A Bolt from the Blue Read online

  The pilot does not know exactly what is going on in the spotter’s head in terms of judging conditions, and conversely, the spotter can’t know exactly what the pilot is thinking. The situational awareness in each of the two positions is a little skewed in this circumstance. The key to the whole dynamic flowing seamlessly is the quality of pilot-spotter communication.

  In addition to interacting with the pilot, the spotter is in constant radio contact with the ranger hanging from the line. He also simultaneously assists the pilot with rotor clearance, tail and main, and manages the backup short-haul lines. There is a tremendous amount of multitasking involved in the position, much of it performed while leaning out of a doorless helicopter in strong winds at high altitude. It is an ultra-high-stress job, and it cannot be winged on the spot. It is not a place for ad-libbing, or for being instructed in the moment about the pilot’s expectations. The ranger must already know exactly what to do or, more accurately, precisely what the pilot wants him to do.

  Fewer than half of the Jenny Lake rangers had been specifically trained for the spotter role, and Renny had by far the most experience. In addition, the spotter position was the right place for Renny on a rescue that would require an intricately choreographed air show. Renny had managed the short-haul program for more than a dozen years, he devised and ran the pilot proficiency tests, and he knew the program and the pilots more intimately than any of the other rangers. He had been present at the inception of the program, initially working with pilot Ken Johnson for five years. Perhaps most important, as a result of a connection forged and intertwined in the course of the previous two years, Renny was particularly in sync with Laurence. Beyond being effortlessly comfortable together, they also had utter confidence in each other.

  Laurence had so much faith in, as he calls them, “Renny and the boys,” that during the short-haul rigging, when the area around his helicopter was buzzing with excitement, with people running back and forth, piling in gear and equipment, loading the line, he simply tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

  Despite the exactitude required to rig the helicopter for short-hauling, Laurence found that there was no point for him to check the rangers’ work. He did, of course, inspect it, but he knew that it wasn’t necessary, and his conviction was vital in a process where the players didn’t get a second chance to fix an error. He believed with absolute certainty that the rangers were true professionals, and in an effort to distinguish them from what he terms “the REI crowd,” Laurence describes them, almost worshipfully, as “capable.” That word comes up a lot in Laurence’s parlance concerning the Jenny Lake rangers, occasionally preceded by “just very” or “super” and always delivered in a tone indicating that it was the highest praise he could bestow on another man.

  Laurence knew from experience that these rescuers could rig a helicopter blindfolded if the situation called for it, and he was confident that they wouldn’t bump their heads on the rotor or put an arm up into a twirling blade. Rather than get worked up worrying needlessly, Laurence merely waited, his eyes shut, calming himself for what was to come.

  While the spotter acts as a backup voice to the ranger and the pilot, Laurence actually had a strong preference for nonverbal communication, and Renny was happy to accommodate. The two of them could have entire conversations, regarding, for example, the helicopter’s proximity to the mountain face, all in hand signals. For the most part, what Renny could see, Laurence could see. Laurence was not, for example, wild about a countdown on his distance to the landing spot. “Seventy-five feet, 10 feet, it’s just numbers, it doesn’t mean much,” he says. “You can say 75 if you want. It’s not necessary.”

  Fluid communication between pilot and spotter becomes especially crucial when the spotter conveys the signals of the rangers as they are detaching themselves from the short-haul rope or clipping patients onto it. Rather than in a stream of chatter—this looks good, this looks bad, this is a disaster—Renny could accomplish the same message wordlessly. Even when he did speak, he still used hand signals, in case the radio failed or somehow couldn’t be heard.

  There were, of course, occasions when Laurence and Renny would actually talk on the radio. When Laurence was landing the helicopter on the mountain, the conversations tended to go something like this:

  Laurence: “See that gray chunk there on the left? Is it flat? I can’t tell if it’s flat.”

  Renny: “No, go to the left.”

  Or, more tersely, when Laurence was sidling up beside a mountain face, pressed against it as close as he possibly could get, he would simply ask Renny, “Got the reference?” By this, he actually meant: “Are you registering our distance from the mountain, how close are we getting to it, are we going to smash into it, are you going to warn me if we are?” But all Laurence asked Renny was if he had the reference, and he knew, and Renny knew, that was all it took, all the communication they needed. It was trust in action.

  All things being equal, Laurence preferred to pull up to a mountain on the rock-face side so as to gauge proximity visually for himself. Depending on the angle and the location of the rescue, however, he couldn’t always have it that way. Few pilots would consider approaching the off side of the mountain and allowing someone else to be their eyes, but Renny was on a very select list that Laurence trusted in that position.

  Laurence explains, in his almost comically understated way, the importance of not crashing into the mountain in that situation: “You have to be really careful with this one. There are no curb feelers on the ship. Once it taps on things, blade on rock, things tend to go pear-shaped. I try to avoid that as much as possible.”

  There is a certain amount of mandatory communication on the part of the ranger being short-hauled to a scene. About six feet above the end of the short-haul line, slack and hooked in with a prusik loop, is an orange bag made of Kevlar-based material containing 10 pounds of lead shot. It is meant to hold the line down, although the bag still sails out below in big arcs. (Longer lines require more weights, and two weight bags are used.) When the ranger lands at the insertion site, he is trained simultaneously to announce “Down and comfortable,” place the bag on the ground in front of him, and signal with his hands. Then, almost instantaneously, he unclips from the line.

  Sometimes when Laurence deposited a ranger on a rock face and he unclipped while clinging to a crack, the ranger couldn’t always immediately release his hands to signal to Laurence. If Laurence couldn’t see the ranger’s hands, he had to guess that he had detached from the short-haul line and safely snapped into a carabiner just by feeling the line go a little bit light. There was obviously a huge risk of Laurence pulling the ranger back off the mountain when he flew away. The communication at this point was supposed to be “Clear to lift” from the ranger and “Lifting” from Laurence in response. Still, Laurence made an extreme point of withdrawing slowly, both looking and operating by a sense of feel for whether a hand or a glove had caught or hooked on something.

  The rangers were so ready to clip back into the short-haul rope during extraction that the process took a few seconds at most. Sometimes when they were ready to leave the scene, they would deviate from standard radio protocol to summon their ride extra-casually, using Laurence’s nickname: “Come on in, LP, we’re ready.” Once they had reattached to the line, the standard phrase was “Hooked and ready,” to which Laurence would again respond, “OK, lifting.”

  It was essential for Laurence to be directly above the ranger at this point, or he was in danger of jerking him off the face. Laurence proceeded excruciatingly cautiously as he ascertained that the ranger was free from all encumbrances. If he had left his harness attached to the mountain or if his safety gear was still connected to both him and the rock, it would likely have ended tragically for him as well as everyone onboard. Once Laurence was convinced that he was clear, he would ease off his grip on the machine and slowly move out into the abyss.

  One of the most high-pressure aspects of Renny’s spotter responsibilit
ies was the obligation to signal to Laurence to “Drop the load” if necessary. If the helicopter suffered a mechanical failure or the short-haul line became entangled with a tree or a rock or other obstacle, the line had to be cut to prevent the helicopter from going down. The ranger outside had to be sacrificed to save the pilot and the people inside the helicopter.

  The decision to jettison the load—the load in this case being Leo Larson—would ultimately be Laurence’s, but the execution would partially be up to Renny. Once Renny slashed the backup lines, the pilot could disengage the short-haul rope simply by triggering the release mechanism. Based on the shape of the switch, the rangers whimsically referred to this act as a pilot “pickling the switch” to kick loose the extended load and drop the ranger to his death. Renny therefore had a knife, blade extended out, stuck upright in a plastic holder inches in front of him, poised, if need be, to sever the lifeline suspending Leo.

  As Renny leaned out of the helicopter to check on Leo swinging far below him, a lone cloud cloaked that part of the mountain, obscuring the landing area. By the time Laurence had fully ascended to the correct elevation, the clouds had thickened around the ridge.

  Laurence kept the helicopter hovering in the area of Friction Pitch, allowing Leo to orbit on the end of the rope, hoping for the clouds to clear. The gap he had just passed through was especially windy, gusting at maybe 45 mph, and it was a supreme challenge for him to remain suspended at that altitude, so close to the very top of the mountain.

  The three men were barely able to restrain their urgency to reach the Folded Man to fix—or at least attempt to fix—his airway. Leo was longing to get on-scene to size up the entire situation and then, if it wasn’t already too late, to focus on saving the suspended climber who was bent backward nearly in two. Laurence was trying to count the people at the scene and calculate, assuming that they could even land, how many minutes it would take to extract each one of them before nightfall. As he waited, he monitored the engine parameters, the engine temperature, and the torque setting, transmitting them all to a radio operator who logged the information.

  A few minutes went by, with clouds continuing to slide over and past the insertion site, and still Laurence held the hover.

  A helicopter can fly in any direction—forward, backward, upward, or sideways—and can make sharper turns than airplanes. It can also, depending on the skill of the pilot, hover over a single spot. It has two sets of propellers—a larger one at the front, above the cabin, and a smaller one at the tail.

  The blades on a helicopter’s main rotor (the large horizontal propeller that spins on top of its body) are essentially moving wings. The rotor blades create a strong wind as they slice through the air, and that current creates a lifting force enabling a helicopter to go straight up. Each blade produces an equal share of the lifting force. Unlike an airplane, a helicopter does not have to move forward in order to achieve lift.

  The tail rotor prevents the helicopter from spinning around when the main rotor blades are turning. When a helicopter’s main rotor turns in one direction, the body of the helicopter tends to rotate in the opposite direction. This is known as torque reaction. A tail rotor produces thrust in the opposite direction of the torque reaction and holds the helicopter straight.

  By changing the angle of the main rotor blades slightly, the pilot controls where the helicopter goes. To increase or decrease overall lift, he alters the angle of all of the blades by equal amounts at the same time. To tip forward and back (pitch) or tilt sideways (roll), a pilot alters the angle of the main rotor blades cyclically during rotation, creating differing amounts of lift at different points in the cycle. If he wants to go forward, go backward, or turn completely around sideways, tilting the spinning rotor will cause the helicopter to fly in the direction of the tilt.

  A helicopter pilot manipulates four separate flight controls to achieve flight: the cyclic stick, the collective lever, the antitorque pedals, and the manual throttle. The changes he makes to the flight controls are transmitted mechanically to the rotor, producing aerodynamic effects on the blades.

  The cyclic control, also called the cyclic stick or just the cyclic, looks like a joystick and is usually located between the pilot’s legs. To make a helicopter fly in a certain direction, the pilot maneuvers the cyclic stick to tilt the rotor disc. This alters the pitch of the rotor blades cyclically, meaning that the feathering angle of the blades changes depending on their position as they rotate around the hub, with all blades changing their angle the same amount at the same point in the cycle. If the pilot pushes the cyclic forward, the rotor disc tilts forward, and the helicopter produces thrust in that direction. If the pilot pushes the cyclic to the right, the rotor disc tilts to the right, causing the helicopter to move sideways or to roll into a right turn.

  The collective pitch control, or collective lever, is on the left side of the pilot’s seat and is responsible for changing the pitch angle of all of the main rotor blades at the same time and independent of their position. When this flight control is used, all of the blades change equally, and the helicopter increases or decreases its total lift derived from the rotor, causing it to climb or descend.

  The antitorque pedals control the direction in which the nose of the aircraft is pointed by changing the pitch of the tail rotor blades. The manual throttle is also generally considered a flight control because it is needed to maintain rotor speed and keep the rotor producing enough lift for flight.

  Forward flight and hovering are the two basic flight conditions for a helicopter, with hovering clearly the most exacting aspect of helicopter flying. A helicopter generates its own wind while in a hover, and that acts contrary to the flight controls. When a pilot keeps the rotor disc completely flat, the helicopter hovers because all of the lift force is straight up, keeping the helicopter in the air. If one side of the rotor disc has more lift than the other, the disc will tilt, and the helicopter will move in the direction it is pushed into. The pilot is therefore required to make constant control inputs to keep the helicopter standing still in the air.

  The cyclic eliminates drift in the horizontal plane, controlling forward and back, right and left. The collective maintains altitude. The pedals control nose direction. The interaction of these controls is what makes hovering so incredibly complicated, since an adjustment in any one control requires an adjustment of the other two, creating a cycle of endless corrections. To complicate the flying process further, in any rotor system, there is a delay between the time a change in pitch is introduced by the flight controls and when that change is manifest in the rotor blade’s flight, forcing the pilot to calculate this lag continually.

  While Laurence was looking down at Leo, contemplating making a move to get in close to the face, a wispy cloud slithered in directly beneath him, scaring, as he says, the “bejesus” out of him (and this is not a man who gets the bejesus scared out of him easily). The ground was indistinct to Laurence, and Leo was in fog. Laurence’s level of disorientation was much like that of a skier racing into a sudden whiteout. He later confessed that the abrupt appearance of the cloud below him had freaked him out, not that anyone could read that in his face at the time, much less in his voice. His unease centered around the idea that there could be more swiftly moving clouds, and the process needed to be completely visual for him at that point. If he fully committed to take Leo to the face and another cloud darted in under them, he would lose all reference with the ground and have no idea where he was in space.

  Although the pilot is in command in a short-haul procedure, either the spotter or the ranger on the end of the rope can also call off an insertion. Laurence, Renny, and Leo each had an independent angle on the situation, and each of them trusted the ability of the other two to go right up to the edge of the risk. If any one of them felt that it wasn’t right, that the safety threat was too great, that person could decide for all of them.

  In this case, there was a completely unanimous decision to abandon the attempt. Laurence knew
what he could and could not do. When he communicated to the rangers that he was not going to be able to work it out, they knew one another and the mountain well enough that both of them already understood and agreed. The only option at that point was for Laurence to fly them back down the mountain.

  Laurence brought Leo back to the Lower Saddle and set him gently down on the ground—a landing, as Laurence says, like “angel’s breath.” They were all plainly frustrated at their inability to get straight to the scene, and an image of the Folded Man being alive and in need of profound help was on everyone’s mind, but they separated out those emotions and systematically began strategizing the next steps.

  There was a ranger hut on the Saddle containing a weather port and backup rescue and climbing equipment, which the rangers used to supplement the gear they had gathered from the cache. Laurence immediately got back in the air, flying down to Lupine Meadows to ferry more rangers up to the Lower Saddle. On the next flights, George Montopoli, Marty Vidak, Jack McConnell, Chris Harder, and a couple of other rangers arrived at the staging area.

  This was a day that the rangers had trained for, a rescue that, quite simply, they lived for. While they all participated in the same training, they clearly brought different skill sets to the rescue, and Brandon assigned them diverse responsibilities depending on their abilities. He considered various scenarios, how much time they had, how many people were available, who was the most experienced at short-haul, who were the most proficient medics, who was the best at setting anchors, who was the fastest and strongest to hike up to the scene. By the time he had finished delegating tasks, he had all of the right people in place, including the support personnel in Lupine Meadows. He designated Dan Burgette as medic for the lower scene. For the upper scene, including the Folded Man, Brandon tagged ranger Craig Holm, who had turned 35 just days earlier, as medic.