30 November 2007

Rooftop Pads, Good Stories, and Lousy Reporting


One of my favorite stories used to be told by a guy that became a close friend after he recovered from a serious heart attack.
I flew him to the Cardiac center in our old Bell LongRanger days. He caught a glimpse of the rooftop helipad as I flew past it downwind, and said to himself, "That thing looks like a postage stamp! I hope this S.O.B. is good!"
(Our flight gave him five good years until "the BIG one" took his life.)
Saw
this blog post today and found it quite interesting... thought you might find it interesting too.

It pays Kandy and me a supreme compliment, and reinforces
what I've said before about the media. (Links are all out of date at that post, but you'll get the idea.)

3 comments:

gypsy soul said...

that helipad does look like a postage stamp from this view! ..so his 's.o.b.' was good, otherwise he might have not made those last five years..

i have never landed on top of a building..what we usually have here are mountain operations, away from urban areas. hope i could try that one day..

ProPilots said...

Hi Greybeard, it's nice to know you guys helped him get five more years. That's a big gift.

I read your post from 2005 about the media. That is so right on. Pretty much everything we do is misreported. It's ridiculous. We sit around the base and roll our eyes at the media reports. I too have called them a couple times to correct them, But they're like "thanks but no thanks". Oh well, add that to the list of things that I can't let stress me out. lol
Kandy

Greybeard said...

Elay, in my opinion they're not a lot different... mountains and buildings. Rooftop pads may have more turbulence because of wind eddying around other buildings or nearby elevator towers,
so they are sometimes a handful-
All our pilots have set their own personal wind-gust spread limits, so if the wind exceeds a certain factor no one throws stones when they choose an alternate landing site.