Written for
Summer Lovin' Story Contest 2023
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Précis: A veteran helicopter pilot is stranded for a night with a younger woman, set in The Bahamas.
Thanks to Kenji Sato for editorial assistance.
Caribbean Castaways
The morning air is smooth, and slightly cool, at two-thousand feet. The sparkling topaz waters of the Bahamas are in accord with the cloudless blue sky. The pilot, 'Cob' Swanson, spots a sea turtle below, diving away from the beat of his rotor blades.
"Sorry dude," he says, and hears the intercom activate to his voice, relaying his words back to his ears. The other headset in the cabin is unplugged. He's flying solo, in a Bell 47G helicopter that is more than a decade older than his own forty-four years.
Cob is enjoying the tranquility, despite the cacophony being emitted by his ride. His noise-canceling headset is doing its part, but doesn't negate the many vibrations of the craft. The slowest being the two-bladed main rotor, currently spinning at 340 RPM. Above that frequency is the tail rotor, geared to spin six times faster, but turning in the vertical plane. The piston engine is running at 3,000 RPM, with its accompaniment of lesser oscillations, from the camshaft and valve train.
Subconsciously, Cob is attuned to these vibrations - feeling for any changes that might warn of a problem. Consciously, he has tuned them out, so he can enjoy the serenity of the morning, even while wearing the necessary hearing protection. It's an ability acquired through thousands-of-hours, flying helicopters.
Eleuthera Island is part of the Great Bahama Bank. A long, thin, arc of coral and sand, that is separated from Nassau by fifty miles of shallow water. The island is only a mile wide at some points, but just over a hundred miles long.
Cod is currently flying over the shallow waters to the west of the island, inside the crescent of land. He is taking the direct route from Rock Sound Airport, to an abandoned airfield, just to the west of Freetown. As he approaches landfall, he lowers the collective lever in his left hand, a little, and slightly adjusts the angle of the rotor plane, using the cyclic lever located between his legs. Then makes a throttle adjustment, with the twist-grip in his left hand. This is all done instinctively. Helicopters are inherently unstable vehicles, like a bicycle, requiring constant inputs to keep them in check. Every control input causing a secondary, and tertiary response, that also requires correction.
Given enough practice, anyone who can ride a bicycle, can also learn to fly a helicopter. It's no harder than standing upright - another inherently unstable position that requires constant input to maintain. Helicopter pilots start out as toddlers, taking their first steps. They understand the concept - they've seen it done - but in practice it's hard, at least at first. Eventually, the coarse movements are minimized, the body becomes accustomed to countering little imbalances, before they require aggressive correction.
Given time, children can stand on one foot, the various muscles in their ankle firing instinctively to keep them upright, leaving their mind free to pursue other thoughts. As a pilot, Cob is past the stage of standing on one foot - he can make a helicopter dance. Or, more usefully, safely take-off from sloping ground in a gusty cross-wind.
It's a nice day for filming, Cob thought. There's some wispy cirrus clouds, high in the troposphere, to soften out the harsh sunlight. The forecast is clear for the next few days, due to a high-pressure system over the Bahamas.
He has been hired for two days. This isn't a typical travel show-type job, flying some TV personality, and their cameraman, to various scenic spots. He knows from the earlier negotiations that the shoot is for a music video. Some young starlet named 'Andromeda' is filming a video for her latest pop song. It's also different because the helicopter will be featured, and has been re-painted for the event.
He had looked up Andromeda during his early discussions with the producer. He listened to some of her earlier singles, but only recognized one of them. Maybe from the car radio or, perhaps, the bar's jukebox. It sounded synthetic, like most modern pop, he thought. Definitely Auto-Tuned vocals, a saccharine-sweet melody, overlaid with a programmed dance beat from a drum machine. With the progress of AI and deep-fake videos, they'll soon be able to do away with the pretty girls, too. Bake the whole damn recipe on computer, he thought.
Cob makes a radio-call as he descends through one-thousand feet, and is down to seven-hundred feet, as he overflies the abandoned airfield. He sees half-a-dozen vehicles parked on the old tarmac, and a large green square painted on the ground, which he recognizes as 'green-screen' green. This is a larger production than any travel show, or nature documentary, he'd supported to date.
He slows and turns, while descending to three-hundred feet for another pass over the tarmac. Checking for any wind, power lines, radio masts, tall trees, birds, or loose items that could be dislodged by his down-wash. All the usual precautions. Thankfully, they had left an open area of tarmac for him to use, so he selects the best approach direction and circles around again. Keeping his airspeed up until he clears the tree-line again, and can descend into a flare, washing off all forward speed just as the landing skid kisses the ground and settles. All the while, he's watching a woman walk towards his landing spot with a phone in her hand, filming him in landscape. She doesn't get close enough to cause him to abort, but he's a little annoyed that he had to watch her, expending his attention on her actions, instead of looking for other hazards.
The collective lever is all the way down now, releasing all lift from the rotors. He rolls off the throttle while watching the tachometer, making sure the centripetal clutch disengages normally. There's no rotor-brake on this aircraft. The woman is still filming him and getting closer, so he tilts the rotor plane away from her and adds some collective pitch, not enough to lift off, just to add some drag, slowing the blades down faster. He makes a 'stop' gesture with his right hand and she gives a nod of acknowledgement, then kneels down, while continuing to film.
Cob completes the shut-down procedure. He leaves the engine idling until the cylinder head temperature drops, then moves the mixture control to 'cut off,' so the engine dies. Then turns the ignition master-switch off. The rotor RPM is well below two-hundred, so he adds full collective pitch, until the blades are no longer turning fast enough to kill. He releases the collective lever, tightens the friction-lock on the controls, removes his headset and safety harness, then hops out. He gestures to the woman that she can come closer now, he wants to talk to her about keeping a safe distance.
"Sorry," she says, as she reaches the shade cast by the high-mounted fuel tank, "I've done helicopter operations before. Slinging Bambi buckets for CAL-FIRE, back when they had Long Rangers, but you didn't know that. I probably spooked you."
"Yeah, okay, I'll spare you the safety briefing," Cob replies, "but I like to choose my own ground crew, so keep a rotor-diameter away from the blades. Unless you're one of the film crew I'll be working with today?"
"I am indeed. I'm a camera operator, as well as logistics," she answers.
"With a cell phone?"
"Yes. I'm Second Phone. My name is Millie," she says.
"Second Phone? Can't you afford a proper camera?" Cob asks.
Millie smiles, "Of course we can. We've got three RED Ravens and some Sony FS7s in the van. But we're also filming a 'behind the scenes' video. That needs to be shot with a phone to look authentic on social media. So, Aki Kuru is operating the cinema cameras. Eduardo, the creative director, is first phone, documenting the making of the video. And I'm second phone, getting all the extra shots that Eduardo can't. The 'making of' will get released as the music video drops. It helps build the hype."
"Oh. I guess I'll be learning a lot today," he says.
"She's a beauty," says Millie, looking at the army-green helicopter with 'M*A*S*H' painted on the side, "a Sioux, isn't it?"
"That's the military designation for the H-13. This old girl never served, she was a crop duster when sold, in 1967. A Bell 47G-4. We just painted her in olive drab on your Director's request."
"You don't like it?" Millie asks.
