ndall Randall Padfield - Learning to Fly Helicopters

Learning to Fly Helicopters

About the Author

R. RANDALL PADFIELD, formerly editor-in-chief of AIN Publications for 14 years and now chief operating officer, has some 9,000 hours of flight time, most of it in helicopters, and is the author of four books on aviation. He holds an Airline Transport Pilot certificate for helicopters and airplanes, flew U.S. Air Force rescue helicopters in Iceland and Alaska and civil offshore helicopters to North Sea oil platforms, and for a short time served as copilot for Donald Trump, flying a VIP-configured AS332 Super Puma. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Mr. Padfield holds a masters degree in engineering management from UCLA and received the National Business Aviation Associations Gold Wing Award for reporting excellence in 1998.

Learning to Fly Helicopters

R. Randall Padfield

Second Edition

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To my ever-loving, always patient, cleverly creative, frequently funny, and thankfully forgiving wife, Moira; our three happy, intelligent, amazing, and much-loved children, Heitha, Dirk, and Tommy, and their spouses, Richard and Dawn; and our clever, spunky, and fun-loving grandchildren, Richie, Nia, Lila, Liam, and Coral, all of whom are showing signs of outdoing their parents and grandparents.

Contents

Foreword

C harles Lindbergh and I both flew out of Roosevelt Field in Garden City on New Yorks Long Island. He did it famously in 1927, and I in utter anonymity some 30 years later. Still, my flightalbeit as a passengerwas also noteworthy since it occurred after the field had become, sadly, the Roosevelt Field Mall and thus may have been among the last flights from the hallowed aviation place.

As youve surely guessed, my aircraft was a helicopter, a classic Bell 47 that my uncle, a friend of helicopter pioneer Frank Piasecki, had sponsored for a brief appearance at the mall. A wide-eyed kid going aloft for the first time, I distinctly recall my surprise at not so much ascending, as I had expected, but rather seeing the ground fall away below me. I knew immediately that this was something special.

Ever since I have marveled at the helicopters unique properties, but they remained largely theoretical as I went on to fly aircraft whose wings were fixed solidly in place, and to write and edit stories about the same.

Then one day in 1980 a manuscript arrived unbidden at the magazine I was then editing that described in riveting detail an environment, a set of circumstances, a discoveryall to the extremethat had tested helicopters and their crews to the limits. The story focused on the Alexander Kielland, a five-legged, semi-submersible drilling rig that had capsized after one of its legs broke off during a furious storm in the North Sea shortly before night. Despite a desperate response by helicopter crews in harrowing conditions, their bravery could not alter the catastrophe, which ultimately claimed 123 lives.

The storys author was one of those responding pilots, an expert rotary-wing aviator, and, as it turned out, a writer of the highest order as well. That was my first encounter with Randy Padfield and, fortunately, weve had many since, as weve traveled parallel paths in publishing.