FLYING WITH MANNING!

I last flew for an NBC affiliate

Not my actual aircraft but similar
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Come fly with me, lets fly lets fly away
If you can use, some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay
Come fly with me, well fly well fly away
Frank Sinatra

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Long-time readers of this BLOG Page are familiar with my career path from Public Television to multiple FM Radio News Anchoring, a Business Financial Reporter, a Weekend "Live" Music Magazine Producer, Scriptwriter and Host, a Director of Marketing and Public Relations in Broadcasting Management and ultimately back to Television News Anchoring. The latter took place in a market 27 times smaller that the one where I spent most of my adult life. Looking back, I was lucky really, and that's all there is to it.

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I began a 15-year run in the number 5-rated market (out of 212 measured by Arbitron and Nielsen) in the United States (Dallas/Fort Worth) and stayed there at a time when many of my friends had shorter stints and had to relocate their wives and families elsewhere when things didn't work out. After five of us endured a layoff with a 1-year non-compete and a severance package, I temporarily moved back to the Cincinnati market after my Dad died to remodel my Mom's home and basically rethink my career. Between auditions for television commercials, producing independent films with a small production house and appearing in industrial training films following a stint as a corporate trainer, I signed on to an NBC TV affiliate with a most amusing job title: "Helicopter News Anchor". I had flown single engine aircraft and have a genuine love of flight (and I've enjoyed being a contributing editor of a commercial aviation magazine since 1995). Five months before I relocated to Arizona from the Number 32-rated broadcasting market where I lived in the Mid-West, a horrific mid-air news helicopter collision claimed the lives of four of my colleagues in Phoenix, and galvanized the national news coverage. Since I have familiarity with the job of reporting from a helicopter, I thought that I would post a BLOG about some of the issues in this always-changing industry.

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In the early afternoon hours on July 27, 2007 a mid-air collision involving two news helicopters over Phoenix occurred because the two pilots lost track of each other while broadcasting live coverage of a police chase on the ground. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the pilots were multi-tasking too much at the time--flying, reporting and monitoring multiple radio channels before the crash. "The probable cause of this accident was both pilots' failure to see and avoid each other," the board concluded in a report on the collision. "Contributing to this failure was the pilots' responsibility to perform reporting and visual-tracking duties." The collision killed both pilots and two TV cameramen from Channel 15 (KNXV) and Channel 3 (KYVK). The NTSB avoided blaming one pilot over the other, but instead cited a common practice among many TV stations, which involves having helicopter pilots broadcast while they fly as a contributing factor. This practice eliminates the need to add a reporter to the crew. In October 2007, the National Press Photographers Association came out against the practice of pilots reporting while flying. "This is a debate now within the industry," said Howard Plagens, chief investigator in the Phoenix case. With all due respect, in my mind, there is no debate.

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My helicopter was a Bell JetRanger 206B (recently replaced) and my pilot was a Vietnam Veteran with over 6,000 hours of flight time. I was one of eight reporters who auditioned for the job. For that audition, we hovered 500 feet above a freeway and as a "pencil camera" and a bright light was turned on, I gave a spirited (but bogus) report of an overturned cement truck, a water main break with heavy traffic backed up and a police stand-off with a hostage situation. My competition for the job was a very attractive woman from New York City who desired work in a smaller market. In my case, I had an agent who was desperate to get me back on television, so that's how I wound up auditioning for the job. In the years before I left Texas, there was a helicopter incident that involved my future Mid-West pilot's Instructor and a young woman who was a reporter. They felt pressured by management to lift off in foggy conditions, and sadly flew into a hill two miles from the airport runway where the helicopter exploded in a ball of fire resulting in both lives lost. In Dallas, I refused to go up in the helicopters we had been using because the news service I was associated with renegotiated a cheaper contract with a dubious operator with a heavily checkered past involving maintenance violations. I am not tolerant of shoddy maintenance practices and when one of our helicopters suffered an engine-out procedure during morning rush hour traffic, the pilot initiated a controlled descent known as "auto-rotation". In this procedure, the helicopter blades are tilted to use the updraft of air to continue rotating as the aircraft descends without any power. The results, depending on any number of weather and technical factors can be mixed. In this case, five of my friends were aboard including a guy my age with a wife and toddler at home. Sensing the pavement rising up to the craft, he quickly gave his last traffic report and uttered.."and we are going down!". The pilot was highly skilled and missed crashing into a Day Care Center filled with children, but struck a tree branch, breaking the tail section of the helicopter off. The resulting hard landing bent the runners of the aircraft and the helicopter skidded 100 feet into a busy four-lane highway before coming to a rest on the median. It is a miracle that an SUV didn't strike the craft killing my friends on board. One of my colleagues,in fact, suffered Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome from the incident. But at least they survived. In Cincinnati, it was a different story for me.

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Our helicopter equipment was provided by a Missouri-based company that is the best in the industry. After an offer of employment was made to me, I had a friend in Dallas aviation circles quietly run a check on the tail number of my helicopter (this is the familiar "N" number you see painted on all general and commercial aviation aircraft. Take note the next time you travel on a commercial jet by looking out the window). His report took a few days and I held off on accepting the offer based on his feedback. Ultimately, (unlike the Dallas scenario where our company President and Vice President were fired after the hard landing incident and five of us lost a contract leading to our layoffs) I learned that my aircraft in Ohio was meticulously maintained. Next, it was time for me to meet with my pilot (and yes, I quietly had his background checked too). He turned out to be a superb pilot who helped institute sweeping changes after the Cincinnati disaster years earlier. Among them, if he or I felt uncomfortable taking the helicopter up for any reason, we stayed on the ground and I would broadcast from a tiny studio at the general aviation airport. Next, we took our "minimums" (height and visibility requirements) and doubled them. For example, if we were to fly 500 feet over highways, we flew 1,000 feet; 750 feet over the city became 1,500 feet. If visibility was 1 mile, we made it 2 miles. I sat for two hours inside the helicopter on the ground with my future pilot and grilled him on worst case scenarios, and this included an engine-out procedure. Most important, we split the responsibilities. I was the designated on-camera reporter who handled the gyroscopic camera attached to the front of the helicopter, along with all communications between my television producer and my point man in the news room who kept me apprised of my countdown to air time. My pilot flew the aircraft and handled all of the aviation-related communications.

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At the time, I commuted to work on a schedule known as split-shifts. I rose at 3 A.M. and made coffee at home, sat down with a long yellow columnar pad and set up a three-minute schedule of 79 fixed cameras I would utilize working from a tiny broadcast studio at the airport from 4:55 A.M. to my last studio broadcast at 5:55 A.M. We started television broadcasting on the air at 6 A.M. and finished at 10 A.M. I would drive home and try to rest, then drive back to the airport at 4:00 P.M. We then flew again from 4:30 P.M. until 6:00 P.M. In the morning, every 3 minutes the television Meteorologist giving weather updates would "toss" the broadcast to me and I would ad lib watching a monitor with the fixed cameras I had scheduled to feature. I recall many drives in the dark winter with my Mustang GT (back when gas was $1.30 a gallon) to the airport. I was greeted in the lounge by the receptionist and walked off to the weather briefing room where I met with my pilot. As we did our ground review, hangar crews towed our freshly painted helicopter on a flatbed trailer out onto the tarmac for refueling and as any good commercial pilot does, my pilot did his walk-around inspection. I have memories of 6-degree weather where I'd finish a report from the studio. My pilot would already have the helicopter engine running and warmed up outside and I would grab my winter coast, sunglasses and a clipboard and run down a hallway to a door leading to the tarmac. The heater was so strong in the helicopter, that I would strip off my coat, toss it into the back seat, lock myself into the left seat, pull down vertical and pull across horizontal safety belts, lift a metal camera control box to place on my lap, place my headset and microphone attachment on to protect my hearing (this also allowed me to converse with my pilot and ground producers). Then I would begin activating an on board monitor to get "the color bars" to adjust the camera settings. By 5:55 A.M. we gently took off flying across the Ohio River and usually headed into Kentucky to follow three Interstate highways for then next four hours. The city below us was glittering in the night with lights from tall buildings and sports stadiums. I was busy scribbling down news information and locations. It was always a high adrenalin-driven job. But the main point here was that we had put into place specific strategies where my job was divided from what my pilot was doing. As NTSB board Chairman Mark Rosenker said after the Phoenix disaster, "This is a really dynamic environment . . . when you're up there following a breaking-news story. You're flying by the seat of your pants up there" he said. I agree.

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For our part, when there was a police chase, we were aware of it, but never covered it. We waited it out, remained in the area to provide technical help to the police, but otherwise showed up only after the chase ended. This was another drastic difference from the Phoenix scenario and what we often continue to see in the Los Angeles market on FOX and CNN. The most dramatic situation I was involved with towards the end of my contract involved an event as we were coming back in for a landing at the airport just before sunset.

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Cincinnati Police were called out to a bad neighborhood where a deranged man discharged a handgun near a city bus. Police quickly surrounded a building where he was apprehended. At that moment, the Police saw our helicopter and asked us to stay up longer to use our camera to find what they believed was an accomplice. As we hovered, I asked my pilot what this nut case could do with a high powered rifle with a scope. From his experience in Vietnam, my pilot assured me we were not only out of range, but we were not actually hovering in one spot (although this appears so on the ground). In my headset, I heard an angry producer asking us to justify why were were burning up aviation fuel and to give them an ETA (estimated time of arrival) back at the general aviation airport. It's worth noting that twice my pilot and I were called in for a dressing down. Frankly, we didn't care. Our aim was to help Police and Firefighters on those occasions and we were unconcerned with office politics. Thankfully, it was now Spring season and I zoomed the camera in on a bush (with dense, bare branches) behind an industrial building. I noticed the young men and women of the Cincinnati Police force with their white caps and short-sleeve shirts in position but with their guns still holstered. All of that changed when I radioed that I located a suspect lying down under the bush behind the complex. Immediately, the Police dispatcher relayed my message and the officers drew their weapons to move in and handcuff the suspect. We decided to stay aloft a while and make a few more sweeps of the area, to the consternation of one of our two bosses who were now arguing with each other through my headset. We tuned them out. The following week, was my last and I decided to step down (no pun intended) and focus on cable television projects. What were the differences between my experience and the ones preceding the disaster here in Phoenix?

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• We were in a market with roughly the same population as Phoenix, but our operation protocol was vastly changed following the disaster several years earlier that resulted in the news anchor and pilot feeling pressured to fly in inclement weather conditions. This brought me back to the night rock artist Stevie Ray Vaughan was killed after a concert when his helicopter flying in fog conditions slammed into a mountain killing all on board. I was on duty that night on radio and remember breaking in with the news of his death. There are lessons to be learned from these tragedies and nothing can substitute for sound judgment about flying safe. Remember: "Safety First".

• My pilot's designated responsibility was to fly the helicopter and concentrate on traffic communications. My job was to gather information and report it. Two distinctly separate functions. In the Phoenix, Arizona scenario the pilots doubled as reporters. In the opinion of this author, this is unacceptable and the NTSB agreed with this same conclusion.

• My pilot and I were empowered to make the call whether to fly or not. On one occasion, I opted out while my pilot waited for the weather to clear to fly our aircraft to Lexington, Kentucky for a maintenance check.

• Politics and a desire for ratings has no place in broadcast aviation. The reporter and pilots need to be provided the tools necessary to complete their assigned tasks. Management needs to get out of their way and allow them to get their jobs done as professionals. We refused to cover Police chases on the ground. If we were uncomfortable with the weather, we stayed grounded. If we we called upon to assist Police and Firefighters, we did so even if part of our management threw a fit over Av-Fuel costs and chewed us out.

• Unlike the Dallas scenario in April 2002, we used a top-rated news helicopter vendor whose reputation for safety was impeccable. My pilot was simply The Best. We had a mutual respect for one another. Our inside joke to each other was "I couldn't do what you do". "Really?, Well, guess what? I couldn't do what you do either!" It was a great working relationship.
  

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I would return home, cook dinner and be in bed by 8:30 P.M. My round-trip was 88 miles daily. It was an interesting experience (and a grueling schedule). Although it gave me the visibility my then-agent sought for me in a new market, in hindsight, I would never do it again.

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Today about 140 television stations operate news helicopters. Some of the NTSB recommendations following the Phoenix helicopter mid-air collision included:

• Increasing copter visibility by painting the rotor blades bright colors.
• Attaching high-visibility lights.
• Installing more effective air-traffic monitoring systems for pilots once the technology is ready.

In Memoriam:
Channel 15 KNXV TV
Craig Smith, Pilot
Rick Krolack, Camera Operator
Channel 3 KYVK TV
Scott Bowerbank, Pilot
Jim Cox, Cameraman