It’s a truism that anybody can be taught to fly an aircraft, just as anybody can be taught to drive a car: the only variable is the length of the training process. Most people with some degree of natural flying ability can reach basic solo standard after about ten to fifteen hours in the air in a fixed-wing aircraft, though reaching the same level of competence in a helicopter will take a bit longer because learning how to drive an egg-beater without adding to the annual aviation accident statistics is a rather more complex process. But the majority of people can achieve a reasonable standard of proficiency in about forty-five to fifty hours.
The military doesn’t do it quite that way, as might be expected, and they take a hell of a lot longer. In the British Armed Forces, the usual route is to put wannabe pilots through a flying grading to see if there’s any chance of them making it out of the other end of the process in one piece. Then they get them up to a reasonable standard in a fixed-wing aircraft. That’s usually called something like elementary or basic flying training, and the embryo pilots emerge from that phase with just enough skill and knowledge to be dangerous to themselves and to anybody and anything else in the air. Even birds.
At that point they’re introduced to the bafflingly complex and unlikely flying machine that is the modern helicopter. Just like the bumblebee, it doesn’t look as if it should be able to fly. It’s probably also at about this point in their training that pilots are reminded that nobody actually knows how or why aircraft stay in the air. There are at least two different and mutually contradictory theories of flight, neither of which provides a complete explanation for the phenomenon.
Assuming their nerves can stand it, they then begin basic rotary wing training, intended to transition them from an aircraft with large and solid visible wings to keep it in the air to a bulbous object possessing no obvious means of support or lift apart from a rotor disk characterised by a small number of remarkably slender blades. If they get through that part of the process they move on to advanced rotary wing training and follow that up with operational training and finally conversion to type. That will familiarise them with whatever kind of helicopter is operated by their designated flight or squadron. And then they go front line, their training over.
Just as there are good drivers and bad drivers, the skill and ability of whoever is sitting at the controls in the cockpit of a military helicopter can vary from – hopefully at the very least – competent up to excellent. And just a handful of the very best of the very best chopper pilots are recruited to serve in various specialised units like the Queen’s Helicopter Flight and the JSFAW, the Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing.
Major David Charles North, late of the Special Air Service and currently something of a wheel in the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, was sitting in one of the passenger seats of a dark blue Eurocopter AS365N3 Dauphin II helicopter being flown by a warrant officer from 658 Squadron Army Air Corps and taking remarkably little notice of where he was or what was happening outside the aircraft. He had spent a significant proportion of his working life sitting in aircraft of one kind or another, most of them helicopters, and the experience of entrusting his life to an aluminium box carried aloft by a rotor disk powered by some kind of jet engine had ceased to either bother or interest him. He knew that the JSFAW pilots were among the best in the business, and that the aircraft were maintained to military standards, so he normally just relaxed and let the pilot get on with the job of flying the thing.
The SRR was a kind of SAS lite, meaning its tasks involved identifying, observing and following potential terrorists and other undesirable threats to the people of the United Kingdom rather than tracking them down and then shooting them, though the SRR personnel were perfectly happy to do that as well if the situation demanded it. Right then, North was en route from Stirling Lines, the SAS headquarters at Credenhill near Hereford, to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to attend a classified briefing in one of the hardened underground rooms at the RAF station.
The pilot was flying VFR – visual flight rules – which meant he was self-navigating and taking his own avoiding action against other aircraft in the area, but he had also been in contact with the Brize Norton air traffic control LARS, the lower airspace advisory radar service, on 124.275 MHz. He’d been passed a weather update – fine with clear skies and light winds – and given the controller his ETA.
It was near the end of a routine, no pressure flight of the kind that North had made countless times in the past.
The pilot slowed and descended the aircraft, aiming towards the hardstanding where the local controller had given him clearance to land, and North felt the slightly increased noise level as he lowered the landing gear.
And then, suddenly and utterly comprehensively, the flight turned to worms.
The warrant officer emitted a kind of gasp that was just audible over the noise of the engines and rotor blades and his head slumped forwards, his arms dropping limply to his sides.
Dave North had been looking forward through the cockpit windows towards the hardstanding and immediately saw what had just happened.
The Eurocopter was single-crewed, with only North and the pilot on board, and the warrant officer had had manual control of the aircraft as it approached for landing. It was probably at an altitude of about five hundred feet and suddenly the ground appeared to be rushing upwards at considerable speed. It looked as if the pilot’s left hand had pushed the collective down as he lost consciousness.
‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ North muttered, ripping off his headset and wincing at the sudden increase in noise level. He unclipped his seat belt and scrambled forwards to clamber clumsily into the left-hand seat of the helicopter.
On civilian versions of the AS365 there’s a partition between the cockpit and the passenger cabin, which is typically equipped with about half a dozen comfortable leather seats suitable for the large and wide backsides of corporate heavyweights, heavyweights in both senses of the word. The military version dispenses with such niceties and crams in more than twice that number of very basic seats to accommodate a clump of hairy-arsed soldiers and also dispenses with the partition, which was just as well, because if it had been fitted North’s life expectancy would have been measured in seconds.
At the rate the Eurocopter was going down he might still be dead in seconds, but at least he had a chance. Vanishingly small, but still a chance.
He dropped into the seat and immediately reached down and to his left, pulling firmly up on the collective, the lever that controlled the angle of attack of the main rotor blades and hence the lift generated by them. North didn’t know much about helicopters but he did know that it was the collective that kept the aircraft in the air.
The helicopter shuddered and lurched, the aircraft reacting badly to his clumsy action, but at least it had stopped dropping like a large, heavy, extremely expensive and very fragile stone.
North glanced to his right, hoping that the warrant officer would have recovered his senses, but the man was clearly still out cold.
He looked ahead and grabbed hold of the second control, the cyclic, with his right hand. That was equivalent to the control column in a fixed wing aircraft. The collective kept the helicopter in the air and the cyclic pointed it where the pilot wanted it to go. That was about all North knew. Right then he also knew that he needed to get the helicopter on terra firma. And he didn’t much care where.
The ground below him was typical of almost every airfield he’d ever seen, a mixture of runways, taxiways, hardstandings and grassed areas.
North could feel himself starting to sweat.
The Eurocopter was designed to be flown from the right-hand seat and almost all the instruments and controls were either in front of that seat or in the horizontal panel between the two seats. The left-hand seat just had a scattering of essential flight instruments in front of it, and the helicopter’s navigation kit sat in the centre of the wide instrument panel, an incomprehensibly complex – to a non-pilot – mix of flat panel colour screens and analogue instruments.
North ignored even the cut-down panel in front of him because none of the displayed information meant anything to him and none of it would help him in his present predicament. He didn’t need to know things like airspeed or altitude because he could see all he needed to through the helicopter’s windscreen.
And what he could see was that it was in more or less level flight. If it was still going down the rate of descent had slowed, and it didn’t seem to be moving forward very quickly, so he guessed the Eurocopter was almost hovering. That at least gave him a bit of breathing space to sort out what to do next. Like how to get it down.
There were numerous buttons and controls on both the collective and the cyclic, he noticed, and he guessed that one of them probably worked the radio, but he had no idea which one. And talking to somebody on the ground wouldn’t help him very much at that moment. If he was going to walk away from this he’d have to land the helicopter himself.
North kept a firm grip on the collective and moved the cyclic very gently forward. The Eurocopter responded by moving ahead. He pulled back and moved it to the left. He knew what the helicopter would do, but he was just trying to get a feel for the way it responded, to gauge how much pressure he needed to exert to achieve a certain degree of movement. It felt controllable in a somewhat uncontrolled way.
He put his feet on the two rudder pedals and applied gentle force to the left-hand one as he turned the aircraft. That made the turn smoother, but right then he wasn’t interested in smoothness, only in getting the thing on the ground.
Next, he lowered the collective lever very slightly and felt more than saw that the aircraft was starting to lose height.
‘You can do this,’ he murmured to himself, though he was way out of his depth and he knew it.
North knew that the way helicopters landed wasn’t to descend vertically from height but to fly towards the designated landing area, losing height all the time, making an approach not unlike that of a fixed-wing aircraft, and then air-taxi before coming to a hover over the landing spot and vertically descend the last few feet to the ground. He was going to have to try to do that, but on his own terms.
He couldn’t risk maintaining the present heading because that was taking him towards a hangar and other buildings, so he put a little more pressure on the collective to stop his slow descent and moved the cyclic and the rudder pedal so that the aircraft was pointing towards one of the runways. If he cocked up his landing out there in the wide-open space of the airfield, at least he wouldn’t end up crashing into one of the buildings and taking anyone else with him.
North gently released some of the pressure on the collective to re-start his descent and held the cyclic as straight as he could. He picked a space a few hundred yards away, more or less in the middle of the runway, and aimed the helicopter straight for it. He kept the speed down, still trying to get a feel for the aircraft’s handling.
He felt the Eurocopter yaw to the left and corrected the movement as gently as he could but ended up swinging it to the right. He was being careful with the controls but guessed that he was repeatedly over-correcting, so he tried to relax and let the aircraft stabilise itself.
North remembered hearing a pilot tell him years earlier that if you went hands-off in a fixed-wing aircraft nothing would happen: it would just keep on flying at the same height and in the same direction at the same speed. But if you did the same thing in a helicopter, absolutely anything could, and probably would, happen and you needed to fly hands-on all the time. Not a particularly encouraging thought in his present situation.
He adjusted the position of the collective when it looked to him as if he was going down too slowly. He didn’t want to overshoot the runway and end up on the grass, though he assumed it was probably stabilised to cope with additional weight in case an aircraft ran off the edge of the asphalt.
He guessed he was only about one hundred feet above the ground, and still descending. His entire attention was focused on what he was doing.
Without his headset, the noise in the cockpit was uncomfortably loud, but there was nothing he could do about that. The runway stretched out below him, getting closer all the time as he tried coordinating the movements of the cyclic and the rudder pedals to keep the aircraft pointing straight ahead while still gently lowering the collective.
The runway surface seemed to rush towards him as he covered the last few feet in descent.
At the last second he pulled up on the collective to reduce the aircraft’s downward movement. That caused the helicopter to lurch to one side – probably because he’d applied too much force – and for an instant he feared it was going to topple over, though the logical part of his brain told him it couldn’t do that because the rotor was on top of the fuselage and mechanically that couldn’t happen.
North had been holding the helicopter in a slightly nose-down position and the nosewheel of the Eurocopter hit the runway first. The aircraft bounced back up into the air, the lurch causing the two mainwheels to bounce off the runway as well.
But that was good enough, and he was near enough, so North lowered the collective lever all the way down. With another bump the helicopter settled onto all three wheels of the undercarriage more or less in the middle of the runway. He slumped back in the seat, his relief palpable.
The rotors were still turning and he had no idea how to stop them or kill the power. And he needed urgent help for the warrant officer, who was still obviously unconscious – or worse – in the right-hand seat.
North looked around the cockpit, wondering which of the myriad buttons operated the radio. Then he glanced through the windscreen and guessed help was already on its way. He could see a couple of fire engines, one a kind of Land Rover conversion and the other a full-size prime mover, lights flashing and heading in his general direction, preceded by what he guessed was a small van used by air traffic control, headlights on and amber rooflight flashing, driving at speed towards him.
The driver stopped the van on the runway directly in front of the Eurocopter and about fifty yards away, well clear of the rotor disk, and an angry-looking man got out. He stared at the aircraft and, apparently when he was sure North had seen him, he walked quickly over to the left-hand side of the aircraft.
North opened the door on his side and waited for him.
The noise of the engines and rotors made normal conversation impossible, but it didn’t look as if conversation was what the new arrival wanted. In what was clearly a parade-ground voice he bellowed at North.
‘What the fuck are you playing at? This is the main fucking runway.’
North grabbed him by the front of the woolly-pully the man was wearing, pointed at the warrant officer and shouted in the man’s ear.
‘Get out of my fucking face and get a medic for him.’
Then he shoved him away.
Just under half an hour later, North was sitting in a fairly uncomfortable chair in what he guessed was an air traffic control briefing room, a mug of obviously instant coffee in his hand and looking at an RAF squadron leader who had pulled another chair round to sit opposite him. The name-plate on the left-hand side of the officer’s light blue pullover bore the name Gerard.
‘You were bloody lucky,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it,’ North responded. ‘If the pilot had collapsed ten minutes earlier you’d have been pulling my mangled dead body out of a flaming wreck somewhere out in the bundu.’
The Eurocopter had been shut down on the runway by an RAF helicopter pilot who was familiar with the aircraft type, and it had then been towed to the hardstanding on which it had been supposed to land. In the process, the warrant officer pilot had been taken out of the aircraft and rushed by ambulance to the station medical centre. His condition, according to what Squadron Leader Gerard had told North when he entered the briefing room, and which had been passed on by the ambulance crew, was unchanged: he was unconscious and completely unresponsive.
Gerard nodded.
‘The local controller told me what he saw from the VCP – the visual control position in the tower – but what happened in the aircraft?’
‘I was sitting in the cabin and looking through the windscreen and the guy just collapsed. No warning signs, no prior indication, and we were chatting away over the intercom for pretty much the whole flight. When he collapsed, he pushed the collective all the way down, which was why the chopper lost height so quickly. I got into the left-hand seat, pulled the collective up again and hoped for the best.’
‘Have you ever flown a helicopter before?’
North shook his head firmly.
‘Never,’ he replied. ‘I’ve flown in them dozens of times and I’ve seen how the pilots take off and land, but that was the first time I’ve ever sat at the controls of any kind of aircraft. And I’d be quite pleased if it was the last time as well. I just tried to get the thing on the ground as quickly as I could without killing anyone, myself included. Is it damaged?’
‘It’ll need a full check because that was quite a hard landing. In fact, according to the local controller it looked like three hard landings, one after the other.’
‘Sounds about right. Look, I need to get to this briefing I’m here for. That should take no more than two or three hours. Any chance of getting a lift back to Hereford when it’s finished?’
‘We can probably arrange that,’ Gerard replied. ‘Helicopter or—’
‘No bloody chance,’ North snapped. ‘I want something with four wheels, all of them on the ground, plus a steering wheel and a competent and qualified driver sitting behind it.’
‘I’ll see what we can do.’