barnstorm2
Platinum Member
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2003
- Messages
- 14,573
- Location
- Cincinnati, Ohio
- Aircraft
- 2-place Air Command CLT SxS (project), & Twinstarr Autogyro
- Total Flight Time
- 750+hrs and climbing
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/318403_parkpilot04.html
After a half-century in the skies, pilot made mistake No. 1
By COLIN MCDONALD
P-I REPORTER
The first two runs of the day went well. Small ice crystals fell, threatening to morph into full-fledged snowflakes, but visibility was still decent.
Anthony Reece was at the controls of his Hughes 500D helicopter, a 165-foot-long cable and hook dangling from the orange-and-white belly. The helicopter soared up the drainage just south of the Skagit River, the deep shoosh-shoosh-shoosh of the blades reverberating off the saturated slopes.
On the ground, Jose Acuna watched and waited.
The local salvage logger had spent the past few weeks cutting cedar stumps -- the remnants of an old clearcut -- into blocks for slicing into shingles and shakes. It was Jan. 4, and Acuna needed to get his blocks, stacked 6 feet high and wrapped in a rope sling, to the mill before the snow got too deep.
At 1 p.m., the clouds began to drop along with the temperature. The sky filled with wet snowflakes, and the voice inside Reece's head told him to land and wait it out.
Instead, thinking of Acuna's thin profit margin, he swooped in for one more load.
He swung the hook directly in front of Acuna and hovered above him.
Then silence.
After more than 50 years of flying the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the rugged Cascades, after rescuing scores of stranded climbers and dousing countless wildfires, Reece had made a mistake.
Snow had piled up on the copter's canopy then slid into the air intake when Reece flared the aircraft back to position the hook.
"That put the fire out," Reece would say later.
With no engine, Reece knew he was going to drop 170 feet. His first thoughts were of Acuna, a father of three boys.
"I didn't want to squish him."
Using the inertia left in the spinning rotors, Reece kept the helicopter in the sky as long as he could. He could have used the energy to cushion his fall, but Reece wanted to give Acuna time to run.
As the ground rushed toward him, Reece had a last thought: This is going to hurt.
The right skid hit first, jamming the strut into the belly of the copter. Then the lower antennas were crushed, followed by the cross support below the pilot seat. The plastic windows shattered. The tail rotor snapped. The impact walloped Reece's spine with a force of 9 G's -- the kind of pressure jet pilots wear special suits to protect against.
Then came the explosion -- a fireball erupting from the bottom of the copter that lasted a few terrifying seconds.
The rotors hit the ground on either side of Acuna. Unhurt, the logger jumped up, radioed for help and rushed to pull Reece out of the wreckage.
Conscious and in severe pain, Reece hung from Acuna as the two made their way to the fuel truck for a ride off the mountain. The ambulance would meet them halfway up the steep, dirt road.
"I remember that ride," Reece would say, months later. "That road has some chuckholes in it, and I felt every one."
Mistake No. 1
When he started flying, Reece made himself a promise: If he ever made two big mistakes in a row, he'd call it quits. That was a half-century ago.
But this was the worst crash he'd ever experienced. And he was 70 years old.
Lying in a hospital bed, Reece knew he was lucky to have escaped with only a broken sternum and four compound fractures in his back. The crash easily could have snapped his neck. Maybe the risk was too much.
After being stabilized at Skagit Valley Hospital, Reece was transferred to Harborview Medical Center. They offered him a flight in an air ambulance; he declined. He'd had enough of that for one day.
Reece would spend three days in the Seattle hospital. He couldn't move, but he could smile.
"He was lying there, laughing and talking," recalled Reece's wife, Sue.
She's never questioned her husband's skills or dedication to safety. She trusts him to know his limits and couldn't bear the thought of him not doing what he loves.
"Flying is part of him," she said. "When he feels like he has had enough, he will quit."
But, in the hospital room, with her husband immobilized, she hung up blown-up photos of the crumpled copter. Then she went shopping for a new camping trailer. It had been two years since their last vacation.
Maybe, she thought, retirement could come a bit early. They didn't have to wait for that second mistake.
'He's the best'
A cedar-block pilot had crashed near Potts Creek Road. That's all that crackled over the police scanner that afternoon. But the locals knew it was Reece, and the word spread fast.
For many it was an emotional blow.
"I was sick," said Craig Holmquist, trail foreman for North Cascades National Park.
After more than a quarter-century of working with Reece, Holmquist didn't know what he'd do without him. Who else could fly in construction beams for remote cabins and not need directions? Whom could he trust with his trail crews? How would he replace bridges washed out by the winter storms? What about his friend?
From Mount Baker to Mount Hood, loggers, park rangers, search-and-rescue volunteers and scientists counted on Reece. Sometimes with their lives and livelihood.
North Cascades trail crew leader Art Olson recalled how he and Reece would team to build rock retaining walls, with the pilot maneuvering 1,000-pound boulders into position for Olson, on the ground. One mistake and the trail boss could be crushed, but Olson said such concerns never crossed his mind.
"I trust him more than anyone else," he said.
Said Acuna: "He's the best."
The logger winces when he thinks of hiring another pilot to haul his cedar blocks. The new guys are slow, charge more and get lost, he said. Besides, after 10 years of working with Reece, he was practically family.
Reece bends the rules -- "I'm old; what are they going to do to me?" -- and has the respect of those for whom he works because of it. No matter how many times they have to tell him to put his helmet on, Reece remains the top choice in the North Cascades for the National Park Service and U.S. Geological Survey. He's also the preferred choice of scientists studying the region's glaciers, bears, wolverines and goats.
Even with one surgically repaired eye, he can spot the footprints of lost hikers in snow and sand from 500 feet up. And the man can fly.
In summer 2004, when a climber fell off the jagged north ridge of Forbidden Peak in the middle of the Cascades and fractured both legs, it was Reece who flew in the rescuer, district ranger Kelly Bush.
"He landed on a square no bigger than this," she recalled, outlining half a picnic table.
Reece is the only pilot climbing rangers at the North Cascades trust to fly them to the top of the park's knife-edge ridges or into its deepest canyons. The running joke is when they go looking for some lost soul it is Anthony who will spot him first. In 20 years of flying rescues in the wild, he's evacuated more than 250 people.
What people like most about Reece is that he's always calm and in control.
"I believe there are two different type of pilots: the ones who have to work extremely hard to match his kind of flying, and the kind that can do it out there and have fun. He just has the raw talent," said Brian Reynolds, owner of Olympia-based Northwest Helicopters.
Reynolds first saw Reece fly in 1985. The pilot was delivering dynamite to crews battling a wildfire in the Olympics. Even with hundreds of pounds of TNT attached to his helicopter and flames scorching treetops below, Reece seemed to be enjoying himself.
500 loads a day
In the 51 years he's had a pilot's license, Reece has spent the equivalent of 2 1/2 years in the sky at the controls of a helicopter. His father helped build Darrington's first runway, and Anthony grew up a self-described "airport bum" -- building model airplanes and hanging out at the makeshift airport to hitch rides on any aircraft with an empty seat.
After a brief stint in the Army, he returned home and worked as a logger, flying an airplane for fun whenever he could. In the 1970s, he started a logging company with two of his brothers that specialized in setting up suspended cable systems to pull logs off the steep slopes of the Cascades.
It didn't take Reece long to combine his love of work with flying. "It would takes us three weeks to set up the cables," he said. "With a helicopter I could do it in half a day."
The brothers bought a Bell helicopter and Reece used the GI Bill to put himself through aviation school.
On the job, he learned the tricks of the trade, such as touching down with only one skid, balanced on top of a stump. He mastered holding the copter steady on hillsides and flying around trees and cliffs with inches to spare.
When he's doing commercial jobs, Reece wears flannel shirts, jeans and a baseball cap. He likes it much better than the olive-drab flight suit and white helmet he has to wear when flying for the government.
With a sly grin, he points to a shelf in his hangar near his Darrington home that's lined with three-ring binders. They're filled with regulations and procedures, courtesy of the Federal Aviation Administration, and each year they're updated.
"It kind of takes the fun out it," he said.
Flying out blocks of cedar taught him to arch the loads over the treetops at 90 mph, then bring them to a complete stop within a few feet of his target. He still takes pride in his speed, noting his personal best: moving 512 loads in a single day.
"He's part of the helicopter," Sue Reece said. "He's always been that way."
'That's his coffin'
In January, doctors told Reece not to even think about flying again until after his birthday -- March 11.
But two days before he turned 71, Leslie Boyd, his ground crew chief, saw him getting someone to help push his remaining helicopter out of the hangar. He was too weak to move it on his own.
Boyd asked him what he was doing, and Reece said he just wanted to climb aboard to "see how it feels."
She turned her back and Reece was airborne.
"He came back with a big grin on his face," she said.
Reece's decision to retire lasted one day. Then the visitors, cards, phone calls and e-mails started to arrive. They came by the dozens and from as far away as Antarctica. They told him to get well soon, asked when would he'd be back in the air. They said they needed him and didn't know what to do without him. Others just assumed he'd be back and asked when he'd start scheduling flights again.
"We decided you are the toughest man in the world," said one e-mail.
Reece changed his mind. Retirement could wait. The FAA agreed, giving him a clean bill of health.
"That's all he knows," Boyd said recently, glancing at Reece's current copter, another Hughes. "That's his coffin."
'Welcome back'
Acuna's clearcut was near the top of the list of jobs to get back to.
On May 22, when he landed to refuel, Boyd yelled at him to walk around a bit to keep his back loose. When he stopped to stretch, she told him he was getting tired. Maybe he should call it a day. Reece just smiled, and Boyd knew he'd finish the job -- as always.
But there have been changes. Before the accident, Reece could fly for eight hours, taking breaks only to fuel up. Now the breaks are a bit longer, the hours fewer.
As Acuna and his crew raced through the woods from load to load, sweating to keep up with the copter, Reece got his groove back -- spinning sideways and swinging loads out of the woods. It looked like he was playing with an industrial-sized yo-yo.
On the way home, in the shadow of the snow-capped mountains he loves, Reece followed streambeds, checking out logging operations along the way.
As he landed, a Navy training helicopter flew over. Reece got on his radio to find out who the pilot was. It was some young guy he didn't know, but who obviously knew of Reece.
"Welcome back to the skies," the Navy man said.
Reece watched the helicopter roar down the valley and smiled.
"It's good to be back."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/318403_parkpilot04.html
After a half-century in the skies, pilot made mistake No. 1
By COLIN MCDONALD
P-I REPORTER
The first two runs of the day went well. Small ice crystals fell, threatening to morph into full-fledged snowflakes, but visibility was still decent.
Anthony Reece was at the controls of his Hughes 500D helicopter, a 165-foot-long cable and hook dangling from the orange-and-white belly. The helicopter soared up the drainage just south of the Skagit River, the deep shoosh-shoosh-shoosh of the blades reverberating off the saturated slopes.
On the ground, Jose Acuna watched and waited.
The local salvage logger had spent the past few weeks cutting cedar stumps -- the remnants of an old clearcut -- into blocks for slicing into shingles and shakes. It was Jan. 4, and Acuna needed to get his blocks, stacked 6 feet high and wrapped in a rope sling, to the mill before the snow got too deep.
At 1 p.m., the clouds began to drop along with the temperature. The sky filled with wet snowflakes, and the voice inside Reece's head told him to land and wait it out.
Instead, thinking of Acuna's thin profit margin, he swooped in for one more load.
He swung the hook directly in front of Acuna and hovered above him.
Then silence.
After more than 50 years of flying the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the rugged Cascades, after rescuing scores of stranded climbers and dousing countless wildfires, Reece had made a mistake.
Snow had piled up on the copter's canopy then slid into the air intake when Reece flared the aircraft back to position the hook.
"That put the fire out," Reece would say later.
With no engine, Reece knew he was going to drop 170 feet. His first thoughts were of Acuna, a father of three boys.
"I didn't want to squish him."
Using the inertia left in the spinning rotors, Reece kept the helicopter in the sky as long as he could. He could have used the energy to cushion his fall, but Reece wanted to give Acuna time to run.
As the ground rushed toward him, Reece had a last thought: This is going to hurt.
The right skid hit first, jamming the strut into the belly of the copter. Then the lower antennas were crushed, followed by the cross support below the pilot seat. The plastic windows shattered. The tail rotor snapped. The impact walloped Reece's spine with a force of 9 G's -- the kind of pressure jet pilots wear special suits to protect against.
Then came the explosion -- a fireball erupting from the bottom of the copter that lasted a few terrifying seconds.
The rotors hit the ground on either side of Acuna. Unhurt, the logger jumped up, radioed for help and rushed to pull Reece out of the wreckage.
Conscious and in severe pain, Reece hung from Acuna as the two made their way to the fuel truck for a ride off the mountain. The ambulance would meet them halfway up the steep, dirt road.
"I remember that ride," Reece would say, months later. "That road has some chuckholes in it, and I felt every one."
Mistake No. 1
When he started flying, Reece made himself a promise: If he ever made two big mistakes in a row, he'd call it quits. That was a half-century ago.
But this was the worst crash he'd ever experienced. And he was 70 years old.
Lying in a hospital bed, Reece knew he was lucky to have escaped with only a broken sternum and four compound fractures in his back. The crash easily could have snapped his neck. Maybe the risk was too much.
After being stabilized at Skagit Valley Hospital, Reece was transferred to Harborview Medical Center. They offered him a flight in an air ambulance; he declined. He'd had enough of that for one day.
Reece would spend three days in the Seattle hospital. He couldn't move, but he could smile.
"He was lying there, laughing and talking," recalled Reece's wife, Sue.
She's never questioned her husband's skills or dedication to safety. She trusts him to know his limits and couldn't bear the thought of him not doing what he loves.
"Flying is part of him," she said. "When he feels like he has had enough, he will quit."
But, in the hospital room, with her husband immobilized, she hung up blown-up photos of the crumpled copter. Then she went shopping for a new camping trailer. It had been two years since their last vacation.
Maybe, she thought, retirement could come a bit early. They didn't have to wait for that second mistake.
'He's the best'
A cedar-block pilot had crashed near Potts Creek Road. That's all that crackled over the police scanner that afternoon. But the locals knew it was Reece, and the word spread fast.
For many it was an emotional blow.
"I was sick," said Craig Holmquist, trail foreman for North Cascades National Park.
After more than a quarter-century of working with Reece, Holmquist didn't know what he'd do without him. Who else could fly in construction beams for remote cabins and not need directions? Whom could he trust with his trail crews? How would he replace bridges washed out by the winter storms? What about his friend?
From Mount Baker to Mount Hood, loggers, park rangers, search-and-rescue volunteers and scientists counted on Reece. Sometimes with their lives and livelihood.
North Cascades trail crew leader Art Olson recalled how he and Reece would team to build rock retaining walls, with the pilot maneuvering 1,000-pound boulders into position for Olson, on the ground. One mistake and the trail boss could be crushed, but Olson said such concerns never crossed his mind.
"I trust him more than anyone else," he said.
Said Acuna: "He's the best."
The logger winces when he thinks of hiring another pilot to haul his cedar blocks. The new guys are slow, charge more and get lost, he said. Besides, after 10 years of working with Reece, he was practically family.
Reece bends the rules -- "I'm old; what are they going to do to me?" -- and has the respect of those for whom he works because of it. No matter how many times they have to tell him to put his helmet on, Reece remains the top choice in the North Cascades for the National Park Service and U.S. Geological Survey. He's also the preferred choice of scientists studying the region's glaciers, bears, wolverines and goats.
Even with one surgically repaired eye, he can spot the footprints of lost hikers in snow and sand from 500 feet up. And the man can fly.
In summer 2004, when a climber fell off the jagged north ridge of Forbidden Peak in the middle of the Cascades and fractured both legs, it was Reece who flew in the rescuer, district ranger Kelly Bush.
"He landed on a square no bigger than this," she recalled, outlining half a picnic table.
Reece is the only pilot climbing rangers at the North Cascades trust to fly them to the top of the park's knife-edge ridges or into its deepest canyons. The running joke is when they go looking for some lost soul it is Anthony who will spot him first. In 20 years of flying rescues in the wild, he's evacuated more than 250 people.
What people like most about Reece is that he's always calm and in control.
"I believe there are two different type of pilots: the ones who have to work extremely hard to match his kind of flying, and the kind that can do it out there and have fun. He just has the raw talent," said Brian Reynolds, owner of Olympia-based Northwest Helicopters.
Reynolds first saw Reece fly in 1985. The pilot was delivering dynamite to crews battling a wildfire in the Olympics. Even with hundreds of pounds of TNT attached to his helicopter and flames scorching treetops below, Reece seemed to be enjoying himself.
500 loads a day
In the 51 years he's had a pilot's license, Reece has spent the equivalent of 2 1/2 years in the sky at the controls of a helicopter. His father helped build Darrington's first runway, and Anthony grew up a self-described "airport bum" -- building model airplanes and hanging out at the makeshift airport to hitch rides on any aircraft with an empty seat.
After a brief stint in the Army, he returned home and worked as a logger, flying an airplane for fun whenever he could. In the 1970s, he started a logging company with two of his brothers that specialized in setting up suspended cable systems to pull logs off the steep slopes of the Cascades.
It didn't take Reece long to combine his love of work with flying. "It would takes us three weeks to set up the cables," he said. "With a helicopter I could do it in half a day."
The brothers bought a Bell helicopter and Reece used the GI Bill to put himself through aviation school.
On the job, he learned the tricks of the trade, such as touching down with only one skid, balanced on top of a stump. He mastered holding the copter steady on hillsides and flying around trees and cliffs with inches to spare.
When he's doing commercial jobs, Reece wears flannel shirts, jeans and a baseball cap. He likes it much better than the olive-drab flight suit and white helmet he has to wear when flying for the government.
With a sly grin, he points to a shelf in his hangar near his Darrington home that's lined with three-ring binders. They're filled with regulations and procedures, courtesy of the Federal Aviation Administration, and each year they're updated.
"It kind of takes the fun out it," he said.
Flying out blocks of cedar taught him to arch the loads over the treetops at 90 mph, then bring them to a complete stop within a few feet of his target. He still takes pride in his speed, noting his personal best: moving 512 loads in a single day.
"He's part of the helicopter," Sue Reece said. "He's always been that way."
'That's his coffin'
In January, doctors told Reece not to even think about flying again until after his birthday -- March 11.
But two days before he turned 71, Leslie Boyd, his ground crew chief, saw him getting someone to help push his remaining helicopter out of the hangar. He was too weak to move it on his own.
Boyd asked him what he was doing, and Reece said he just wanted to climb aboard to "see how it feels."
She turned her back and Reece was airborne.
"He came back with a big grin on his face," she said.
Reece's decision to retire lasted one day. Then the visitors, cards, phone calls and e-mails started to arrive. They came by the dozens and from as far away as Antarctica. They told him to get well soon, asked when would he'd be back in the air. They said they needed him and didn't know what to do without him. Others just assumed he'd be back and asked when he'd start scheduling flights again.
"We decided you are the toughest man in the world," said one e-mail.
Reece changed his mind. Retirement could wait. The FAA agreed, giving him a clean bill of health.
"That's all he knows," Boyd said recently, glancing at Reece's current copter, another Hughes. "That's his coffin."
'Welcome back'
Acuna's clearcut was near the top of the list of jobs to get back to.
On May 22, when he landed to refuel, Boyd yelled at him to walk around a bit to keep his back loose. When he stopped to stretch, she told him he was getting tired. Maybe he should call it a day. Reece just smiled, and Boyd knew he'd finish the job -- as always.
But there have been changes. Before the accident, Reece could fly for eight hours, taking breaks only to fuel up. Now the breaks are a bit longer, the hours fewer.
As Acuna and his crew raced through the woods from load to load, sweating to keep up with the copter, Reece got his groove back -- spinning sideways and swinging loads out of the woods. It looked like he was playing with an industrial-sized yo-yo.
On the way home, in the shadow of the snow-capped mountains he loves, Reece followed streambeds, checking out logging operations along the way.
As he landed, a Navy training helicopter flew over. Reece got on his radio to find out who the pilot was. It was some young guy he didn't know, but who obviously knew of Reece.
"Welcome back to the skies," the Navy man said.
Reece watched the helicopter roar down the valley and smiled.
"It's good to be back."
