helicopter pilot
JAMES GETTENS describes his life FLYING the length and breadth of the COUNTRY TENDING to bush fires and flood relief and showing TRAVELLERS a new PERSPECTIVE on Australia through SCENIC flights.
I’m out a of pilot Armidale with Fleet and Narrabri Helicopters, in northern which is New based South Wales. We’ve recently been doing some bushfire work, which takes place a fair bit over the summer, but it can be all year round. There are always fires – often smaller ones that you don’t really hear about in the news – that we have to deal with. But it hasn’t been too bad in New South Wales recently; we’ve had some very bad times but it’s been OK. I come from a family of pilots. My grandfather was a navigator in the Air Force, and my dad was a helicopter mustering pilot; he used to muster cattle up in the Northern Territory in the early ’80s before returning to work back down in New South Wales. Plus my brother is a fixed-wing pilot for an airline. So flying is in the family, and I felt the desire to get into flying as it’s in my blood; ever since I was a kid it’s all I’ve wanted to do. My earliest memory of flying is when Dad used to be working around Sydney – going up in a chopper around the harbour, especially for the Sydney to Hobart yacht race to help with aerial filming of the event. I learnt to fly full time about six years ago, with the same company I’m with now, Fleet Helicopters. Learning to be a helicopter pilot is very hands on and you need very good situational awareness. You don’t necessarily have to have a great maths brain, I wasn’t an A-grade maths student or anything like that. It is an expensive process financially. However, it’s a lot of fun too; you get to see some pretty awesome sights. Flying enables you to see a lot of wonderful places:
I spent four years doing remote work up in the Kimberley and have flown over its coast; I’ve flown over the Great Australian Bight; the Northern Territory; and all over New South Wales, especially the gorge country to the east of Armidale. This is a real highlight after the rain – seeing all the waterfalls and rivers at full flow. Likewise being up in the Kimberley during wet season and seeing the big storms as you’re flying around, plus seeing the roaring Mitchell Falls, is an incredible sight. I’ve flown from the east coast of Australia to the west coast. I’ve seen croc-infested rivers and wild brumbies running in the gorge country. So the helicopter is like an office where your view changes every day. And you get to meet great people, like Sarah Marquis, one
of National Geographic’s adventurers of the year [2014]. I dropped her and a Nat Geo photographer into remote bush in the Kimberley. In my last two years I was based just south of Kalumburu, which is right up in the northern tip of the Kimberley. Sometimes we flew around Indigenous elders to see some of their ancestral artwork, which was very special, kind of like a free tour by an Indigenous elder; no one can go there unless you’re invited by them. So you’re not just seeing things from above, you’re getting down and really seeing the locations and meeting the people.
We up there also did for some the medevac communities. [medical evacuation] work And relief flights where you’d evacuate people when floods hit and cut them off; there’s no road access up there during the wet season. My work with Fleet Helicopters is very varied; one day we can be on fires and the next week we can be on flood relief; we can be doing power line inspections and then I can be doing scenic flights over the gorge country and over the waterfalls. With bush fires, the work can involve anything from dropping fire teams from the Rural Fire Service and national parks fire services into location to do what they need to do to put the fire out or contain it. We also do mapping, so we can map and track the fires and direct other helicopters where to drop water loads onto the fires, and we can do water bombing where we pull water out of a river or dam and drop it on a fire. I enjoy the scenic flights because you get to meet people from all over the country and show them parts of Australia they don’t normally get to see. I’d never seen or even knew about the remarkable gorge country to the east of Armidale until I got my helicopter licence – and I was from the area. On scenic flights you get nervous flyers, and the main reason they are nervous is because they’re not too sure what’s going on with the aircraft. So I talk to them to let them know what to expect with bumps and turbulence, which is all quite normal. I’m actually scared of heights and can’t go near a cliff edge or anything like that but I’m fine in
a helicopter. The aircraft we operate are some of the safest single-engine aircraft in operation in the world; in my whole career I’ve never experienced an incident like an engine failure or anything like that. People think that if the engine fails in a helicopter you’re toast, but it’s not true – it’s actually a lot safer. I can fly both planes and helicopters and if there was to be an engine failure I’d rather be in a helicopter – you can glide down as the rotor is still spinning and you don’t need a big runway, just a small paddock. fleetadventures.com.au