Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

Harrison let me take the controls for a few minutes as we flew past the ventilator shafts for the Holland Tunnel. I held altitude and airspeed okay. I was working on feeling the aircraft, but I was pushing too much right rudder and the ship was out of trim. “Left rudder. Left rudder,” Harrison said.

“Yeah, I’m a little rusty, eh?”

“Yeah,” said Han Solo, Decker, and Indiana Jones, disappointed.

Later, after we pulled his chopper inside the hangar with the tug, I asked Harrison why he had read my book. “Everywhere I go, if it has anything to do with helicopters, people tell me I have to read Chickenhawk. So I did. And I agree.”

When he sat down at his desk to fill in his logbook, I noticed he had about five hundred hours in helicopters. He’s quite good for that amount of time.

Three months ago I had the chance to go visit my cockpit buddy, Jerry Towler. He lives close to Detroit, near one of our Vietnam pilot friends, Bob Baden. Bob had just restored a 1973 Bell-47G2 (the M *A *S *H helicopter, known as an H-13 in the Army). He’d let me rent it at cost, to see if I could still fly.

I rummaged around, found my army flight records, and checked the date of my last official flight. June 6, 1967! When I took the controls of Bob’s 47, I had not flown a chopper for almost thirty-seven years. What I wanted to do was attempt to get it up to a hover and not crash, unaided. Bob, who’s been flying all those thirty-seven years, agreed.

I’d never flown an H-13, the army’s designation of the Bell 47, when I was in the army. I knew it was a good machine.

I gradually got the machine light on the skids, feeling it beginning to shift a little, twitch like it was alive. Instincts took over. We lifted off the tarmac, the little Bell sounding far louder than the much larger Huey. Turbine engines are beautifully quiet in comparison to the 400 HP, six-cylinder, fuel-injected, snarling beast behind the cockpit seats.

It was thrilling to be drifting around just three feet off the ground. I wasn’t locked over a spot like I would’ve been thirty-seven years before, but I wasn’t dangerous, either. The chopper was noisy, it vibrated, and the throttle was sloppy—something Bob, who had worked as a helicopter mechanic and pilot for thirty years, advised me to notice. I was able to turn around, hover forward over the grass next to the runway. Mercifully, Bob operated the radios. I had my hands full keeping the machine within the confines of the taxiway. We were cleared with the local traffic for takeoff. I nosed the Bell forward, holding her close to the ground while she accelerated. We hit translational lift, surged up, free of gravity. You can call it translational lift, but that hardly describes how much fun it is.

Bob points beyond the plastic canopy. Don’t fly over those warehouses; avoid this neighborhood; break right here; give the highway plenty of clearance.

I’m looking for a place to land in case the engine suddenly takes a nap.

I was taught to fly as though the engine, brand-new or not, was preparing itself to enter motor oblivion precisely when you needed it alive and chugging. But there was nowhere to land below us except little tiny postage-stamp yards, wire-draped suburban streets, and a few swimming pools.

“Forced landings?”

“Anywhere you can fit it. Except roofs,” he said, nodding toward a vast complex of flat-roofed factory buildings.

“Why not?”

“Chances are you’d fall through the roof when you hit, probably kill some people working inside.”

“The highway?”

“Yeah, if you’ve got no other choice.”

I listened to the Lycoming grumbling. “She sounds great, though.”

Bob nodded, smiled.

I kept the airspeed somewhere between fifty and seventy, altitude around 500 feet as we fly toward the main airport. I was still grinning about how much pure fun this is! So what was nagging me? We flew across a crowded parking lot. Then I realized I’ve never flown over houses full of people before. That’s what was making me nervous? Houses? I flew combat assaults in jungles. Never neighborhoods. Flying over a perfectly normal American neighborhood, apparently with nobody shooting, made me wary.

Patience and I stayed with Jerry and Martie Towler while I went out to the airport every other day for flight instruction. And after a hiatus of thirty-seven years, everything I did was fresh and exhilarating. I still felt the thrill of practicing to control a machine that has been built to hover off the ground and not kill you. I was happy in the world of foot pedals, collective, throttle, cyclic. By my third hour with Bob, it was beginning to come back. We did autorotations: hovering, straight-ins, one-eighties, to make sure I’d at least be competent enough to survive a forced landing. If I had been grading me, I’d have given meaCride. I could do the maneuvers, but not with the smoothness of a practiced hand. But it was still fun. I would only get better each time I flew. Unfortunately, even at the reduced rate my friend Bob was letting me pay for the Bell, it’s obvious why it’s only military pilots and people like Harrison Ford who can fly helicopters around for the fun of it.

There’s got to be a way to make a more affordable hovering aircraft.

Patience is a publisher, writer, and editor. Her book Recovering from the War is still in print. She gives talks to veterans all over the country about post-traumatic stress disorder.

My son, Jack, is in school learning digital graphics. I have a grandson, also named Jack, who visits me on weekends, and who is the best grandson in the world.

My plans keep me busy. That frustrated engineer inside me is getting out more often. I’m writing, too. Upcoming is a book about the invention of vertical flight, a screen-play about Bill Reeder’s survival as a POW in Vietnam, a third Solo novel, and a movie I want to write and produce myself.

Where do I file for a life extension?