IF I MAY SHARE AN ANNIVERSARY…

It is January 26, 2015, and I am now two years helicopter-crash-free.  I told the story here shortly after it happened: http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/01/27/dont-be-afraid-of-flying/.

I would like to thank the many people who added poignant and sometimes funny comments at the end of that blog entry. It’s worth reading. I love you people.

Two years later, all three of us who were on board are doing fine. Graham Harward, the pilot who “brought us home alive,” is still flying as far as I know. John Strayer still has some range of movement issues with his gun hand, seriously injured when it went through the shattered Plexiglas when we hit, but is nonetheless still winning pistol matches. I’ve only got one visible scar from it. We were indeed lucky.

Share in our “celebration of survival.” The song written and sung by our friend Steve Denney, “Porkchopper Blues,” overlays the first three and a half minutes of the video, some of the flight film having been edited for brevity.  If you hear hysterical laughter in the background, it’s us survivors and the women in our lives and some good friends: we’re hearing it for the first time on the recording, as you are now.

When the overlaid music stops, it’s your warning that things are about to get serious.

John Strayer, on the port side of the bird, was wearing a Go-Pro camera which recorded the short, fun flight, and the no-fun-at-all crash.  Sorry for the engine sound. You won’t hear us talking on board the aircraft; we had radio mics and headphones for that which didn’t pick up our conversation over the engine noise. In the seconds before the crash, you won’t hear me say to Graham, “Those trees are getting’ kinda tall, bro,” nor will you hear him say “I don’t like this—I don’t like this at all.”

Since I have a mechanical IQ of about 50, I didn’t hear the engine sputtering with the muffs on…but John and Graham did, and thanks to the Go-Pro, so will you.  Some folks asked why we didn’t just auto-rotate into a hard but safe landing when the engine failed and we lost altitude. It’s kinda hard to auto-rotate when you don’t have rotors, and as you’ll see in the video, the rotors were gone in the first fraction of a second when they hit the treetops.  Notice how quickly things proceed from there.  “Gravity sucks”…fast.

Click here for video if you can’t see it on your screen.

Among other things, we learned a firearms safety lesson on that short, ill-fated flight in which several guns were on board, one drawn and in hand during the incident, but no shots were fired. If you’ve taken one of my classes between then and now, you’ve heard me discuss it in the opening firearms safety lecture. If you haven’t, it will be the topic of the next blog entry here.

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