Film Pilot by Jerry Grayson

Author:Jerry Grayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472941060
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

13

HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

At the end of 1990 we bought a helicopter. I say ‘we’ but it was actually purchased and owned by my old friend Barty Smith in an arrangement by which he put up the capital while we financed all the operational and maintenance costs as a result of the good quantity of commercial work we were now doing. Barty’s interest lay particularly in being able to get himself to Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, a very remote spot which would otherwise have been a three-day trip to reach, and where we had shared the dreadful experience of discovering his dead sister. (See ‘Emma’ in Rescue Pilot – Cheating the Sea.)

When you’re buying a used car, there is a good chance you can assess the value of it simply by knowing the year of manufacture and the number of miles it has done. To a certain extent that’s true of a helicopter, but there is the added complication that every component on a helicopter has a preassigned life. A rotor blade, for example, is not something you can allow to fail without warning. To prevent that, or at least mitigate against it, a rotor blade is given a life that might, for example, be 3,000 flying hours or ten years, whichever occurs first. Through its life the blade will be inspected at stipulated intervals and if any sign of deterioration in its condition is noted then it will be thrown away and replaced. Through these three parameters – hours, calendar and on-condition – a pilot can have confidence that his machine is in the best possible condition to keep him safe, warm and airborne.

A rotor blade is an obvious, stand-alone item to judge, but there are many much smaller components buried deep within structures such as the engine or the gearbox, each of which has a life of its own, with its own predetermined time for replacement. At any given moment in the existence of a helicopter, some items will be brand new while others may be reaching the end of their life. If you fail to appreciate that an engine is about to require a major overhaul involving multiple part replacements, then you could over-value that helicopter by several hundreds of thousands of dollars. To assess all of that you need a highly qualified and reliable engineer, who will look through the extensive maintenance records to arrive at a conclusion about the value. The only engineer I knew who fitted that description was Mick Wright, the guy I had recruited to Castle Air a decade earlier and who had risen through the ranks to become the chief engineer in my old company.

Mick and his wife Sheena had also become great personal friends over the years so it was natural that I would turn to him for help in assessing G-OJFR, a Bell Jetranger that Barty and I had set our sights on. Not only was Mick the engineer I most trusted with, quite literally, my life,

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