Family & Leisure
De Troy keeps humble by comparing himself to his wife. When asked what he considers his greatest professional accomplishment, he shifts his answer from himself to Veronique. The travel and time that both his globe-hopping military and Helisim careers have demanded of him, his wife, and their children are the type of demands that dissolve many families. One time he was deployed for five months in Djibouti and then was home only one week when he was suddenly deployed for a NATO exercise in Norway. “I barely had time to pack up my African stuff before I headed to Norway. My wife was again alone to raise our three kids,” he says with a tinge of melancholy. “She deserves so much credit for our success and for our marriage.” He unhesitatingly says that his greatest professional accomplishment is that his family stayed happily together throughout his career. “That is mostly due to my wife,” he says. “My children’s success also is mostly due to my wife.” Their daughter is a veterinarian in the Caribbean, while one son is an IT security scientist and the other son works for an organic food company in Paris.
As aviation is integral to de Troy’s identity (remember, he said it’s in his DNA), it’s no surprise that he met his wife at an airfield over 30 years ago. She is a rated glider pilot and the couple often fly a Cessna for pleasure on weekends. Their shared interest in flying, along with hiking and nightly dinners together, strengthens their relationship. De Troy doesn’t like to watch TV, so he has more time each evening to talk with Veronique. When their dinner conversations conclude, he then turns to his other passion of reading. “I read anything because I like to read a lot. It could be an accident report or a book,” he says.
A recently read book gave him insight into piloting accidents: “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. “It’s interesting because it describes how our brains work, and that can apply
to aviation accidents.” De Troy cites flying the H145 as an example: “You push a button and engage autopilot and can start talking sports with your copilot. But that flight can quickly turn into a nightmare without the pilots really understanding how the accident developed.” Learning how our brains think might help us understand that accident process better. “Flying can be very simple, yet very hard to understand. It is difficult to trust what you don’t understand,” he says. “Most pilots are impressed by all the fancy avionics we have, but many don’t really understand their autopilot. If they get in an unexpected situation because they don’t understand and trust their autopilot, they will disconnect it and that is usually a super bad idea.”
De Troy and Helisim want to replace those bad reflexive decisions with safer instincts. He uses the hazardous conditions of North Shore oil rig flying off the coast of Norway and Sweden as an example of what good training can accomplish. “It’s not nice to fly up there, yet their accident rate is very low. They have frequent training that allows them to react to changing situations without thinking every step through. It becomes like a reflex to do the right thing,” he says. “We can do that here; it’s possible to significantly reduce accidents through training. We have the opportunity now to offer frequent, efficient, very realistic, and affordable training.”
Yet, even with that type of training, there will always be an element of luck involved with being a helicopter pilot. De Troy’s final story explains, “A French astronaut was training in Houston to go up to the International Space Station. I met him at the French consulate and we began talking about pilot stuff. I told him I did helicopter training and he responded, ‘Oh, I’d love to fly a helicopter one day!’ So, even cosmonauts dream of flying helicopters. That they dream of flying helicopters shows how lucky we are!”
16 May/June 2021
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