Blip on the Radar

By Francis Meyrick

The Tuna Helicopter Industry is regarded by many as the Wild West of helicopter flying, and Francis ‘Moggy’ Meyrick describes his personal experiences as a pilot on board Taiwanese and Korean fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. This collection of short stories has it all – hilarity and tragedy, nail-biting near-disasters and some truly intense, borderline terrifying moments. He describes flying through a massive cloudburst, struggling to find his way back to the ship as he runs out of fuel. And he describes accidentally throwing smelly garbage onto Sacred Burned Offerings.
You will also find expressed, surprisingly perhaps to some, the author’s deep awe and respect for Nature, which he refers to as ‘All Our Mother’. He stridently calls for sustainable fishing practices, and warns about the danger of short-term exploitation. Above all else, his passionate love of tuna helicopter flying and his quiet compassion for his fellow Man and the Mystery of the Universe, shine forth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francis Meyrick
• Release date: Nov 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311760630

Francis Meyrick

Location:Texas, USA Naturalized US Citizen of Irish extract - Fixed Wing and Helo trucker.Interests: "The Absurdity of Man". I am a proud supporter of Blarney, Nonsense, and Hooey. I enjoy being a chopper jockey, and trying to figure the world, people and belief systems out. I'm just not very good at it, so it keeps me real busy. I scribble, blog, run this website, mess with rental houses, ride motorbikes, and read as much as I can. I went solo 44 years ago, and I like to say I'm gonna get me a real job one day. When I grow up. ("but not just yet, Lord, not just yet") For my aviation scribbles see www.chopperstories.com.... enjoy! I wish you Peace in your Life. May you always walk with the sun on your face, and a breeze ruffling your hair. And may you cherish a quiet wonder for our awesome Universe. Life isn't always good. But it is always fascinating. Never quit.

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Introduction

In ‘Moggy’s Tuna Manual’ my emphasis was on awareness of what goes on in the ‘Tuna fields’, what is required of a new Tuna Helicopter Pilot, and what goes into establishing Safe Operating Procedures. In ‘Blip on the Radar’ the focus shifts gear. This series of short stories is much more at the human and cultural level. What goes on, in the minds of people? How do they think? What are their beliefs? What are mine?

When you mix one dreamy Irish Helicopter Pilot-Mechanic with a crew of Taiwanese, Chinese, Philippinos and Indonesians, you get everything – from confusion, to fireworks, to hilarity. When you go flying in those remote Pacific areas, thousands of miles from Search and Rescue capability, and equally far from Hospital Emergency Rooms, then it is inevitable that small emergencies quickly become life-threatening. My memories cover many different moods, on many different days. Above all else though, I was touched by our common humanity. And awed by Nature.

These stories are all true. Yes, I could almost count the rivets and see the oil stains on the belly of the Hughes 500 that deliberately kept skimming fast and low across my rotor disc, on a deliberate collision course. Yes, I was threatened and abused over the radio by the furiously angry, gun-toting pilot, who threatened to ‘ram me out of the sky’. Yes, I got hung up on a vertical log, and fought the controls desperately, expecting a fatal roll-over any second. Yes, I flew through a massive cloudburst, with lightning striking all around, wholly unable to see out the windscreen, and landed back on my ship, running on vapour. Many pilots out there could recount similar hair-raising stories. And many unexplained disappearances and fatal crashes can, I’m sure, be explained by circumstances described truthfully in this book.

But above all else, I look back on an amazing five years. Mother Nature (‘All our Mother’, as I call her) is beautiful and threatened. Plastic garbage needlessly kills innocent marine creatures, and covers the beaches of almost every atoll and island. Sustainable fishing often clashes with utter greed, and it remains to be seen how this ecological battle will work out. I have tried hard to paint for the reader the Good and the Bad, the Brave and the Ugly. If we are all pilgrims in Life, trudging our way along dusty roads unknown, to an uncertain destination, then I count myself a fortunate man indeed to have seen, tasted, and flown, the vast Pacific Tuna Fields. Roaming up to 50 miles away from my ship, long since disappeared over the horizon, sometimes on my own, I so often saw no sign of human existence. No ships, no islands, no people, no manmade structures. Only solitude, endless marching waves, and ‘All Our Mother’, in all her essence. With my blades slapping time, wind rushing by, and unseen gears steadily meshing. And the Eternal Sky, looking down – kindly, I believe – on a puny, mortal Man. In a sense, it was and is a paradise for any storyteller.

I wish all who kindly read my scribbles, very simply, Peace.

Francis ‘Moggy’ Meyrick

"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it."

― David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World

How pilots fly helicopters

This collection of short stories is written not only for (would-be) helicopter pilots, but also for lay people and armchair pilots. This very brief section may help non-pilots to understand some of the mysteries of ‘rotary wing flight’. Many other terms used are explained in the Glossary.

Controls

The pilot has three major controls: (A) Collective pitch control, to the left of his seat; (B) Cyclic Stick Control, sticking up in front of him; and (C) Anti Torque Pedals for Tail Rotor Control.

The collective (A) is basically an ‘up-down’ control. It increases or decreases total main rotor thrust, and makes a proportionate change in power to compensate for the change in drag.

Seen from the top, the main rotor blades are driven counter-clockwise. (Unless you are French... shhh!) The fuselage tends to rotate in the opposite direction, clockwise, and the tail rotor pushes (or pulls) against that unwanted movement to compensate and achieve directional control/heading stability. To put it another way: looking forwards, the helicopter tends to slew to the right; with everything nicely trimmed, it stays looking straight ahead. When the pilot presses the right pedal (C), he reduces that compensation and allows the helicopter to ‘turn right’; pressing the left pedal applies more thrust to the tail rotor, overcompensating the natural tendency of the machine, and forcing it to ‘turn left’. Note that this ‘turn left’ and ‘turn right’ only refers to the orientation of the fuselage, not to the actual direction of flight. That comes in the next step.

Basically, the helicopter is pulled in the direction the main rotor is ‘pointing’. When the rotor is horizontal, ‘pointing upwards’, the machine is pulled straight up – or maybe hovering. When the rotor is tilted away from the horizontal, the lift-thrust force is divided into two components: upwards (lift) and horizontal (thrust in the ‘direction of tilt’).

The cyclic pitch control (B) is used to tilt the main rotor in the desired horizontal direction. The thrust component of force then pulls the helicopter in the direction of rotor tilt. The cyclic control changes the direction of this force, thus controlling the attitude and air speed of helicopter. The rotor disc tilts in the same direction the cyclic stick was moved. If the cyclic is moved forward, the rotor disc tilts forward: if the cyclic is moved aft, the rotor disc tilts aft, and so on.

To sum it up: the pedals (controlling the tail rotor) determine in which direction the helicopter is ‘looking’; the cyclic stick (controlling the tilt of the main rotor) determines which way the helicopter is moving. And the collective (controlling the pitch of the main rotor and the throttle) determines the up-down movement. All in all, a helicopter is a very manoeuvrable machine!

AUTOROTATION : A phrase often used in the text is ‘autorotation’, in combination with a ‘flare’. These, together, form the emergency exit for a pilot when mechanical things go drastically wrong. The engine is disengaged from the main rotor system and the rotor blades are driven solely by the upward flow of air through the rotor. This provides sufficient thrust to maintain rotor rotational speed throughout the descent. Since the tail rotor is driven by the main rotor transmission during autorotation, heading control is maintained as in normal flight. The pilot's primary control of the rate of descent is airspeed, determined by the cyclic pitch control just as in normal flight. Rate of descent is high at zero airspeed and decreases to a minimum at approximately 50 to 90 knots.

When landing from an autorotation, the kinetic energy stored in the rotating blades is used to decrease the rate of descent and make a soft landing. This is the point where the ‘flare’ is used to reduce both vertical and horizontal speed, to allow a near zero-speed touchdown. A greater amount of rotor energy is required to stop a helicopter with a high rate of descent than is required to stop a helicopter that is descending more slowly, so descents at very low or very high airspeeds are more critical than those performed at the minimum rate of descent airspeed.

HOGE : Hover Out of Ground Effect. Ground Effect is a condition of improved performance when operating near (within 1/2 rotor diameter) of the ground. It is due to the interference of the surface with the airflow pattern of the rotor system. The lift needed to sustain a hover can be produced with a reduced angle of attack and less power because of the more vertical lift vector. To ‘hover out of ground effect’, further from the surface in other words, requires more power.

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Staying with the Herd

What do you do for a living?

It's a valid question, as we all trudge our way meekly or otherwise through this vale of... of... flowers. Some people plan careers, and stick to that plan their entire working lives. Some even stay in the same place. That must be nice. I wouldn't know. I'm not like that.

I get restless...

I'm just a blip on the radar, that shows up unexpectedly, and frequently unwanted, in different places...

Some people have ordinary, hum-drum, safe and sensible jobs. They like it that way. That, also, must be nice sometimes.

Me? Oh...You don't want to know...

I spent five years flying helicopters off Taiwanese and Korean tuna boats.

Yes. Flying-helicopters-off-tuna-boats. All over the Pacific Ocean.

Why? I guess it seemed like a good idea...

If... you're interested, I'll tell you the story.

I'll shut up, if you're not. And go away. Disappear off your scope...

Just be sure to tell me, ya hear...?

Five years...That's fairly unusual. Many pilots only sign up for one six month tour. Many of those don't complete that tour. They quit in disgust, or they get fired.

Or, not infrequently, they crash and die. I talked with some ex Vietnam War pilots who commented ruefully that the accident rate amongst tuna helicopters was higher than in Vietnam at that time. That at first glance alarming statement does in fact bear up to scrutiny. It's a combination of adverse factors. For instance, a lot of the maintenance takes place out at sea. This puts a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the field mechanic. Who may not be that experienced. Or that familiar with type. The way a helicopter works, you had better spot a hairline crack in some vital component or structure at the very early stage.

If you don't...

... that flaw will propagate very quickly indeed. When you're talking vibrations, you're up against a dramatic exponential progression.

2...4...8...16...32...64!!Ccrrrrrrack!

I once heard a Hansen Helicopters pilot, real cool character, remark over the radio to his buddy that he thought he had a small vibration. A few minutes later, he said he was turning back to his ship as a precautionary measure. Dead cool. A minute after that, in the same tone of voice, he was asking for his buddy to get the hell over there, because he was 'going in the water – NOW!'.

Boom. That fast.

The supply of spare parts was another problem. It could take weeks and weeks for a much needed spare part to arrive, via another fishing vessel. Or maybe via the Philippines, from Guam, through Fiji, to some port in... Papua New Guinea.

Where you might be going. Depending on the catch. The customer. And the freezer container ship, which might or might not be going to... somewhere else.

The Solomon Islands maybe. Or Easter Island. Nauru. Truk. Rabaul. Tarawa. Madang...

Heck, you might be going just about... anywhere. It was only human nature to push the limits... a little. To try and please the captain, and keep the show on the road. Just soldier on with the tail rotor gearbox... making a bit of metal. Not really... much. Just... a little bit. Showing up on the magnetic chip detector. But... it'll be all right.

And of course, next thing...

Another problem was simply the nature of what we did. Just about anything. Long range searches. Fifty, sixty, seventy miles. With your mothership long since disappeared over the horizon... five hundred miles or a thousand miles from land...

and not a soul around, not a ship, nothing... believe me, it gets interesting.

It gives you a whole new understanding of being alone...

We did emergency medical runs. Injured crew members. Shopping trips. Take the captain to go visit his buddies and go gambling mid-ocean. Herding...

A lot of the captains liked us to herd the fish. Herd? Like cattle? Yes, kind of...

It involved keeping the fish inside the net, whilst it was still open, and slowly closing.

As the nets would sink down, to a depth of one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred feet... and as the ship would play out the nets, steaming around in a huge circle... the fish, understandably, would often try and swim out. If they decided to go under the nets, you were, technically speaking, goosed.

Unless you wanted to go play submarine. (People actually did, often enough, but not intentionally.) If, however, the teeming mass of thousands of fish, the so-called foamer, stayed at or close to the surface, now you had a chance. As the foamer headed for the exits, you, the crazy helicopter pilot, could come screaming in and hover noisily just ahead of the leading tuna. If you hung close above the water, typically four to six feet, and pedal turned furiously, causing the tail rotor pitch to change constantly, in a high pitched, teeth grinding yowl, then... you had a fair to good chance of turning the ‘leaders' around. They would then swim back into the slowly encircling nets. If only one leader got out past the helicopter... you were done. The rest would follow, nose to tail... Just like humans.

You could watch them, hovering only feet above them, but there was nothing more you could do, except watch and enjoy the sight of a worthy, beautiful quarry escaping to swim another day... If you were really fast, you could keep the leaders in, and you could hold them all in. But you had to be mobile. Because no sooner had you stopped them from crossing the line in one place, than they would be trying to break out at another spot fifty meters up the line. The speedboats couldn't keep up with a determined foamer trying to break out. Only a helicopter, flown by a dervish, wheeling, tail spinning, and moving like greased lightning, could often save the day. And make the difference between a three hundred thousand dollar profitable afternoon versus a big fat zero. With the Taiwanese captain, after three weeks of sailing maybe... and not a single fish caught, more than emotional. Over the radio. Screaming hysterically. My nickname was Moggy. In Korean, it means mosquito. Kind of apt, I guess.

All I would get was:

Moggy-Moggy-Moggy!!!...

behind you!!!... Gott!... Gott!... Moggy!!... towline... go to towline... Moggy!!!

Come to back of ship! Come to shipppppp!!!... Moggy-Moggy...

feeshh get out...!!... Aaaaahhhh!!!!

It got pretty intense. It was wonderful if you liked to fly... After some of the lumbering big 21 seat helicopters I previously flew, or rather, just drove along... You could handle a nippy light helicopter like a turbine powered Hughes 500... and make it go like the ultimate teenager stunt motorcycle.

I used to spin-drive 'em just for the sheer fun of it. 'Spin-drive' means flying in a straight line whilst spinning around the vertical axis continually through 360 degrees. A bit like a kid's toy, I guess. Maybe exactly like a kid's toy... The problem was, at those low altitudes, you couldn't afford any mistakes. Additionally, huge rolling waves would come through. It was nothing to find yourself performing this low level air show in remarkably lousy weather. The captains would 'make a set' even in borderline gale force conditions. If they were desperate enough. Now you would find yourself well below the top of the waves, fighting to keep the foamer inside, whilst trying to keep an eye on that next big roller coming in behind you. You can't do both... at the same time. So in practice, you would mentally time the seconds before that next big one was going to get you. With a couple of seconds to go, you'd kick hard left, check the wave, haul up collective lever, lift over the swell, and back down the other side to go back to what you were doing.

And again. And again. Hundreds of times...

It probably looked suicidally crazy. And many, many were the pilots who accidentally stuck their tail rotors into an unfriendly wave. Instant catastrophe...

Hasta la vista!

I knew one guy who had crashed and been underwater three times. That can't be any fun. Swimming out from a drowning helicopter with enthusiasm, I'd bet... But his captain, the honourable customer, liked him... so his company, well, they would just... give him another four hundred thousand dollar helicopter... and off they would jolly well go...

I simply... enjoyed it. Raw nature at its best. The chase..., the hunt, the handling, the salt spray, the turbine howling, and the feeling of the controls in my hands, and the pressure of the pedals on my feet.. Fish jumping... Speedboats criss-crossing in frantic haste. The smell of the sea, jet fuel burning, adventure, and excitement...

And the awareness, the constant, striving awareness, of where the next wave was coming up behind me, of how much fuel I had left, of where the fish were, of how much power I was pulling, and where the wind was coming from, and how effective my tail rotor was given that power setting, that wind direction, that wind strength, and that rate of pedal turn... All of which varied of course continually. And I would weave, and bob, and jink, and race a hundred meters in a frantic dash, pedal turn violently, lift up over a wave, and then... do it all over again...

Throwing up massive amounts of salt spray, that I would spend hours afterwards clearing off... to prevent corrosion.

With the cockpit doors removed, I would literally taste the salt as I got hosed from time to time. Sometimes I could see little rainbows appear and disappear... in the spray outside my windscreen.

I once, after a particularly hectic session in appalling weather conditions, got a call to go to the bridge. The pilot on a nearby American ship, the Martinac, wanted to speak to me. Wondering what the problem was, I called him up. His voice, crackling and tinny in that peculiar 'transmitted way', spoke volumes:

"Hey Buddy! My name's Dave! Just wanted to say hello... This is my first fishing trip, but I've been flying helicopters for near thirty years... Just wanted to say I ain't ever seen anything quite like that show you just put on!... I reckon that was one of the best pieces of helicopter flying I've ever seen, either that... or you are...

... the craziest, dumbest motherfucker I've ever met...!"

Mmmm... I knew he had a point. I wasn't the only one that flew that way.

A lot of us long timers did. Some guys, a few, had been out there for twelve to fifteen years.

We knew what we were doing. None of us wanted to ever crash.

Too damn dangerous...

The whole thing was...

It was a drug. Kinda crazy. Kinda fun... See the world. Bury the past. Move along...

A lot of guys like that.

And then of course... there were the unexpected weather changes...

... that's when things got REALLY wild...

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Running the gauntlet

It's hard to fathom how immense the Pacific Ocean is.

Even looking at a globe, and studying how much of the world is in fact covered by said mega puddle, does not convey the breath-taking vastness of a world of waves. From horizon to horizon. Take that globe, and look up the islands of Hawaii. From Hawaii, go to Guam, which is another... whole lotta miles east... Found it? Now, with your finger, trace a line down to Papua New Guinea. How many thousand miles is that? Then, roughly half way along that line, imagine me, floating in all that water, all on my lonesome, with only my life jacket and thoughts for company. And a bunch of hungry sharks of course. Now factor in gale force winds, producing twelve foot waves.

No, it's not pretty, is it?

Put it this way, you're a thousand plus miles offshore.

There's no 'search and rescue' friendly US Coastguard out there.

When you run into trouble, big trouble, like I did, you know full well, deep down, that you're in some serious sh...! I ask you to imagine this, because, believe me, I was staring at it. For real...

If you fly in a relatively friendly place such as the Gulf of Mexico, there are weather stations everywhere. Some with trained weather observers. Via telephone or Internet, you have a blaze of weather information available. Current, forecast, winds aloft, radar summary charts, satellite pictures... anything you want.

In the early nineties, flying off Taiwanese tuna boats in the middle of the Big Puddle... we didn't have all that good stuff. You could always moisten your thumb, and hold it up in the wind... The ship's radar, set to the furthest range, would give you a rough idea...

But in the final analysis, you were on your own. On the exploratory rides, hunting for the elusive tuna, we had to keep a wary eye out for fast moving storm fronts. On the day in question, I had flown east from the Hsieh Feng 707. With a pleasant following wind.

It had been cloudy for a few days, light rain, but nothing too bad. We knew there was bad weather out further west, but we didn't realise how fast moving a storm front it actually was. Little did I surmise, as I departed eastbound over the horizon, losing sight of my only landing platform within one thousand plus miles, that the front was already about to surge over the western horizon towards the Hsieh Feng 707. What compounded the problem was that the captain, exhausted from an early rise and 'set', had gone to bed for a quick nap after my departure. And promptly 'conked out'. Nobody of course thought to wake him up, as dark and evil storm clouds raced for the ship.

What brought him back into the action was the ship rocking and rolling, and spray cascading over the decks. By the time he, breathless, called me on the radio, I, sixty miles away, had already turned back, observing for myself ominous dark towers on the distant horizon. His voice betrayed his anxiety within seconds.

Moggy-Moggy!... Weather BAD... come back!... come back!... come back to sheeeiip!!

I acknowledged his call, and wondered what I was getting into.

I ran the numbers, and from what I could see I should be able to arrive back at the ship with a healthy thirty-five to forty minutes of fuel reserve. That should give me quite a bit of time for poking and prodding my way cautiously around the bad weather. It seemed not too bad, although I noticed the waves were building rapidly in