Thought I'd share one of the many weird things you see in this job and some nice photos too.

 

We got tasked while in transit towards skye to a cliffhanger, I've not had many proper cliff hangers so got my heart going a bit. Long story short we got a wiggle on and were there in 12 mins and searched the bowl they were in. We learned they were deer stalkers and on the third pass I spotted a waving hand. They were dressed in tweed and that real tree cammo and it bloody works. There were 3 of them on a 70 or 80 degree slope at the back of the bowl. The highest was genuinely precarious pretty much clinging to a birds nest with his face.

picture taken as we flew away it doesn't look much but they were about 850 foot up the back of it just on the edge of the area in shadow.

 

Was a bit tricky we stayed fairly high so as not to blow them off (steady) and had about 150 foot of cable out with the tail 15 foot from the rocks. With the cliffhanger rescued quickly we slowed it down and got his mates along with their gay carved walking sticks and rifles. The winchman performed a manoeuvre only I was witness to but with a kick of his legs swung in a graceful arc, hung upside down to snatch up a walking stick and then landed legs astride the second stalker. What a ninja.

 

As we left the bowl the cliffhanger (surname Smyth-Oswold) broke out a sandwich and got stuck in as we dropped them at their land rover. We gave them some parting words like "carry an orange bit of sheet to flap at rescuers in future." "Don't be ****ing stupid." And "so the deer won today then lads"

 

Good fun, more pictures to follow.

Nice action shot Tom :thumbup1:

Good work as usual Tom, but why are you trying to run mate, you're suspended and you're legs flapping like a good'n lol!

 

Only joking! When I fast roped from a Merlin to HMS Ocean it wasn't only my legs that were flapping!!!!

 

Good video mate, "shark watch" ;)

are you sure it was your legs flapping and not yer hoop giving it 5p 50p?? lol

are you sure it was your legs flapping and not yer hoop giving it 5p 50p?? lol

 

Ha ha mate, yeah, could of used my hoop as a bottle opener!

Ha ha mate, yeah, could of used my hoop as a bottle opener!

 

:laugh::laugh::laugh:

Good work as usual Tom, but why are you trying to run mate, you're suspended and you're legs flapping like a good'n lol!

 

Only joking! When I fast roped from a Merlin to HMS Ocean it wasn't only my legs that were flapping!!!!

 

Good video mate, "shark watch" ;)

 

Haha we did a collapsed lung job on Ocean and the navy wouldn't let us land because we hadn't done the training so we had to winch, their deck was bigger than our helipad!

 

No matter how much you kick you normally arrive at the boat facing backwards lol

 

No matter how much you kick you normally arrive at the boat facing backwards lol

 

LOL the Navy boys prefer you to come in backwards.:lol::lol::lol:

Had a very interesting training trip on Saturday. With it being nice the plan was to go across to the Culins on Skye land and have a SAR picnic, this meant we could spend a few hours ready to react to any jobs over that way and was a good opportunity to see the Culins.

 

A nice day to fly

 

I hadn't been before but had heard many stories told in hushed voices talking about near misses and crazy rescues. When we got there I could see why, the mountains are steep jaggy spikey ones, not rolling lumps like the Cairngorms, the large amount of volcanic rock with a high iron content makes the instruments wobble and a lid of cloud turns day into night.

 

Just add dinosaurs

 

After some good training winching at height and getting most of the cable out, looking at the accident hot spots and flying sideways round bowls like a paper bag in the breeze we had a cold and uneventful picnic.

 

We set off home just as it got dark, and as it happend just as it fogged out! The route home was hard work, but a great team effort. It was so dark the goggles were just showing green static, there were long periods of no light at all, no houses, no moon or stars. The right hand seat did nothing but fly, the left hand seat did all the radios, instruments and various bits of switching needed, I was between the two with a 1:250'000 scale map and a tiny torch, while the winchman followed through on the nav as best he could from the back.

 

A poor goggle picture! (Obviously taken after the really scary bit) the lights are the cockpit instruments and the 2 shades of green are a mountain and the sky.

 

We spent most of the transit at 200 feet or so, the danger was that the wrong turn up the wrong valley would lead to invisible suspended wires, or a dead end and a horrible U turn in a tight valley. The cloud went right to the top and if we lost it and had to climb we would quickly turn into a big yellow snowball amd come back down.

 

Map reading with a finger torch

 

Eventually we saw the lights of inverness and could relax a bit as we cruised home.

 

Invaluable training, we would never intend to get into that position for training but having done it it's just one more experience to fall back on when we do it again for real.

 

 

 

And! Good news! Today I heard that I have a position with the civilian company replacing the military SAR service. I am so relieved and proud that I can continue to do the job I love for years to come, albeit on a red white amd blue Italian helicopter :-/

 

Thanks for reading, ill put up another cool winching video a bit later on.

That looks scary Tom. I have been on a few night flights in a Lynx and Gazelle and they do get the adrenaline going but still scary. I will never forget when the Chinook from RAF Aldergrove slammed into a hill on the Mull of Kintyre 25 dead :sad: So be careful out there Tom and glad to here you have a civi job lined up mate.

Two aircraft I haven't been on Gary, but I hear a lot of scary Gazelle stories from the ex army pilots here. Well if I make it to the end of Sea Kings I reckon I am safe, the new helicopters are about uncrashable (in theory) whereas these things are nearly unflyable.

 

As exciting as it is it will be sad to leave the RAF.

Edited March 3, 201411 yr by tomfromthenorth

Congratulations on the civi post you have secured buddy. I always admire the crews of SAR.

Always sad leaving the forces Tom but onwards and upwards mate (no pun intended lol)

Got another one :-)

 

I don't tell these stories to show off, I just love yellow helicopters and it will be sad to see them go, I know the TV shows quite a bit of our work but it's normally hyped up and badly lost in narration. So these are from the horses mouth and when we're gone, a few more otherwise untold stories are out there to be remembered.

 

So we got the call at 8 (er... I mean 20 hundred in the afternoon hours... zulu time :wacko:) 2 crag fast climbers near Balatter. We flew down and found the bowl they were in. The blue line is a trace of our flight, I didn't draw it on it's a GPS trace.

 

 

Now the cloud was thick cold and went right to the top and it was sat like a lid in the bowl gently rising and falling leaving a 150 foot clear bit in the bottom with a 50 foot tall letterbox to get in and out over the lip of the bowl. So we were hooning around the bottom of the bowl (because you can't always hover a helicopter, especially not a shit old one at 4000 feet with half a tank of fuel) trying to spot them in the dark on NVGs and my thermal (FLIR) camera. On the third pass we see a flash of light in the cloud and then find the footprints of the stuck climbers heading in that direction. We realised we couldn't really get to them.

 

Quick SAR lesson,

If one engine stops (which they do) you need to get forward speed on fast.

If you loose references in cloud you have to climb to 1000 foot above the hills you're in.

If you go into cloud below 0 degrees you turn into a snowball and fall out the sky.

 

If these guys were dying we would have hover taxied into the cloud clinging onto the rock face for references and try to do the rescue faster than the snowball effect hoping we don't loses sight of the hill in snow/cloud or have an engine fail whatever.

 

They weren't hurt so we went off to get some Mountain Rescue. We did 3 shuttles in the end 4-4-5. Each shuttle saw the cloud dropping after initially jumping up a couple of hundred feet for team one.

 

It was team one that was a sporty drop off, we managed to get one wheel on and hover jump the 4 MR and then throw their bags to them. I have never seen an expression like the MRT leader's when I told him to jump out! **** off it hinted.

 

It was only like 6 foot! But they did it and to give them credit it was fairly sporty.

 

Diagrams and everything :biggrin:

 

As we did this the cloud sunk from about where we were to a good hundered feet beneath us and the departure was fairly A level, with the MR huddled in the triangle formed by the hill the helicopter and the rotor blades we broke contact with the ground and fell down and left paralelling the hill diving into the white keeping a reference on the hill side, we popped out the bottom of the cloud did some crazy Sqn Ldr Macfarlane (gifted pilot) 180 degree diving acellerating departure thing and went for more MR.

 

The next 2 were very straight forward getting dropped off lower and lower with the cloud.

 

 

Fuel light flashing we used a remote fuel site to top up at Braemar and went home.

 

 

And! To top it all off we flew over Kim's house on the way home :-) We are availiable to go back if they need us but they won't. The clinbers weren't hurt and the MR are going to have an awesome time tying knots and eating Kendal mint cake.

 

I hope you find this interesting, it is great to be back at work but I did throw a few bergens forgetting my broken finger :-( and if the bell goes now and it's an oil rig job :headvswall:

 

Only joking a lot of you guys are off shore so I will sprint to the aircraft. Goodnight guys :biggrin:

:bow:

Post 33....nothing more reasuring than half a dozen drip trays under your aircraft is there:lol::lol:. Great thread btw:thumbup1:

Loving this thread Tom I find it so interesting mate:thumbup1: keep it coming.

Got some awesome photos today but no rescues unfortunately/fortunately.

 

Had a long day training in the mountains, practicing landing in bowls on ridges and valley bottoms, without snapping aerials or rolling over. That and we just landed from a nice 1hr night decks trip, winching with a little fishing boat.

 

If anyone is any good at photo cropping and colour contrast fiddling feel free to show me what to do with some of these nice ones.

Edited March 30, 201411 yr by tomfromthenorth

Looks cold up on the Highlands Rob.

The thin line between tragedy and comedy.

 

No pictures I'm afraid, perhaps an archive one at the end but an interesting story none the less. The bell rang and the call was something like, "Hi lossie, damp job, well a woman on a beach. We have reports of a wheelchair in the sea off lossie beach. Scramble."

 

So we launched and as the engines came up I activated a heaty-up chemical blanket and prepared for a drowner with my bag valve mask and defib. It's 2 miles to the beach so my radio call was "kinloss rescue, rescue 137, airborne, on scene, wait out." We saw 2 coppers with a wheelchair and a crowd stood off, we landed on the beach (much to my displeasure, 5 mins on a beach 5 days of ****ing hoovering!) and we jumped out and ran over. In the sandblast I stood ready to do the usual winchOp shuttle runs to the cab and back to fetch medical gear for the winchman; waiting, I watched the winchman shouting in the ear of one of the cops. As they talked I looked at our casualty. Sat In the chair was what looked like an overweight dinner lady wrapped in towels, only her pissed off head and plaster cast leg were protruding top and bottom.

 

We decided to lift the chair between the 4 of us and carry her to the door. I then jumped in threw Ducan 2 rescue strops and we attached her to the aircraft winch to bring her onboard. Duncan shouts "ligature ligature, Tom J-knife now!" I thought this was the word for a heroin addicts arm tourniquet but quickly learned that in this case she had (beneath the towels) wrapped a bungee round her kneck twice and was doing her best to die. The tempo kicked up we cut the cord and winched her in. I wrapped her in heaty up pouches and tin foil and passed duncan the oxygen stuff as I cleared us off the beach from the door. A rapid plan to land just up the road to transfer her to an ambulance was made and I pattered us to a suitable landing site. I jumped out to ensure no one ran into the disc or tail before positioning the ambulance just outside the disc and running in with a trolley. We offloaded the woman and went home. Then the story came out over the phone from the hospital.

 

The woman who was about 40 had been taken to hospital about a week before after taking an overdose, very hungover and not happy she decided to jump off the hospital roof. She came to with her leg in plaster. Still not very happy she wheeled herself to lossie beach and got stuck in the sand. She then stood up and used the chair like a zimmoframe to walk out to sea... at low tide... 100m out and knackered she thought **** this and sat in the chair, then swallowed a load of sleeping pills. As the tide came in someone saw a woman up to her knees asleep in a wheelchair in the sea. The police came and dragged the cold wet grumpy woman back to shore and wrapped her in towels. Determined to kill herself she wrapped a fairly tight bungee round her kneck and held her breath. A helicopter arrived cut her ligature warmed her up and sent her back to hospital!

 

She was no quitter!

 

I don't know what happened next but I haven't heard anything bad. I hope she gets some help but you can't make these things up.

Picture of us training as I didn't get any on the above job.

What a story lol, although i feel for the woman, she must be in a bad place to want to end her life, but you could imagine her scenario in a comedy sketch with all the attempts gone wrong, its obviously not her time to go :innocent:

Not while I'm on shift :batman: :lol:

Great story Tom. There is so many people out there fighting to stay alive yet some want to give it away. :sad: Keep up the good work Tom.

May sound harsh, but I hate it when suicial people involve other strangers in their plans, which could affect them for life. Like sitting in a wheelchair on a beach. somebody is gonna spot you. sounds more like a cry for help.Maybe it's because I work on the railway and I see how it affects the people involved when somebody uses your train to kill themselves

The day of 2 jobs and carbon monoxide poisoning :(

 

Couple of weeks ago some time the bell went at about 11 and we were scrambled to reports of an 80 year old male who had fallen off a pier, I don't know where it was but it was along the Moray coast somewhere. More accurately it was here...

We came into that photo from the right saw an ambulance near the harbour wall and did a quick left hand descending turn to come to the hover over the thicker arm of the wall. I winched the winchman out, then we orbited for safety, for the winchman's peace and quiet and to take photos.

 

I think I will tell the story of how the 80 YOM ended up in the sea through smilies :scooter: :scared: :oops: :helpsmilie:

 

He was in a bad way and it was decided that a specialist team would come out to RSI (put into a rapid coma) him so we waited on the hill top.

 

 

Now, as you can see its bloody lovely weather and I sat in the door in the heat which masked the jet eflux, only made worse by the still air meaning I was breathing in loads of exhaust for an hour. More on that in a bit.

 

We got a ready for lift call from the winchman at about the same time as a second job came through on the HF from the ARCC. So we swooped in picked up the casualty and smashed over to Aberdeen. We dropped the winchman at the ARI, jumped over to the airport for fuel then went back for Sprokkit at the hospital and then made our way into the cairngorms for job 2. I was starting to feel a bit sick.

 

Job 2 was a Skier who got up loads of speed and ran out of snow. (somewhere near the bottom of the photo)

 

 

In a very similar fashion we orbited, spotted the casualty and winched Sprokkit down, this time though it was about 130 feet of cable with rocks and rotor blades I was actually having to pay attention. Once in position with the casualty Sprokkit set up a HI Line (which is 150' of nylon rope attached to the winch hook), this means we can sit out of the overhead a little way so we're not Battering everyone with down wash, or sat 5 foot from the cliff face to the rotor tips. I sent down a stretcher and some gear that Sprokkit hauled towards himself using the HI line and we went away to allow him to package the casualty.

 

We orbited and found a proper Sea King perch where we could land and watch the winchman.

 

 

Bear with me, in the top picture you can see where we landed and took the other 2 photos, in the top picture we landed by the rocky nipple on the upper right ridge line.

 

After 20 mins (of sitting in the door breathing in fumes) the casualty was packaged and we did a massively fun nose dive off the perch and winched the guys on board. As we went back to the ARI then to the airport for fuel, I went totally man down, white as a sheet sick, evil headache absolutely baggage. I was laid on the floor pale and sweaty. We landed at Lossie after 5hrs 30 flying time and it took me about 4 hours to feel better. I got a bit of banter for it, I am now known to be the SAR canary, like a fuse for noxious substances, "Can anyone smell hydraulic fluid?" "I dunno has Tom passed out!"

 

I think we got another search that night, suicidal bloke found in a pub sort of thing, but by then I had had a little vomit-sleep-snickers and was more or less OK again.

me being more or less OK again :)