Above: Joe Mashman lands a Bell 47J at O’Higgins Hospital in Peru with Luisa Maria Nunez Bravo onboard in 1956. Mashman was on a promotional tour of South America when he received a request to medevac the young girl who had been injured in a car accident. The rescue occurred at 13,000 feet and required a climb to 17,000 feet to clear the Andes Mountains. Photo: Courtesy of the Mashman Aviation History File
plow could clear the way for an ambulance. That was the first time that Joe Mashman had ever seen a helicopter (Padfield, 1992). About two months later, it was decided that the Bell Aircraft helicopter development team needed another pilot. At the time, Floyd Carlson, a pre- vious fixed-wing test pilot, was the only Bell hel- icopter pilot.
However, none of the fixed-wing
test pilots wanted to volunteer to fly helicopters. Mashman had some interest in the helicopter after seeing the Woolams rescue first hand. He was the most junior member of the group and figured that he would be selected for helicopter duty anyway, so he decided to volunteer. He was assigned to Bell’s helicopter development team as a helicopter test pilot in the spring of 1945.
Later ROTORCRAFTPROFESSIONAL
in life, he said that volunteering to fly the heli- copter was one of the best decisions he ever made (Padfield, 1992). Upon Mashman’s arrival at
the helicopter
development group’s Gardenville facility, Floyd Carlson taught him to fly the Bell Model 30. The two of them would do nearly all of the flight tests on the original Bell Model 30s, known as Ships 1, 2 and 3. By the end of 1945, Mashman had become a valuable member of the Gardenville team and a skilled helicopter pilot. Around this same time, Bell was trying to get the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) to certify the Bell Model 47.
copter had ever been certified by the CAA, so new standards had to be
24
The problem was that no heli- developed.
Joe
Mashman not only helped to adapt the fixed- wing certification standards to helicopters, but also played an important role in determining the training and certification standards that would be needed for helicopter pilots (Padfield, R., 1992). On March 8, 1946, the Bell Model 47 received the first commercial certification ever given to a helicopter, followed by Approved Type Certificate Number One (NC-1H) two months later. Floyd Carlson and Joe Mashman also received heli- copter instructor pilot ratings, which allowed Bell Aircraft to open a helicopter flight training school later that year (Brown, 1995). On January 28, 1947, Carlson became the first CAA commercial rotorcraft pilot examiner and Mashman became the second. Following commencement of Model
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