INTHESPOTLIGHT continued
started to head for a place, and before I got to it, the cyl- inder seized and blew the jug completely off. This was a six-cylinder Bell 47 engine. I kind of just smiled and thought, here’s my chance to prove I can handle an emergency. I was able to autorotate and land it just as smoothly as a practice autorotation.
What advice would you offer for a pilot who would like to achieve their own accident- or incident-free career? Don’t ever give up on it. You know you can’t sit there and freeze and hope that something will happen. You have to take action. It happens just so fast. You have to do the right thing, and that’s where the skill comes in. You can get into situations in a helicopter where your job exceeds your skill and you just can’t recover. It’s good to practice those skills. That’s what you get in 31,000 hours—a lot of practice. It isn’t just a matter of training, though. You have to
focus. It was different then. The Bell 47 had no GPS, gov- ernor, or other system to help. You had to fly every min- ute, navigate, maintain rotor rpm, all of it, every minute of the flight. When I went to HAI HELI-EXPO 2023, I saw the helicopters of today, which are just so amazing. Nowadays, helicopters have this controller stabilization augmentation, or autopilot, and other systems where you can just set it up and it’ll fly itself. When I was in the military, I had an accident with a
saw and lost my last three fingers on my right hand above the first joint. I was able to recover and prove I could still fly and climb up that H-21 for preflight, which was no easy thing to do with a weak hand. But 80% of the use of your hand is in your thumb and first finger, so I was able to prove I could fly just as well, and that’s how I flew my entire career. I would say that if you’re determined to do some-
thing, if you can find a way to compensate for whatever is the issue, you can succeed.
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rotor.org/academy 22 ROTOR JUNE 2023
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