“You guys ready?” I asked.
There was one sullen grunt to the affirmative.
“Might be a little dust on departure,” I said. Probably shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist. I eased the helicopter off the ground, then, with a quick pull on the collective, we rose up and out of what little dirt was still hanging around.
After we dropped off the patient and were on our way back to base I thought about what I should say to the crew. It occurred to me that I should’ve offered a brief explanation on the second flight around the LZ. On the other hand, at the beginning of the shift this crew had made it clear they weren’t interested in talking to me about anything.
A dozen versions drifted through my mind, some confrontational, others more conciliatory. Given this crew, though, I went for silence. What would it prove with them to attempt a rational discussion? They’d made it well known on my arrival that night that they had little use for pilots. The shift would be over in an hour and, since this wasn’t my assigned base I probably would never see these people again.
After we landed and shut down, the crew climbed out and left the pad. I busied myself filling out flight forms until they disappeared into the quarters, killing a half an hour at the helicopter. By then the day shift had arrived.
Months later I did end up working with that crew again. We didn’t speak of that night. Some dogs are better left sleeping.
As I look back on it now it occurs to me they weren’t being abusive on purpose. They didn’t exactly hold pilots in high esteem but that wasn’t the sole basis for their complaints. It was fear. Who wouldn’t be on edge riding in the back of a helicopter thrashing around in a blinding cloud of dust? You didn’t have to be a pilot to know that was dangerous. Could we be sympathetic and give them some slack if they started sniping at us? Could we somehow, maybe even calm their fears?
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