BRAD BERTELE
Brad Bertele is the DOM and fl ight operations manager for Safe Flight Instrument Corporation, a White Plains, NY-based company that designs, develops and produces equipment that improves the performance and safety of helicopters and fi xed-wing aircraft across the corporate, commercial and military sectors. Bertele is an Army veteran who holds and A&P/IA and is also a helicopter and fi xed-wing pilot. This is his story.
DOM AND FLIGHT OPERATIONS MANAGER | SAFE FLIGHT INSTRUMENT CORPORATION After that, Bertele was hooked
on aviation. He joined the Civil Air Patrol in high school. He did everything he could to fl y airplanes, but didn’t have the fi nancial means to get his pilot’s license. Then he came up with a plan.
FASCINATION OF AVIATION Bertele was fascinated with aviation as a kid. This fascination increased dramatically one Christmas when he was 13 when his father gave him a special gift. Bertele jokes that it was a “wicked” gift. “That Christmas, my dad gave me a gift certifi cate for a glider ride,” Bertele tells D.O.M. magazine. “The reason I joke that it was a wicked tease of a gift is because you can’t fl y a glider in Pennsylvania in December. I got that gift certifi cate and a book called The Joy of Soaring, which I read cover to cover probably 17 times before spring came around and I could fi nally get my glider ride. My instructor thought I was a ‘wise- guy’ 13-year old, and looking back, he was probably right.”
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DOMmagazine.com | feb 2017
U.S. ARMY Bertele enlisted in the Army before his high school graduation. He knew that would be his opportunity to get his foot in the door of an aviation career. Bertele signed up to be a scout helicopter crew chief. “One of the reasons I did that is the OH-58 scout helicopter was a single-pilot aircraft,” Bertele says. “My job was to jump in the helicopter, fl y with it and fi x it. Most Army crew chiefs sat in the back. In the single-pilot scout helicopter, the crew chief sat in the front.”
Because he sat up front, Bertele had the opportunity to learn how to fl y the helicopter even though his “job” wasn’t as a pilot. He also learned how to fl y in a very aggressive environment.
THE COLD WAR Bertele was stationed in Felda, West Germany in the late 1980s during the height of the Cold War. “We fl ew the
BY JOE ESCOBAR
East-West German border,” Bertele says. “It was not uncommon for us to get tracked and even missile-locked by the Soviets, although they never fi red. It was quite the experience from a pilot’s perspective to have that happen. Even though they never fi red, it was like having a laser dot on your chest — you want to get rid of it. So we would dive down and try to put dirt between us and the soviet antennas to try to lose the signal. We would fl y very low. I had to avoid a cow once!” Bertele served two years in Felda. He shares how the daily stress of fl ying in that situation changes a person’s perspective. “I remember one time, my roommate Randy had slipped on black ice, hurt his knee and was limping,” Bertele says. “He was from Texas, and had never experienced black ice before. When everyone went to dinner that evening, Randy’s slip was more interesting than me getting missile-lock, because we got missile-lock all the time. When you experience extraordinary events long enough, they become ordinary, a lesson I applied later in life treating PTSD. If you remember 1986-1987, there was this looming pressure of the Soviet Empire and nuclear war. It was a scary time, and
PHOTO BY STEVE ANDERSON
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