Arizona by Skyhook

It was an ugly cluttering. Naked cylinders, insect wings, a clumsy four-pillar pylon beneath overhead blades that dropped, rotated, flapped, and seemed to deny all the aeronautics of 1931. Yet Thomas Edison, then in the final year of his genius, had watched it fly and could see well beyond. He spoke his verdict: "Well, you've got them so now they will do anything but chew tobacco." text continued on page 11

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(LEFT AND RIGHT) Hover-ing in a shroud of brown mist rising from the muddy waters of Grand Falls on the Little Colorado River, chopper pilot Jerry Foster cautiously maneuvers his aircraft into oblique angles for a photo-graph. Nyle Leatham photo/ Tom Gerczynski photo (ABOVE) Cascades on the Colorado. Whirlybird's-eye-view of Glen Canyon Dam brought to life by the release of runoff from Lake Powell. Nyle Leatham photo (FOLLOWING PANEL, PAGES 6-7) A wonderland of green forest in the White Mountains stretches out limitlessly from all sides of the bubble-enclosed deck of a racing helicopter. Big Lake shimmers in the distance. Nyle Leatham photo

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(RIGHT) The Inner Basin of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff. These mountains are home to the Hopi Kachinas and the Snow Bowl Ski Resort. Herb McReynolds photo (BELOW) SP Crater and Lava Flow, foreground, formed by volcanic eruptions, gives the Coconino County landscape an eerie lunar appearance. Nyle Leatham photo (RIGHT) Colorado River runners pause for a cold spring water drink at Vasey's Paradise in the Grand Canyon. Nyle Leatham photo

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Actually, Edison was a little early with his enthusiasm. He had endorsed a New Jersey demonstration of the steep takeoffs and landings of a flying machine called the autogiro. Eight years later, just two states away at Stratford, Connecticut, the tobacco chewing really began when Igor Sikorsky climbed aboard a "heel-i-copeeter" (the closest pronunciation allowed by his RussoAmerican accent), and what looked like a toppled oil tower rose in the world's first practical, single-rotor, personnelcarrying, absolutely vertical flight.

From that instant, in the words of Serge Sikorsky, son of the 1889-1972 pioneer, came an era producing not a continent, not a climate, not a piece of land, including the North and South poles, where the helicopter is not in use at this very moment.

Sikorsky, fifty-nine, executive assistant ant and consultant without any particular portfolio to Sikorsky Aircraft, has another favorite sentiment: "Just as supersonic transport aircraft and men walking on the moon are said to be shrinking the world, so is the helicopter expanding it."

He means a world expanded by lives saved and the quality of those lives improved; the preservation of environments and the protection of national futures and individual opportunities. The helicopter, whether by Sikorsky, Bell, Hughes, Aerospatiale, or Westland, has brought the inaccessible within easy reach and created salvation from hopelessness. And, says Sikorsky, in its forty-five years of modern development, this odd, noisy, unique, and wonderful machine has achieved indispensability as the most versatile and ubiquitous vehicle known to history.

At Sikorsky Aircraft, still of Stratford, a computer program is maintained to count lives saved by helicopters.

The first score, by names and incident, is known and was in 1945 when test pilot Jimmy Viner hovered a Sikorsky R-5 above a storm-torn barge in Long Island Sound and winched three sailors to safety. The latest rescues, however, cannot be detailed because saves have become routine and hourly, sometimes by the half-dozen and scattered worldwide, until a computer count can only be by extrapolation.

Yet sometime between August 15 and September 30 of last year-maybe it was a French soldier bleeding in Beirut or a bass fisherman near drowning in Arizona's Apache Lake-the grand toll of lives saved by helicopters touched one million.

In war, Bell H-13 helicopters became bubble-snouted ambulances for an estimated 25,000 soldiers and civilians in Korea. They guaranteed that no wound was more than thirty minutes from surgical assistance, and that there was a seventy-four percent survival rate for all wounded. In Vietnam, with jet helicopters carrying heavier loads farther and in less time, the survival rate rose to eighty-one percent. And that, stated a government summary, translated to 200,000 GIs who did not die.

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In peace, some sixty American cities have hospitalor government-sponsored emergency helicopter services. Typically, two hospital-based programs in Phoenix and the Air Rescue Section of the Arizona Department of Public Safety flew more than 4000 mercy missions in 1982. Stroke victims. Climbers crushed by mountain falls. Teenagers cut from cars. And, reported a study last year by the University of California San Diego Medical Center, badly injured traffic victims evacuated by helicopter stand a fifty-two percent better chance of survival than if carried by ground ambulance.

In 1939, Igor Sikorsky visualized none of this. Three decades later, it was his highest satisfaction. Sikorsky often would summon rescue pilots to his office, and their reports would be accompanied by his exclamations. “Oh my. Oh, that's wonderful. That's exactly what I wanted to have happen.” Then, said his son, he would weep.

Yet as Sikorsky's invention evolved as a careful lifesaver, so was his helicopter converted into a deadly gunship. Vietnam was its offensive baptism. At peak, the Army's fleet in Southeast Asia totalled 3000 helicopters, and between 1966 and 1971 they flew thirty-five million sorties.

As vulnerable as it was vicious, more than 9000 helicopters were lost to enemy ground fire. “Huey” (from UH-1E) and “LZ” (landing zone) and “Jesus nuts” (critical rotor couplings) and “Slick” (troop carrier) and “Loach” (light observation chopper) crept into schoolboy vocabularies and became journalese. Tim Page, a world published photojournalist eventually crippled by Vietnam war wounds, remembers the helicopter: “The big choppers could feel like elevators, a sky crane from ground to 2500 feet in seconds, stomach lifting, eyes popping, hanging on those Jesus nuts. You would think that bigger is safer: twin-rotored Chinooks, Sea Knights, Sky Cranes stronger, can take more hits. They just come down heavier and provide more human colanders inside, like at Chu Phong when our Chinook took sixty hits going in. Charlie got eight choppers in ten minutes that morning.

“Somehow, when you're wounded, the ships feel snail-slow, the crew chiefs always seem to say only five minutes more to the Med: maybe it's just the hurt, the heat, thus a mirror of your own frail heart.

“A bringer of life and death, the pallets of plastic water jerry-cans, the Skyhook dustoff out of triple canopy jungle where even a smoke grenade doesn't penetrate, the late dusk extract from some precarious rock pile of a guar anteed miserable night, back to a Marine-run press center of stateside Tbones and vodka collins.

“We still look up when one clatters overhead. I will always think that they make a great camera platform, but a better frame: the heart still flutters around them.” To one infantry officer, the helicopter in Vietnam produced a less sentimental conclusion. “The last time the United States fought a war like this one was against the American Indian,” he said. “The cavalry rode out of the fort on horses to search for the enemy. It's no different now, except we use helicopters instead of horses.” Helicopters instead of horses. Helicopters more effective than ambulances. Helicopters patrolling a hundred American cities farther, faster, and easier than any police car. Sky 12 (Phoenix) and NewsCenter 16 (South Bend, Indiana) and 11-Alive (Atlanta) with airborne footage at 10:00. And helicopters instead of boats (by Jacques Cousteau for whale and penguin spotting), sightseeing buses (chopper hops into the Grand Canyon), ski tows (by Heli-Ski

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Inc., serving remote runs in the eastern Sierras), limousines (the plant-airport shuttle for 600 domestic companies), fire trucks (for U.S. Forest Service drops on hot spots), mules, tractors, Jeeps, and most other forms of traditional transportation-including Santa's sleigh.

Stan Van Vleck and son Van are California cowboys. They have 1400 head, sheep and cattle, on a 5000-acre spread northeast of Sacramento. The Van Vlecks brand, herd, track coyotes, and watch for late-term pregnant cows hiding in far gullies. Their horse is a two-place Hughes helicopter.

"On horseback, you can't investigate every craggy area or gully," explains Van Vleck. "But in a helicopter we can sweep through the entire ranch, scanning hundreds of acres in just a few minutes."

Jimmy Drake is a New Mexico oilman. A helicopter is his pickup for fetching parts, moving personnel, and scouting wells. "It used to take me two to three weeks to visit all my rigs and some I never did find," he says. "Now I can leave the office at 8:00 A.M., visit all of my rigs, and still be back by 11:00 A.M."

Unreachable stands of timber are being farmed in Oregon. The price of controlled burning of underbrush inAlabama has been halved. The Ocean Pearl will be back in San Diego weeks earlier with 1200 tons of yellowfin tuna. Because the lumberjack, the forester, and the fisherman have retrained as helicopter pilots.

"Timesaving," emphasizes Joe Mashman. "That's the helicopter's edge, timesaving. It can get people there sooner and extract them faster; time usually translates into saving money and saving lives."

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When there are flying arguments to settle and aviation advisory board slots to fill and evaluation reports to be written for professional helicopter pilots, the calls go to Joe Mashman of Dallas. He's been flying helicopters for forty of his sixty-eight years, and that logs out to 18,000 hours. Mashman was chief test pilot and chief demonstration pilot for Bell Helicopter Textron of Fort Worth, Texas, when it was Bell Aircraft Corp. of Niagara Falls, New York. He began flying clattering, underpowered machines that could barely lift twenty pounds of baggage and retired in 1981 having piloted just about every helicopter built in the past four decades by American, British, Italian, German, French, and Russian companies. He checked out pilots in Indonesia and judged the world helicopter championships in Russia. Later, a defense minister of Chile conned him into buzzing a nudist colony, which was after the sale of forty-two helicopters to spray locusts in Argentina. Then came months in Korea monitoring helicopter evacuations to MASH units, flying President Eisenhower as part of a 1957 Civil Defense exercise, and making the first helicopter landing on the White House lawn. And so on.

In 1943, former flight instructor Mashman was test flying World War II fighters built by Bell. In a converted automobile showroom and repair shop at Gardenville, New York, he watched Bell's engineers building some competition for Sikorsky. "I saw (test pilot) Floyd Carlson take off and hover and fly around a backyard surrounded by a fence," recalls Mashman. "It really appealed to me. I could see a means of transportation that I knew didn't exist at that time. Here was complete freedom of movement...the ability to stop, back up, go sideways, and look down knowing that you could land anywhere."

Bell's 150-horsepower, Model 30 prototype fully confirmed Mashman's Lawthat a man needs to be able to fly like a bird rather than a bat out of hell. So he volunteered to be Carlson's backup. "I wanted the job because the helicopter was very intriguing and its future a gamble. I figured that if we could make it work, find uses for it, I would be part of a helluva challenge. So we started playing with the helicopter, going in and around the town, and it was obvious to us then that the helicopter had a future in getting into remote areas of the world." During landings, Mashman watched the downwash stirring and swirling dust. Here, he reasoned, was pressure and penetrating movement, and a potential for spraying insecticides on crops. He took a helicopter to Guatemala on the outside chance that it could assist oil exploration-and in six weeks took men into a region that hadn't been reached after a full year of hacking. "The Canadian government in about 1948 started laying a power transmission line with helicopters," added Mashman. "Then the helicopter really took off, competing with men on horseback and men on foot.

(BELOW) Dense foliage complicates a helicopter pilot's life at a jungle landing site in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era. From a United Press International photo (OPPOSITE PAGE) Photojournalist Tim Page documented this 173rd Airborne dust-off helicopter rising from a Vietnam battlefield with a wounded soldier in tow. With swift helicopter evacuation and the close proximity of hospitals, the mortality rate due to wounds in Vietnam dropped to two and five-tenths percent, the lowest of any war.

ARIZON SKI ARIZΟΝΑ

Although best known for its yearround summery temperatures, Arizona also offers some great skiing (both downhill and cross-country) in the high country from December through March. A few hours' drive from Phoenix or Tucson, and you'll be shushing down the slopes or cruising the cross-country trails in the state's pine-clad highlands. Most areas have accommodations nearby for overnight stays, or you can drive back to the warm desert the same day.

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IQUES THE INTERNATIONALLY FAMOUS BREWERY GULCH GAZETTE

One of the few Arizona periodicals that consistently reaches national and international audiences (other than Arizona Highways, of course) is Bisbee's Brewery Gulch Gazette. Editor Bill Epler distributes the 2300 circulation tabloid to eleven foreign countries. (Arizona Highways has a circulation of over 400,000 and goes to 110 foreign countries.) Brewery Gulch is a narrow side street in the charming turn-of-the-century mining town cum tourist center of Bisbee. In addition to the newspaper, the street once boasted a brewery and fifteen saloons that lifted the spirits of Bisbee copper miners. Today, the popular Brewery Gulch Gazette carries on the tradition of high spirited news and grassroots philosophy covering everything from presidential campaigns to gold prospecting, graduations to coyote poisoning. And it manages to work in some humor along the way. Example: "The sun shines on Brewery Gulch 330 days a year, but there's moonshine every night. Main Street is the place for banking business, and Brewery Gulch is the place for monkey business. The world was created for men to labor in six days a week, and Brewery Gulch was created for them to roister in seven nights." Over the years the Gazette has had such dignified subscribers as Conrad Hilton, several state governors, senators, and leaders of commerce and industry. Just plain folks take the paper, too. For subscription information, write the Brewery Gulch Gazette, P.O. Drawer 48, Bisbee, AZ 85603.

ENDANGERED PYGMIES

A little over a dozen pygmy owls survive in the deserts of southern Arizona, but experts predict they will disappear completely from the United States within the next few years. Humans have reduced the once-abundant rust-colored owl's habitat through the damming of rivers. Cutting off water destroys downstream trees in which the birds nest. Grassland nesting areas also have been reduced by overgrazing. The pygmy, second smallest owl in the world (the common elf owl is smallest), hunts other tiny birds for food and, unlike most owls, is active during the day.

TELEGUIDE PHOENIX

Now, with the touch of a finger, you can find that perfect restaurant, check the time and location of sporting events, locate what movies are showing where and when, dis cover which stores are having sales, and uncover a host of other entertainment and shopping information for the Valley of the Sun. Teleguide, a computer network with easy to-use color video monitors and keyboards at over seventy-five locations throughout metropolitan Phoenix, now documents events and retail information free at high-traffic locations such as shopping centers, hotels, airports, and convention centers. Tourists and residents alike find the Teleguide terminals, which resemble automated banking machines, handy, simple directories on how best to enjoy the Phoenix area.

FEBRUARY WEEKEND WANDERING

1-13 through 2-2: Goldwaters Department Stores' Gallery of the Southwest. Showing at the nine stores will be Kachina carvers, sand painters, basket weavers, cowboy artists, jewelry makers, and others, displaying and creating their art. One of the few free oppor tunities to see Southwestern artisans at work. Telephone: 941-0066.

2-11 through 2-17: Aid To Zoo National Horse Show, Arizona Equestrian Center, Good year, Arizona. Exhibitors from throughout North America, Mexico, and Europe compete in hunter/jumper shows for trophies and over 55,000 dollars in prize money. Proceeds benefit the Phoenix Zoo. Telephone: 277-7203.

2-19 through 2-24: The Tucson Winter Classic. Over 1200 of the top show jumping horses in the country compete in the 25,000 dollar grand prix at the Pima County Fair grounds, Tucson. Many Olympians compete in the Classic, one of the top ten shows in the U.S. Telephone: 624-1013.

2-20 through 2-24: The Phoenix R.V. and Travel Show at the Phoenix Civic Plaza. Recrea tional vehicles, motorcycles, fishing and camping supplies, sporting equipment, educa tional clinics, vacation information, and more. Telephone: 967-8714.

2-25 through 3-3: Samaritan Turquoise Classic Ladies Professional Golf Association Tournament, at the Arizona Biltmore Country Club. Telephone: 265-6474.

For a calendar of events listing the fun and fascinating goings-on in Arizona please write: Arizona Office of Tourism, Department CE, 1480 East Bethany Home Road, Phoenix, AZ 85014. Unless otherwise noted, all telephone numbers are within area code 602.