An Eclectic Mind

A passenger overcomes her fear while over the Grand Canyon.

She was from England, in her mid to late fifties, thin and tall. She had some difficulty with her headset and I helped her out. She didn’t tell me she was nervous. She didn’t have to. I could tell by the way she grasped her seat bottom as we took off.

We were on north traffic in and out of the airport. North traffic, for a North Canyon tour puts me on a zig-zag course over the forest northwest of the airport. The first two turns are sharp turns to the left. I’m allowed to bank up to 30° with passengers on board, and the first turn, at the Moki, needs it. As we turned and the helicopter leaned to the left, my passenger leaned to the right. I was a bit more gradual with the second left, but she leaned all the same.

The passenger clung to her seat bottom, staring straight ahead. I was just starting to wonder if she’d ever let go when she became interested in the view of the canyon, which was coming up on our right. She released her seat and began fiddling with her camera. She snapped off a picture or two and then I was making a turn to the right and she was holding onto her seat for dear life again.

This happened throughout the flight. She’d release the seat to take a few photos, then grab on again as I made a turn or some mild turbulence bumped us around. I’d seen people like her before and I knew she was okay about the flight. I tried to ignore her, since she was a bit distracting. She really broadcasted the helicopter’s minor movements to me — movements I usually had no real control over.

At the end of the 25-minute flight, I came into the airport with one last sharp left turn. I set down at my helipad, throttled down to idle, and turned to thank the passengers.

My frightened passenger was all smiles. “I was so scared!” she shouted to me. “Thank you! Thank you!” And then she hugged me tightly — a difficult task, given that I was strapped into my seat, wearing my headset, and not expecting it. She thanked me a few more times for good measure, saying how wonderful the flight had been. She shook my hand, too. I told her she made my day.

And then she was gone, rejoined with her friends outside the helicopter, telling them how great she thought the flight was.

So if anyone asks why I’ve taken on a job that pays a fraction of what I make in my other job, I can tell them about the frightened passenger and the big hug she gave me when we landed.

Summer Jobs Flying, Grand Canyon, helicopters, tourism

A Mid-season review of my job at the Grand Canyon.

The other day, a fellow helicopter pilot called me to ask about my job at Papillon. His name is Dave and he’s an R22 owner/pilot like me. I’d met him last year (I think) at the airport in Wickenburg when he came through with his helicopter on a flatbed trailer. He calls himself a “scenery collector” and flies around the country taking photos of the scenery — especially interesting geologic formations — from the air. Now he works as the Chief Flight Instructor for a flight school/aerial photography outfit in Florida, but he’s always thinking ahead.

Dave had seen an ad for a job flying A-Stars in Hawaii. He thought that might be a nice job. (Oddly enough, I think so, too.) Trouble is, he has little or no turbine experience and he knows he can’t get a job like that until he gets some.

Dave was in St. George, UT recently and ran into one or two pilots I know. I don’t know if it was Rod, who flies a helicopter for fire contracts for Papillon or Dusty and Craig who work fire contracts with a SEAT. It might have even been Robin, who runs the helicopter flight school in St. George, or his brother Job, who runs the Millionaire FBO there. (I never realized I knew so many people in St. George. I’ve only been there twice.) Anyway whoever it was reminded him about me. He looked me up on my Web site and gave me a call. By some miracle, I was at my desk and answered the phone.

We had a nice chat. He said he called to find out about working for Papillon. He told me about the Hawaii job and brought me up to date on what he was doing. He said he was thinking of applying at Papillon to get some turbine time. What did I think of working there?

So I thought about it. I’d already been thinking about it, on and off, for the whole summer. But this time, I thought about it in a way that I could provide some kind of conclusion or recommendation.

And this is what I told him.

Working at Papillon can get exceeding tedious at times. I’m the low person on the experience ladder, so I haven’t been trained to do anything except the two basic tours we do: the 25-minute tour in the Dragon Corridor and the 50-minute tour in the Zuni and Dragon Corridors. So that’s what I do. All day long. On average, I make 10-14 trips into the canyon a day. Not much variety.

What can make the work interesting is the weather. Spring brings high winds, sometimes with gusts up to 50 knots before we shut down. That generates turbulence in the canyon when all that wind is rushing over all those weird formations and buttes. Summer brings isolated and scattered thunderstorms, mostly in the afternoon. The challenge is navigating around them without flying into a no-fly zone. Of course, when you get a bit close to one, it’s a bumpy ride. And if you fly under a storm in one of its early stages when you’re out in the canyon, you can expect severe updrafts or downdrafts. Good thing there’s that big ditch under you. And I believe I’ve already gotten a glimpse of what the autumn will bring: low clouds that float below us in the canyon or as ground fog on the north rim. Very pretty, but there will come a day when I have to fly around them, too.

The pay isn’t very good. I won’t get specific, but I will say that I could never survive on that pay. I’m not sure how the rest of the pilots do it. I’m very glad I have another job that I can do on my off weeks to make the money I need to maintain my lifestyle.

And living conditions in Tusayan or Valle are not very pleasant. Imagine sharing a double-wide trailer with three other pilots. Or sharing a fifth-wheel trailer with someone you’ll become very well acquainted with. The closest supermarket is 60 miles away. The closest movie theater (other than IMAX, which plays the same movie all the time) is about 100 miles away. Night life is limited. And everything in the area is extremely overpriced.

Doesn’t sound very good, does it? Well, I’m not finished. There are definite benefits to working at Papillon.

First of all, Papillon is willing to hire piston pilots with as little as 1,000 hours of PIC time. It will train those pilots to fly Bell 206 L-1 C30P Long Ranger helicopters, using a training program that’s very similar to the coveted Bell Transition Course. But rather than take the course in a classroom crammed full of other pilots, Papillon’s training classes are typically 2 to 6 people at a time. And if a pilot needs special attention (as I admit I did for a few things), he’ll get it. The Bell course costs about $6,000 plus living expenses while you’re in Texas for a week. Papillon’s course is free and they pay you while you take it. So there’s a definite benefit to getting transition training with Papillon.

But what’s better than just the training is the extremely challenging conditions you’re thrown into right after you finish. I’m talking about those winds plus flying at high density altitudes (Grand Canyon airport is at 6600 feet) near max gross weight. Only days after learning what torque was, I was battling to keep it under 100% when I took off. And by this time in the summer, it’s common to log 6 or more Hobbs hours a day. Every day. So building time is a definite part of the package.

And, of course, there is the end-of-season bonus that comes when Papillon cuts its pilots loose in October. That makes the pay a little more palatable.

I told all this to Dave. I told him that if he was willing to dedicate an entire summer to Papillon, he’d get the experience he wanted and needed to move on to a turbine helicopter position somewhere else. And, if he didn’t drop out in the middle of the season, he’d earn the respect of Papillon’s management, which could then be depended upon as positive job references.

I think he realized the benefits and the drawbacks. Like me, he doesn’t have to depend on a job like this to survive. He’s still thinking about it, but I have a feeling that unless something else comes along, he’ll be flying at the GC next year.

As for me, one season is enough. I know where I stand with the bosses. They consider me a “Sunday pilot” because I didn’t come to them with a strong background in commercial flying or flight instructing. It doesn’t matter that I have more cross country or solo time than any of their other piston pilot converters. It doesn’t matter that I made solo cross-country trips from Wickenburg to destinations in the Los Angeles area, the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the western side of the Rockies in Colorado. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been doing tours and rides for the past three years when their other pilots were building time by teaching students how to hover. It doesn’t matter that I can perform as well as — or better than, in some cases — any of the other pilots, sitting in a cockpit for 6 hours straight sometimes, conducting tour after tour. No matter what I do or how I perform for the rest of the season, nothing will change that. So the chances of me getting more training and more varied assignments next year are pretty much nil. And I cannot bear the thought of cranking 50 to 80 passengers a day through the canyon every work day next summer.

So what will I do next summer? I’m thinking about barnstorming in my new R44…anyone want to come along for the ride?

Summer Jobs Flying, Grand Canyon, helicopters, jobs, tourism

Two passengers on consecutive flights are as different as night and day.

Passenger one was a young boy, about twelve or thirteen years old. He was overweight, with pudgy freckled cheeks. He wore long, droopy shorts and a tee shirt. He sat down beside me and was buckled in by the loader. I handed him his headset as the loader closed the door and continued loading the rest of the family into the back.

When his headset was on, I gave him a cheerful hello. He responded with a very unenthusiastic hello.

“How are you doing today?” I asked him.

“Okay.” The word came out as if I’d forced it from him. It was flat. It told me he really wasn’t okay but he was telling me that he was just so I’d leave him alone.

Of course, I couldn’t do that. “Must be better than just okay,” I said. “After all, you’re going for a helicopter ride. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

He nodded glumly.

I got the thumbs up from the loader and started my passenger briefing, glancing in the back. His mom and dad were facing forward. His little sister, about eight years old, sat behind me facing backwards. They were all overweight. They were American, of course, from Colorado.

I took off a while later. We were on an Imperial Tour. That’s the long one, 45-50 minutes long. I gave them a little bit of a narration. Once, I heard the little sister in back yell out, “Look Mommy!” and say something about seeing deer. The boy beside me was looking out through the bubble at his feet at the trees we flew over. Later, he looked out the windows. But he didn’t react to what he was seeing. It was as if he was watching a television show his parents were making him watch when another show he really wanted to watch was on another channel at the same time.

At one point, he rested his chin in his hand. I had to look at his eyes to make sure he was still awake. He had long, curly eyelashes. His eyes were open, but they revealed nothing but boredom.

For heaven’s sake! He was being flown in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon! His parents had coughed up $169 (each) for this life experience and he had absolutely no appreciation for what he was seeing.

(For the record, I do it ten or more times in a day and I still enjoy seeing it.)

When they got off, I gave him and his sister each an Aero-Prop. (It’s a helicopter-like toy I give out to the kids.) His has probably already been added to the collection of junk dropped by tourists at the rim.

The next group of passengers were from England. The woman who sat next to me was probably in her eighties. She was small and rather frail looking and had some trouble getting into the seat. Dennis, the loader, helped her. She thanked him very politely, looking like she really meant it. I helped her with her headset, then said hello to her. She said hello back, then started looking at my instrument panel and the flight controls. She was really studying them. I thought she was going to ask some questions, but she didn’t. Her eyes just kept moving all over them. I started wondering whether she was all there.

I did the preflight briefing. I had a full load of six passengers, all from the same bus tour. Most of them were middle aged. Two of the women had enormous breasts. (That really doesn’t have any bearing on this story, but it is a fact.) They were all crammed into the back seats, but they looked happy enough.

We took off on a North Canyon tour. That’s the short tour, about 25-30 minutes. The woman beside me was very interested in the collective as I pulled it up. More interested than anyone else who has ever sat beside me. I started to wonder whether she might try to grab it. I didn’t let go for quite a while.

We passed the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine on its return trip to Williams. I pointed it out. The woman beside me looked. Then she untangled her sunglasses from her seat belt and camera strap and put them on. She gazed around like an average passenger and I realized that she was probably as harmless as she looked.

But as we made the turn toward Eremita Tank and she saw the canyon ahead of us, she changed. It was as if she’d been told that she was going to see something good and she suddenly realized that it was going to be better than she’d originally thought. Way better. She took off her sunglasses and, as we crossed the rim into the canyon, she began looking at everything. I’ve never seen anyone look so hard. It was as if she were trying to commit everything she saw to memory. Like she was a sponge trying to absorb everything in. And every time I pointed out something, she looked to make sure she saw it.

I thought about my Grandmother, who passed away about two years ago. For a moment, I imagined that this woman was my grandmother and that I was finally taking her for a helicopter ride. It made my eyes teary.

We were on our way back across the canyon when I saw her wipe her eyes. Her fingers were wet. She was crying. Here was a woman near the end of her life and she still saw wonder in the Grand Canyon.

And I thought about the fat kid who’d been in her seat for the last flight. He had his whole life before him but couldn’t see how incredible the Grand Canyon was — even when he was looking at it from the front seat of a helicopter.

(I’m glad I don’t have kids. I couldn’t bear to have a child like him. Or let my children associate with children like him. Small minded, spoiled, and never happy.)

I’ll think about the woman from England for a long time. The fat kid is someone I’d rather forget.

Flying, Summer Jobs Flying, Grand Canyon, helicopters, kids, tourism

I think about my job as a Grand Canyon Tour Pilot and come up with seven things I think are strange about it and the people I meet.

No doubt about it. Being a Grand Canyon helicopter tour pilot exposes you to all kinds of weird things. Here are a few of the weird things I’ve witnessed lately, in no particular order.

A front seat passenger riding with her eyes closed. This happened today, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind. She was from England, an older woman probably in her early sixties. She said something to me as her friends climbed on board in the back, but I couldn’t hear/understand what she was saying. But when I asked if it was her first helicopter flight, she said it wasn’t. On takeoff, she held onto her seat bottom and the door frame. She leaned toward me when I banked left and away from me when I banked right. When we broke out over the rim on the tour, with the Grand Canyon and all its splendor spread out before us, she was holding on tight. When I looked at her face, I noticed her eyes were tightly closed. Okay, so she opened them after a few minutes and seemed calm enough. But for a while, I thought she’d do the whole tour with her eyes closed. Talk about a waste of money!

A passenger who made herself sick. I call her Captain Video. She was an American of Indian descent and that camcorder was turned on from the moment she sat down. Her eyeball was in the viewfinder nonstop for the first twenty minutes of the flight. Then she hurriedly reached for a barf bag and puked into it. It wasn’t the turbulence. It was incredibly calm that morning and there was no reason to be sick. Unless, of course, you were enjoying the view through a camcorder viewfinder. After having a good puke, she put the camera up to her face again. Five minutes later, puke. She did this for the rest of the flight. I think she must have puked seven or eight times. She even started a second barf bag. If she’d only keep the camera away from her face, she’d be fine. Heck, it was calm!

A woman who decided she was going to be sick before we even took off. While we’re on the subject of puke, I better do this one, too. She sat in the front seat and as soon as her husband got into his seat behind her, a hand came forward with a barf bag in it. She took the bag (we have them in the front, too) and turned to me. “I always get sick,” she told me. And sure enough, she did. About two thirds of the way through the short flight, she calmly opened the bag and made a deposit. And no, it wasn’t turbulent. Oddly, she did this the same day Captain Video rode with me. My first two barfs in one day.

People who remind me that they don’t speak English. Okay, so it’s always French people. Always. No one else has ever told me that they don’t speak English. It’s just French people and always women. What’s that about? The manifest I get tells me where everyone comes from and what language I should play the narrative in. I don’t speak French. I can only do my preflight briefing in English. And they seem to doubt that they’ll hear any French during the tour. But when I start up Disc 1 Track 9 and that French voice comes on, they nod, satisfied. You don’t think this is strange? That’s it’s just French people?

Working with people who are, on average, ten years younger than me. Wow. Was I like that when I was in my twenties and thirties? I don’t think so. I feel a little like a den mother. In the break room, they make bathroom jokes and watch surfing and skateboarding on television. They make rude noises to each other over the Canyon air-to-air frequency while we’re flying. They have nicknames like Clogger (think bathroom) and Crispy (I don’t know what to think). They make me feel old and out of place and rather glad that I built my life before I learned to fly.

Spending the entire day doing just two different tours in all kinds of weather. Talk about tedious. There’s the 25-minute tour and the 50-minute tour. You can make more money doing just the 25-minute tour, but I just can’t handle doing the same thing over and over all day long. Doing two different things all day long makes it marginally more interesting. The weather, however, is what keeps you awake. Springtime is full of winds gusting to 40 knots or more. (They call it quits when it hits 50 knots.) Summer is full of isolated showers and thunderstorms that keep you wondering whether you’ll find your way back to the heliport at the end of a tour. (They call it quits when visibility drops to zero, hail exceeds the size of a pea, or lightning strikes nearby make it impossible to refuel safely.) Who knows what autumn will bring?

Living in or near a tourist town. Although I don’t live in Tusayan, working here gives me a good taste of what it must be like to live here. A constant flow of people, most of whom do not speak English. High prices in every store (and discounts for locals in most, if you know the secret password). Limited nightlife, limited shopping, unlimited tee shirts, unlimited collector’s spoons. Overpriced, substandard housing. And some of the world’s most beautiful scenery, right in your backyard. But the weirdest part? Come September, the area’s population will shrivel up to a bare minimum — the year-rounders who actually do this all the time.

There you have it. Seven things. If I come up with more — which I’m sure I will — I’ll report them here.

Summer Jobs Flying, Grand Canyon, helicopters, tourism

My lessons on learning to fly in weather continue on a new track.

It’s monsoon season here in Arizona.

Monsoon season is the time of year when there’s a seasonal wind shift that brings moisture off the Gulf of Mexico up and into New Mexico and Arizona. (It may get as far north as Colorado and Utah, but I think we get most of it.) Most days start off sunny and pretty clear, with just a few friendly clouds floating low in the sky. But then the sun kicks in and puts those clouds to work. Convective activity builds them into towering cumulus clouds that move in an east to west flow (sometimes southeast to northwest; sometimes northeast to southwest). The clouds build very quickly and, after a while, gang up to form storm cells. The rain from the biggest of these clouds can start as early as lunchtime. But if they’re still around and still building in the afternoon, they turn into ugly cumulonimbus and start throwing lightning bolts and, on occasion, hail.

Fortunately, these storms are extremely localized and easy to see. Pilots flying at our altitudes (i.e., 300-500 feet above the ground) can usually fly around them. We can even get pretty close to them if we have to.

On Wednesday, my first day back to work, I got my first t-storm lesson. I was a spare pilot, flying someone else’s ship for lunch. I was returning from a tour, about 3 miles out, when a lightning bolt came out of an innocent looking cloud and struck the ground about a half mile away from me. I immediately saw smoke in the trees near where it had struck. Shit. I hurried back. When I made my 2-out call and they told me my next flight, I told them about the lightning, sure that they’d put on a weather hold. Silly me. I was told I’d better get used to it.

Later, the Chief Pilot told me that I was actually safer in the air than spinning on the pad when there was lightning around. Lightning wanted to hit the ground, not something in the air. I found his words comforting. (If they’re not correct, please don’t tell me. I’d prefer blissful ignorance on this topic.)Yesterday, I got a better lesson. I was the top priority pilot, which meant that I was going to be flying all day. That was fine with me. I’d rather fly a helicopter than waste time in the break room. The storms built up magnificently throughout the morning and by lunchtime were raining down in various places on the North Rim and far to the east. I had a lunch break and returned to fly at 1:20 PM. The storms had built up and were darker than before. I did a few flights and had no trouble staying clear — the storms weren’t on our route.

But then I did an Imperial Tour, which took me to the east. A storm I’d spied out that way seemed very close to Grandview Ridge. The tower had even commented on it. When I got out to Grandview, it was raining heavily on us, but we were on the storm’s northern edge. The lightning was still about 2 miles to our south. The temperature had dropped considerably — enough for me to close both vents — but the air was still smooth, with no heavy winds, updrafts, or downdrafts. I made a pirep to our company frequency, telling them about the storm and that it was still good to fly on the east side. Then we broke out of the cloudy area and were treated to views of a sun-drenched painted desert and the spectacle of the Little Colorado River’s flood flow turning the Colorado River brown at the confluence.

I was at the Split when I heard some chatter on our FM frequency. It appears that the storm we’d skirted had come straight to the airport. It was dumping “quarter-inch hail” on the helipad. Chuck’s voice sounded unusually perturbed as he reported all this to everyone. Visibility was zero-zero. He told the pilots on their way back to stay clear. To land near the ponds. No, the storm was moving that way fast. Land near the triangle.

What followed was chatter between the pilots in that area, deciding what they were going to do. By that time, I was over the North Rim and had a clear view to the south. Although I could see the South Rim, anything beyond it was lost in a dark gray cloud. With lightning. I got on the FM frequency and told them where I was. Should I double back and return the way I’d come so I could come in behind the storm? I was advised to continue. Although I doubted the wisdom of that, I followed orders. These guys had far more experience with canyon storm systems than I did.

The chatter started up again. AirStar, another helicopter company, had flown south to Red Butte and was able to come in from there. The pilots about to land (or landed, perhaps) decided to circumvent the storm system by flying around its western edge to the south. One by one, they made their way home and were told to shut down. Soon, I was one of only two pilots still in the canyon, now in the Dragon Corridor. The other pilot, Tyler, was about 15 minutes behind me, doing the same tour I was.

At first, it didn’t look good. There was definitely a storm system in front of me. But by the time I got to Dragon’s Head, I realized that it was two separate storms. Dripping Springs, where I had to fly, was remarkably clear, with a storm on either side. I reported this to Tyler when he asked. He sounded nervous. (But that could be his voice; he often sounds like that.) When I got to Dripping Springs, I got a good look at the storm that had hit the airport. It was a monster, right on my usual flight path, a wall of gray that completely blocked out everything. No flying through that. But I could clearly see Red Butte in the distance. I reported all this to Tyler. Someone got on the FM radio and started giving me detailed instructions how how to get it. But I didn’t need them. It was pretty obvious where I had to go. I made my call to the Tower. I told the controller where I was and what I planned — to skirt the western edge of the storm and come in from there. The controller read me the ATIS info, I thanked him, and continued in.

A moment later, I could see the tower. The airport looked clear. I reported this to Tyler, too. By this time, he was at Tower of Ra, still about 3 minutes from the Rim. It would be close for him, especially if the two storms decided to merge. I called our tower about three miles out and was assigned a pad. Then I called Grand Canyon tower and was given permission to cross the runway. It was raining lightly there but my landing was uneventful. All the other helicopters were already there, tied down. There was hail on the ground, making the scene look more like something out of a Christmas card than mid-summer. Here’s a photo I took later of the hail on the ground. I included my shoe to give you an idea of size. The smallest of the ice pellets was about the size of a pea. Some were about twice that size. Amazingly, there were still piles of the stuff at the bottom of gutter drainpipes at the Papillon hangar midday, the next day.

Tyler came in just as I was tying down my blades.

Summer Jobs Flying, Grand Canyon, helicopters, weather