No Mavericks to the Rescue
By: Adrian Páramo I know nothing about aviation, although I’m married to a helicopter pilot. All aircraft look identical to me. I easily mistake a Robinson for a Jet Ranger, and unlike my husband, I can’t accurately identify aircraft only by the slightest roar of its engine. Yet over the last week, while my husband flies in and out of the areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, I’ve come to the realization that my ignorance is a blessing. Not knowing the technical intricacies of my husband’s job has allowed me to see the human aspect of what he does, the hidden side of a job, highly romanticized in movies such as Top Gun. Who didn’t fall under the spell of Maverick in that film and thought that all pilots were rugged, tough, handsome men who ruthlessly ruled the skies? I know one thing though.
Pilots use a combination of instruments and landmarks to navigate the open sky. When it’s dark, and the landmarks (masts, beacons, antennas, and such) have been swept away by a hurricane, all a pilot has to work with is intuition. Oh yes, there is also a cornucopia of knobs, screens, buttons, and switches on the instrument panel. That’s exactly how these pilots are flying in and out of the states affected by Katrina. I nervously watched television as a pilot rescued a couple of people from a rooftop in New Orleans. He or she (the viewer rarely sees a shot of the pilot) put the helicopter into a rock solid hover while his teammate descended onto the slanted, wet roof of the building below. Surrounding crew and chopper were more buildings and a maze of power lines that swayed and shook in synch with the helicopter blades. The rescuer shouted instructions to the two stranded victims, showed them how to put the harness on, and tried his best to make his instructions clear so to avoid a tragedy. All the while, the pilot maintained the helicopter in a solid, sustained, perfect hover, his hand firmly grasping the throttle, one eye on the three lives beneath the machine, the other eye on the instruments, and most surely a divine extra eye keeping the flying debris from darting through the windows. The slightest mistake on the pilot’s part, the smallest distraction could cost everybody’s lives. One of the two stranded people was an old man with frail frame carrying an oxygen tank; he was confused and frightened. It took what it seemed forever to safely whisk them up in the air and on board of the aircraft. As I saw the helicopter fly away—shingles and debris flying in all directions at take off—I realized that pilots never get the praise they deserve. My husband, Tom, was called to operate initially out of Pensacola, Fl., and later Baton Rouge. His role was to fly damage assessment personnel back and forth as required. “Don’t worry,” he assured me when he got the call. “It won’t be a life-saving operation,” he said, to put my mind at ease. The first night after flying the BBC crew, telephone company employees, and several engineers to various destinations along the Gulf Coast, he called me to let me know he was ok. He wasn’t calling from his hotel room in Pensacola although it was almost midnight. He called me from Mobile, Alabama, while his helicopter was being refueled. “Are you ok?” I asked him. He didn’t answer immediately and for a few seconds I thought we had lost communication. But we hadn’t. His broken voice came back through the line as he shared the events of his day with me. He was choking back tears trying to maintain his composure and also probably trying to hide them from the re-fueler standing a few feet away from him. He told me about his flight out of New Orleans well into the night. It had been a good day flight-wise; he had done his job, he said. However as he flew away from New Orleans in the darkness, he could see a desperate display of flashlights pointing at him from rooftops. Lights that flashed and talked and begged him to come down and rescue them. But he had a different job to do. He needed to return his passengers—three engineers—back to Pensacola. “I just wanted to go roof hopping, turn each of those flashlights off, put everybody in the helicopter, and fly away to dry land and safety, but I couldn’t. I had to turn around and leave them behind. That was my job.” I heard him cry. My husband served in the British Royal Air Force for 25 years, many of which he spent in a cockpit. He is no stranger to human tragedy: he was a SAS member, an antiterrorist squadron leader in Northern Ireland, and a military adviser for a Middle Eastern country’s government. Yet I had never seen him as touched and feeling as helpless as he was that first night after flying out of New Orleans. He wasn’t alone in his feelings. Once on the ground, during a rare moment of respite, a group of civilian pilots like Tom, shared stories, shed tears, shook their heads in disbelief at the desolation they saw from the air. I’m sure they didn’t look at all like the macho students of the elite flying school for advanced pilots that so many of us learned as the real deal from Top Gun. They don’t go by “Viper,” “Goose,” “Jester,” or “Iceman.” They don’t have time to socialize, they most likely don’t even know each other’s names, and they don’t wear fancy flying suits or black and white uniforms with shoulder bands. They fly in shorts and sandals because their helicopters are not air conditioned, many hours pass before they get a single meal. They don’t whine about the weather, or the long hours, or the lack of adequate lodging. They went there to help, and I know, they wouldn’t have it any other way. Last Thursday wasn’t a good day for me. Tom called me in the morning to let me know that he was about to take off. He was flying to New Orleans to rescue a couple of employees of a telephone company who were trapped with their dog inside a building. “I’ve got pizzas, water, and I brought along a couple of my t-shirts. Bet these guys are starving,” Tom said, as if he was going on a weekend camping trip. During the day, I heard on the news that two helicopters had been shot at and that one had gone down. My heart sank. From then on I glued my eyes to the TV screen expecting to catch a glimpse of Tom’s blue bird, fearing that his helicopter might be shot at, or mobbed at landing by desperate crowds. While I worried and frantically worked the phones trying to find him a hotel room for the night, Tom was landing over power lines on a building roof barely wide enough for his machine, with the blades of his bird rotating only a few inches over the air conditioning units and just one foot separating them from a wall. The helicopter wobbled, trapped in a recirculation whirlpool formed between the air conditioning units and the wall. Armed with a crow bar and a hammer, Tom and his passenger struggled to open the locked door on the roof. They left the helicopter running as they worked; they couldn’t afford to shut it down, only to find out later that the machine wouldn’t start. Helicopters do that, I think. The operation took longer than anticipated. By the time they had broken the door open, gone inside the building and finished the job, the helicopter was very low on fuel. “Are you ok?” I asked my husband again after he finished his story. “I’m fine,” he replied. “It was supposed to get easier with each passing day, but it’s getting worse.” It was 11:30 PM when he called; he had just arrived to the hotel Id reserved for him online. He sounded fatigued. Before we hung up he said that he’d be on Japanese national TV. He had flown a Japanese news crew over the disaster area earlier in the day. Later, after landing safely in Pensacola, they interviewed him. The reporter’s English was limited and needless to say Tom’s Japanese consists of only three words: “sushi,” “karaoke,” and “Mitsubishi.” After a few embarrassed chuckles, the Japanese producer came to shake hands with Tom. “Good job, Maverick,” he said, and walked away. “You’re kidding. He didn’t call you Maverick, did he?” I asked, amused at the exchange. “I swear he did,” Tom answered. “The funny thing is, I haven’t eaten in all day, shaved in three, and I look like crap.” -- A Message from Adrian: I thought I was alone in this world until I found your pilotfamilies.com. Good job, congratulations. I'm a writer married to a helicopter pilot, currently living in Florida. I have written an article about the job that pilots like my husband are doing in the areas ravaged by Katrina. It is a peek into the human side of what pilots do and what their spouses deal with, especialy now that the three affected states are for all intents and purposes almost considered war zones. --- |
