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.”
Isn’t something like TrafficGauge.com coming to LA? It was developed in Seattle using realtime data from the Dept. of Transportation cameras. Generally works very well. Only nuisance it’s another item to carry — wish it were a display on a cell phone instead. But I think LA is next for them…
I worked for a county dept of transportation ( http://www.maricopa.gov/assessor/gisPortal/gis_portal.asp ) in the mid-nineties developing geographic information systems, gps coordination of our crews etc…Every now and then one of the planners would start blabberin about the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System and how it would give the public all of the things you mention (routing, coordination, etc…)I ain’t holding my breath for it… At this point, we have ‘electronic message boards’ and ‘freeway cameras’, but no delivery of data to the car, much less tracking of the vehicle, coordination of traffic patterns, routing around incidents, etc… In my opinion, the biggest impass to any solid IVHS implementation will be a resolute american determination to maintain their privacy and not let anybody track their movement, primarily out of fear of some gang-buster local municipality mis-using it to increase their income from traffic fines.
Philip –
I must admit that anyone coming from Boston and talking about traffic or traffic design is really pretty ridiculous. And suggesting that we’re somehow used to god-awful helicopter noise (a.k.a. “ghetto birds”) is insulting.
Helicopters are truly the scourge of Los Angeles. From my house we don’t hear traffic, but we certainly hear an endless stream of clattering helicopters. They violate every custom and form of etiquette and should be banned from urban areas.
And, yes, I am a commercial pilot with IFR, etc. In my case, though, I try and fly quietly for my neighbors.
Philip: I am glad you enjoy flying helicopters, but please don’t make these kind of suggestions again. They’re irritating to the locals. Consider fixing Boston’s traffic design first, perhaps by just getting parking spaces to be “unreserved.”
Thanks
Glad you were able to take advantage of Chuck’s B206 at KFUL. I figured that you might use the MD500 at Western Ops at Rialto for the full-downs, but I was wrong.
What is your opinion of Robertson’s course. Was it worth your time?
Phil
Regarding the Boston traffic: Folks who commute from our suburbs do suffer as they try to pile into the center, but we don’t have the kind of widespread misery that extends even to those who are trying to go from suburb to suburb at mid-day. I spent more time stuck in traffic in one week in Los Angeles than I have in the last 52 weeks in Boston (and at least 4X per week, I venture out on the highways to drive to helcopter school in Nashua, New Hampshire (about a 40-mile trip)). I’m surprised that rich people in California don’t charter helicopters more often, like their counterparts in Brazil.
Phil: The Robinson course was worthwhile. Portions could have been a little faster-paced, but I’m glad that I went.
FYI: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TRAVEL/NEWS/06/20/traffic.jam/ lists the U.S. cities with the worst traffic. Los Angeles is #1. Boston is not on the list of cities where people waste a lot of time. It is mentioned as a city where rush hour is much slower than non-rush hour (not nearly as bad in this respect as the California metro areas, however).
I work at SNA as an instructor at Sunrise Aviation. It’s a fun place to work, actually. It’s very common to see a wide variety of aircraft in the pattern over there. Recently our Cub, Extra 300, and Pitts S-2B were up there with some helicopters. Later a couple of our Decathlons flying formation patter work joined the fun.
It’s fun watching the R22s do the full down autos, though the scraping seems like it would be tough on the airframe.
I really want to do my rotorcraft add-on, but the price is a bit prohibitive, especially on a CFI’s salary…
Helicopters are the bane of most Angeleans’ existences. I have discovered that there are no regulations in place requiring a minimum flight elevation except that which the pilot deems to be “safe.” None have come into place since the fatal crash of a helicopter in a residential neighborhood a few years ago.
Many of the flights are charter flights for sightseeing purposes and these vehicles fly at low altitudes over the hills to hover over celebrities’ homes. For residents of the hills, this causes an endless barrage of noisy blade-slaps and low frequency vibrations which rattle windows and indeed entire structures. It’s a nightmarish descent into the bowels of of some apocalyptic wasteland. OK, while that’s a strong statement, I still often feel as if I’m living in a M.A.S.H. unit day and night. The flights continue unabated throughout most nights.
I’ve had enough. I’m moving to San Francisco next month. If the city of Los Angeles refuses to deal with this scourge after decades of residents’ complaints, this is one city I can live without.
I currently live in the Marina Del Rey district of Los Angeles with a PTSD patient under constant pain.
There are helicopters that fly so low the apartment shakes. Lets not mention the ears rattling like a sledgehammer.
It is absolutely outrageous that there seems to be no control on our quality of life.
We came here from europe for peace of mind. Is there any way to take action or better yet sue the people involved?
PLEASE HELP ME.
OR LOS ANGELES DO SOMETHING.
Kevin: Marina Del Rey is a particularly bad choice if you don’t like low-flying helicopters. To avoid interference with passenger jets departing LAX, helicopters are required to fly as low as 150′ above sea level in your area. There isn’t much that a citizen can do. The public owns the airspace in the U.S., which means that a helicopter or airplane owner can fly more or less wherever he or she wants, just as a car owner can drive up and down your street even though it might be annoying to you. There is an additional level of control around busy airports, such as LAX, but unfortunately it works opposite from what you want. I.e., the controllers force helicopters to fly below their normal altitudes. If a helicopter annoys a neighbor, that doesn’t bother the FAA as much as a helicopter hitting an airliner.