The pilots words.......
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By RALPH R. ORTEGA
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Pilot Russ Mowry, in hospital bed, says he was hovering when 'something happened.'
Wreckage of Chopper 4 copter is lowered from roof of Brooklyn apartment building yesterday.
Helicopter pilot Russ Mowry was shot down three times in Vietnam - but the crash of his Channel 4 news chopper on a Brooklyn rooftop was the scariest moment of his life.
"I was looking death in the face," Mowry told the Daily News yesterday in an exclusive interview in his hospital room. "I knew I was going to die."
Miraculously, none of the three men aboard was killed in the Tuesday accident, and Mowry, 60, was feeling well enough yesterday to give a gripping account of the near catastrophe.
From his bed at Brookdale University Hospital, where he was nursing a black eye and cuts on his right leg, he recounted how disaster struck in the sky above Flatbush.
He and his WNBC crew mates, reporter Andrew Torres and co-pilot Hassan Taan, were covering a police shooting for the 6 p.m. newscast. "We were sitting there at a dead hover at 1,000 feet and I was just flying the helicopter, and then something happened - it just came out of control," Mowry said.
The veteran pilot, who has logged more than 9,000 hours in the air, radioed the control tower at Kennedy Airport that the Eurocopter AS350's tail rotor had failed. The tail rotor counteracts the immense turning power of the main rotor.
"I just tried to control the aircraft, to keep it level," he said. "But when it went nose-down, that sucker was going down. It was instantaneous. It was all over before it happened."
As people on the street stared in horror and scrambled for cover, Mowry "was holding the trigger on the control stick" and hoping he would land on a roof instead of the street.
"I told the tower, 'I'm going down! I'm going down!'" he remembered.
The chopper jerked across the skyline, spinning wildly before veering toward the top of a four-story apartment house at 2502 Cortelyou Road.
In the moment before the aircraft slammed into a parapet, only one thought flashed through Mowry's mind: "I saw that brick wall and I knew I was gonna die."
The Lincoln Park, N.J., man said he cannot recall the impact - or how the whirlybird did a 360-degree flip, sheared off its tail and landed in a crumpled heap atop 2514 Cortelyou. "Your mind erases that," he said.
But after seeing a photo of the wreckage on the front page of The News, he knew it was amazing he escaped with such minor injuries.
"How lucky can you get?" he asked.
Mowry, a Boston-born father of three grown kids who races vintage cars and rides BMW motorcycles in his spare time, dismissed any suggestion he was a hero. He said that although his military training taught him to aim for a rooftop instead of the ground in a crisis, he was not able to control Chopper 4 at all.
"It was fate, the odds. It wasn't grand design," he said. "There was nothing I could do. I just had to ride it down. I'm just so glad I'm the one who got hurt."
The Army vet earned two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star in Vietnam, but says getting shot down in combat "was a cakewalk compared to this."
He said he expects to have vivid memories of the moment he lost control of the helicopter "forever," but insists they won't ground him.
"I'll fly again," he vowed. "I got a long way to go. I got the best job in the world."