It was not a scary moment for me but from the pilots’ point of view we were ready to crash.
I was flight mechanic on a Bell HTL-1 (early model 47) and we were returning to base in Traverse City, Michigan from a stint on an Ice Breaker on Lake Superior. We had a leaky tail rotor gearbox so every fifty miles or so we would land and I would fill up the gearbox with of all things, fish oil. Very smelly stuff.
My pilot, Dave Gershowitz, who incidentally was the first helicopter pilot to hit 1000 hours, was easily freaked out.
While flying in the left seat I was holding the oil can between my legs and reading a map. We were about twenty minutes out when Dave saw a bear. He very excitedly told me to look. When I leaned over, my legs spread and the can hit the deck making a loud noise. Dave thought there was something wrong with the tail rotor gearbox and he made a quick turn looking for a spot to land. In the process of making his maneuver he really made a hard over. On that particular helicopter type when there was an excessive side load on the mast it would cause the planetary gears to really growl.
Upon hearing that, he really wanted to get on the ground. He picked out a landing spot in front of what we later found out was a veterinarians office. To get from where we were to that landing spot we had to pass over a turkey farm and in the process we made the turkeys stampede and over 100 birds were killed in the pileup at the fence surrounding the turkey farm.
Oh yes, in the process of landing, we took out the vets' telephone line
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