SASless
4th Jan 2016, 14:20
Well Done! That Man!
'We had 3 minutes to save their lives' (http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/09/28/wildfire-king-fire-helicopter-pilot-crew-rescue/16394813/)
I was there too, I had to wait for my "Helco" before getting airborne, got there two minutes after Gary... We took over the incident from him. This is him in the LZ we found waiting for the crew to get there, (you can see them running left side):
http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j35/helokat/4014/Safe_zps6a7ee4f3.jpg
This fire had a bad attitude and in our minds, was being fought a little too "aggressively". There were two other near misses on this fire that did not get the publicity of this incident. Gary was awarded the "Pilot of the year" award by HAI.
To give you an idea of how bad this fire was, the first video were taken the same day as the incident above, about 3NM away, and about 3 hours later by yours truly... The other 2 are just good montages:
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Northern California actually ran out of Jet A for a day or so there was so much aerial traffic......