I Learned About Flying From That (ILAFFT)

[Wageslave]

A Bit of Entertainment

This event happened near Tenby in May '88 and was published in Pilot magazine in the mid '90s. Dennis, youda been proud of ol 'AX that day! She impressed the hell out of me I can tell you!

Wire Wise

Way back, early in the reign of Queen Margaret 1st I was a cocky young Helo jock revelling in the escape from drudgery as a North Sea P2. I’d swapped Aberdeen for the exciting (and unknown) world of charter operators, a Captain at last! A proverb pinned to the crewroom noticeboard in Aberdeen was long forgotten.

At 100 hrs a pilot thinks he knows it all.
At 500 hrs he knows he knows it all
At 5000 hrs he knows he’ll never know it all.

I’d just cracked 500 hrs...
The most exciting part of the job, better than the charters, joy rides and wedding trips was the twice monthly pipeline patrol which took my observer and I over much of southern and central England for two and a half days at a time, 30 hrs per month at a legal 200 ft AGL. We dodged Chinooks and Pumas in Hampshire, Tornados in the midlands, mortar shells on Salisbury plain, the landlady in Birmingham, Hawks and Harriers in Wales and the weather everywhere we went. Oh, we also had to avoid the wires, which were never far from our thoughts.
The observer knew the route by tree, hedgerow and roadsign. His job was to spot anyone damaging the oil pipelines we were following, potentially vulnerable to a JCB digging foundations, ditching or draining fields.
We got off to an inauspicious start. The forecast was lousy and much of Wales was clampers until late afternoon. The potential for getting “stuck” was high and I elected to wait an hour or so to see how things would develop. The thought of a delay sent our boss, who I’ll call Harry into one of his John Cleese rages jumping and screaming and waving limbs around at improbable angles. Half an hour later I called Salisbury Ops and got the usual reply, “Roger, cleared Shrewton-West Lavington VFR 200 ft, live mortar firing in progress left to right you are passing beneath the trajectory.” Hmm.....
As the hills rose cloud began to obscure the tops of the pylons I was folowing towards the oil depot. Soon we were grubbing along at 200’ and 60 kts and eventually I had to chuck it away. I made a slow, decelerating turn away from the wires searching for any suitable landing site.
The farmer’s wife was, as Colin said, “Welsh Bloody Wonderful, Boyo”. We explained ourselves at the kitchen door and were fed and watered in the most generous style. As we sat in the damp cockpit phoning Bracknell Met from our huge handbag sized Vodaphone (this was in the days when you could actually talk to the duty forecaster) we saw a hope of moving just before dusk. I called a friend’s father who had a farm thirty miles away; no problem, there’s room for two or three SeaKings here, come on over, and then he briefed me about the wires.
The front passed and we set off. I recognised the farm and did an orbit to recce the field and spot the power lines. Colin and I kept up a running commentary on those wires to ensure that we both knew exactly where they all were. Our host was there to marshal us in. The haze and overcast had made it a very dull grey afternoon and as we slowed the drizzle no longer blew off the screen, making vision ahead rather poor. Still,I could see the electricity poles ahead and our host who was marshalling energetically as the tall hedge passed below.
The next few seconds passed in a series of freeze-frame snapshots. A pencil thick black line, horizontal in the chin window by my left foot. Odd! Then a strong smooth deceleration. The entire screen full of nothing but grass, lit ice-white in improbable detail by a silent flash. I don’t remember taking any corrective action, it must have been instinctive. The field, miraculously back in it’s proper place in the windscreen rushed up at an unhealthy rate as I pulled the collective to my armpit, throttle wide and thought, “That’s all there is...” As we settled like a feather Colin uttered the immortal line, “Nice one, I guess we caught the third wire!”
It lay looped across the grass fizzing malevolently. Grey haze, grey field, grey hedges and poles, and a grey drizzle on the screen. Even my friends father was grey. For all our looking neither of us has seen the third set of weathered grey wires in the undershoot. (Colin never saw them at all, he thought we’d had a control failure until the flash, which he said made one heck of a bang) Our poor host had told me of them on the phone but I had only registered the first two which we had seen. His marshalling acrobatics were an attempt to warn us, and as I flew on he knew what was coming.
Was it pressonitis? Yes. I should have scrubbed the trip back at base and just let Harry rant and rave. Complacency? Had I let my guard drop as the weather improved? Probably. Inattention to the briefing? Definitely. Environmental Capture, seeing the two wires which corresponded to what I thought I’d been told? Obviously. Poor visibility turned from acceptable VMC into something much worse on short finals as drizzle frosted up the screen. I should have thought of that. 500hr pilot-itis, more than anything else, I reckon.
The Enstrom had reached a pitch angle of 40-60 deg down at perhaps 20 feet above ground level. The cable virtually stopped us before it snapped, destroying our translational lift which left us in a very high hover with about a third of the power that we suddenly needed. Thanks to the wonderful design of that little Enstrom we did no damage at all, ego apart. A Jetranger would have chopped it’s own tail off and my beloved Hughes 500 would have dropped the last 20ft like a ripe peach. Boy, were we lucky. Good thing we only hit the wire though, and not one of the poles...
Earlier this year, on a wet, grey, drizzly evening I shot an ILS into Luton and thought about writing this story. Somewhere between Barcelona and that landing I’d passed 5000hrs.