Los Angeles is the best helicopter town in the United States. Distances are vast, traffic is beyond human tolerance, people are rich, helipads are everywhere, the weather is perfect, and the population is accustomed to 24/7 noise from various kinds of machines.
My helicopter week in LA started with the Robinson Helicopter Factory Safety Course. Every two weeks, roughly 100 people flock to Torrance, California for this 3.5-day course, most of which is classroom instruction. The most important thing for a non-pilot to take away from a course such as this is “Don’t walk anywhere near the tail of a helicopter, where the tail rotor can chop off your limbs or head.” People should approach running helicopters from the front, depart by backing away from the front, and keep eye contact with the pilot.
After completing the course, I went down to the John Wayne airport (KSNA) in Orange County for an introductory lesson with Helistream, reputedly one of the best helicopter schools in the U.S. Helistream does a lot of recurrent training for experienced police department pilots, but they also provide training for beginners such as myself. Helistream is situated on the roof of a medium-sized office building adjacent t the airport. Part of the roof is devoted to their hangar, and part devoted to a helipad large enough for about three ships. Andreas, the chief instructor, and I, flew up into the hills and landed in a clearing. Then we came back to the airport for “full touch-down” autorotations. This is a required maneuver for helicopter flight instructors. Starting about 500′ above the ground, you roll the throttle down to idle and let the helicopter glide until it is about 40′ off the ground. Then you start to pull back on the cyclic to flare the helicopter and turn its forward airspeed into an arresting of the descent rate. Finally, you pull the collective pitch control to cushion the final contact with the ground, which in our case was the hard asphalt surface of an airplane runway. Even with an experienced pilot, in a light helicopter such as the Robinson R22, there will be an inevitable amount of sliding and scraping along the ground at the end. Full-downs used to be required for all helicopter pilots, but the FAA and the manufacturers have been discouraging their use in training. Very few helicopters get wrecked due to engine failure; quite a few were getting destroyed during practice autorotations.
The John Wayne tower eventually got too busy to deal with us, so we flew down the coast to Laguna Beach, 500′ above the surf. There is no industry in this portion of the coast, just private houses that look like fancy hotels and fancy hotels that look like small towns unto themselves.
We landed in the dark, refueled, and then had to restart the helicopter and park it back on top of the building. This would not have been easy for a student working on his private pilot’s license!
I ended my week flying Commander Chuck Street’s Bell Jet Ranger out of Fullerton. From 6:00 am until 9:00 am, we watched the aftermaths of cars burning, a “vagrant/homeless person” getting struck and killed under a bridge, fatal collisions, and saw literally hundreds of thousands of people backed up for 30-90 extra minutes behind these various accidents. Chuck worked the radios as we transitioned among LA’s complex airspaces, made on-air reports, and had me do various practice approaches and landings to hilltop pads, small airports, and various spots on the Fullerton airport.
The waste of resources viewed from the air was almost as tragic as the deaths that are a daily feature of folks trying to get around LA. LA has a highway and surface road infrastructure worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The cars on these highways are probably worth another $100 billion. Yet for want of a few GPS chips and a wireless Internet system that would allow the cars to talk to each other, there is no way for a car to tell the driver “don’t go this route because you’ll just end up waiting for 90 minutes behind a clumb of other stuck cars.”
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