Disclaimer.
We'd like to know before the start of this interview that the opinions about to be expressed by the guest of tonight's Getting Salty Experience podcast are that of the guest and do not directly or necessarily reflect the views of the host of the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
You're listening to the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Hello, and a whole week ago.
Let me tell you something mean, Pete, Welcome to another episode.
Laughing well, I'll come to another episode of Getting Salty Experience. His brothers frozen? Is he frozen? He's frozen?
Man.
Let me tell you I'm joined by my brother be Pete Oakland and Jimmy's Super pissy Pants Snucker.
Episode of the Getting Salty spears the only podcast brother that brings the firehouse kitchen table to you.
Brother there is thanks for having me.
Oh my god, you guys are out of your mind.
That is something by Getting Salty Dogga.
Maniacs, Craig bro Bro, drink.
Your titos, subscribing and go to jobs.
Brothers. Brother, this is the chief of past.
He'll be missed, Yes, he will be.
I'm talking about Pete.
No, let me tell you something I'll tell you.
Welcome, welcome back on. So how is your little cruise?
That's good, it's good. I have no complaints. So actually I shouldn't say the's no complaints. The uh, this is probably not a good time of year to get on those big boats. The kids, a ton of kids, and the parents don't control them. There's no personal space. They it was just a little overwhelming. But yeah, you thought about it a few times. I'll tell you.
Yeah. Any we got a guy on tonight.
Man, because he's still in the back, he said, you put it.
He hold up his sign right now, says I'm.
Out these guys professionals.
Yeah, but you know, it's actually it's funny. This is the first for us. If you guys don't realize that what's that that we've actually told them with somebody that from an aviation person, an aviation this is a first for us.
Yeah.
Man, So he's he's we're honoring him.
He rode the backstep first in l A. He was going to jobs like it's nobody's business. So he's, uh, he come a full circle.
You know what I mean. It's like a circle.
That's a like a circle, a circle.
You gotta play our you know what, I was gonna tell my the weed story with my mother, but we will save that for next week.
Crushed the chief that much. He already had to sit through that last thing.
My god, he's like, oh my, he's gonna calling Chief Downy right now. It's like what you get me into?
Broh got him Dave Downey.
Chief down Yeah, he's uh from that. He hooked me up with him.
Oh this is your guest.
Yeah, this is my guy. This is my guys, my guy.
Thank you for contributing. I appreciate it.
I'm trying. It's like a contributed for a first for us, like a little that's good.
I've been looking forward to it.
Actually, yeah, God's playing the commercials so you can get him on all right.
Are we gonna do the membership one? Now? You won't do it to the end to end a Actually, so let's let's go to Arma Tough. First. Let's listen to de Vins and AKA whoever's the system is here, we.
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When he want Yeah, that was wow because there's sobody in that he send me, send me more stuff with the cup of joke tivid don love that guy.
Love Budapest. He was from Budapest, right, and we assigned.
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Hi rough Now you can bring our steam guests in.
All righty, don do you read anything?
Yes, twenty one.
You want the ladies, you want the traditional that being on him, you gotta go. I'm nderpants at the stage.
All right, coming to the stage, l A f D. Chief Pilot, Scott Davidson, geta.
Get away for get away from.
Than for having me before we dive into the early days of Scott Davison.
We gotta get the patriotic, do it, sir?
Here we go.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic, for which it stands, One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice.
For all.
Us.
All right, chief, let's go get the way back machine. I'm too far back. You're not that old. Where'd you grow up? Where you're from? Give us a little family life in the early days.
Yeah, I'm I'm from the West Coast, so I'm on the other side of the world from you, guys. I grew up in Los Angeles in one of the suburbs, and I actually got on the fire department young. I was only twenty years old, so very fortunate. I was involved in the Explorer program. I did volunteer work everything as degree in fire science, you know, a typical path at that time. And I got on the fire department nineteen ninety. He's a firefighter and.
Aman.
Yeah, so, man, that the story's funny, but it's shit's short. My dad was an LA County sheriff. He came out of Vietnam. Both my grandparents were in World War Two. But I was in high school and around seventeen eighteen, trying to figure out what I was going to do and taking SATs. All my friends were going to colleges, and I told my dad, hey, I'm thinking about going to some of these colleges that my friends are going to,
a preparatory loyal and merrymount of expensive schools. Of course, you know, I was living out of my my my expectations, and his weren't in alignment. And he said, hey, that's good. You're going to make it on your own. And I panicked, and I had some buddies that were going to this explorer thing when uh and I I kind of jumped on board and and uh so getting on the fire department was kind of a last ditch effort for me. I was panicking, I needed survival, I needed a paycheck.
And so I never fantasized. I never looked at fire trucks and fantasized about being a fireman, And man, was it the best decision ever did So once I decided, you know that's what I wanted, I went full tilt and got on young and and then the you know, the thing about La City Fire Department is and you know, you say in the interview getting in there, the opportunity is unlimited to what you can do, and I'm kind of proof. I was just a snot notice kid and I just wanted to be a rookie. I want to
be successful. And that was a time that was different, right we you know, the bloods and the crips weren't putting out rap music, they weren't killing each other, and we were going to those incidents and every day it was putting a bulletproof vests on and going into neighborhoods where it was just bad stuff happening, structure fires every day.
It was.
It was crazy, and I was young. I was twenty years old, and being exposed to all that was just you know, overwhelming. So, you know, on my normal trajectory, I spent the first five or six years the fireman decided I wanted to start to promote. You know, a normal process in the La City Fire Department is you promote the engineer your apparatus operator first, then Captain one, Captain two, Battanian, chief, on and on. So I took that normal first step, became an engineer. I drove the
fire engine. I was successful with six years on and then after that I got a probation and La City Fire Department had fire helicopters. We are, you know, in the area business.
To she let's go back a little while you're a fineman. I don't really understand the whole thing with La County. Is that a whole bunch of counties put together in one fire department.
How does that work?
Yeah, it's a good question. So La City sits within La County. La City is about four hundred square miles. La County has four thousand square miles. So La City has everything in a metropolitan like New York has high rise structure, fires, brush, everything, all the money sits in La City. La County is predominantly urban interface, you know,
large properties, wildland, desert. Yet La County Fire Department La City Fire Department have about the same size fire department, same size personnel personnel, about the same amount of fire stations, helicopters. We are almost parallels. Just La County covers a much larger region around us, and then we have tons of small little municipalities and pities around us that have fire
departments that we do mutual aid with. And you know, one of the things coming out of nine to eleven was it was a big learning curve for all of us. But what we learned how to do well was to integrate with our partnering agencies, automatic aid, mutual aid, and basically just as simple as being able to talk to each other, you know, having radio frequencies and you know, just like on the fire engine, same thing in the helicopter.
You know, Hurricane Katrina, the helicopters they had whiteboards up and they were scribbling notes to each other while they're flying next to each other and say, hey, go to this frequency. I mean, it was just silly. So you know, everything has evolved. If anything good came out of nine to eleven for public safety and Katrina was our where our ability to communicate before and incident command. All of
those things are just at light speed, the evolutions. But yeah, My first twelve years was in the Fire Service before I got into to the flying and Air operation from.
You know, it was it was we was signed to an engine? What engine were you assigned to?
When everything? I worked all over the city. So in my twelve years, you know, as a rookie, you rotate through three different houses and three different parts of the city. For me, south central Hollywood and one of the the San Fernanda Valley, which is one of the urban areas or one of the more you know, affluent areas. And then after that I had promoted, I had transferred to several different stations. You spend a year or two in each station to get experience because the city and the
one hundred and four stations are so diverse. You know, you go from one station that's got high rise to another one Beverly Hills high rent district. Extreme the type that you you know, you possibly are mindful when you walk in somebody's house on an ems around about your bootprints because all are put.
The little yeah, all the.
I can't even imagine that, you know, I'm sure in Manhattan, but in Manhattan, like you got listen, You're you're going to a ten million dollar houses, right.
You're I mean we we clean our underneath our fire engines. So I was an engineer for six years. We go under our fire engines and clean them with my gloves and rags for.
As long you guys still have wooden ladders.
Right yeah, yeah, Oh my god.
I do. I do have a quick question before we get too bus When you were driving, did your rig get narrow at the fancy you drove or any garbage cans in the way?
I don't know, shot bro, just like starbage cans.
Hey cheep.
Let me ask you if we've had we've had one of two guys from la on. If I remember, just refresh my memory if you remember, like what how the turnout is? Like how many what companies you get? If for each type of if you had a regular fire and in an area, do you get in like two trucks and three engines or something like that.
I don't you remember anything.
Well, So I've been out of the fire department, out of the ground resource side of the fire department for twenty five years. I've been in your operations. But I can tell you we are we are manpower heavy. We overwhelm incidents. Yeah, I mean when I was downtown. I was a task force downtown. I spent a couple of years and we would literally the alarm would come in and within three minutes, three task forces would be nosed
to those of the incident. That's thirty firefighters and nine apparatus within minutes, and you're literally running each other over with ladders to get to wherever you wanted to go.
Yeah.
So in La City, I would say, our tactical advantage is just we overwhelmed the incident with man man.
That's what we do too.
You beat it out with Yeah, we beat it.
That's exactly what we always say. How many guys can you fit in? If you were in the squad, which me and Kevin, how many guys can you fit in.
A fire department? At least five?
So Mike Thomas is asking if the chief was were you working for the ninety two riots.
Yeah?
Yeah, I was a rookie. So I got out in nineteen ninety so ninety two I only had two years on and uh, you know one of my one of my good buddies, who was a classmate, was in South Central when after you know, the Rodney King extent, and they just started to burn down everything, and and the police at that time, you know, you had LAPDN La County Sheriff, two totally different ideologies at that time and
how they managed. But for whatever reason, nothing was happening and they, you know, everybody was going nuts and burning everything. And my good buddy was and we both you know, we had two years on, so we're rookies. We're just riding the behind the apparress operator as the top man, and there we were getting shot at. The fire department was getting shot at. But in this instance, the driver
got shot in the neck. They're going down the road and my buddy Tom Carroll jumps over and grabs the steering wheel.
You know.
Meanwhile the driver's got his old as neck with a bullet in it, and he survived, thank god. But it was an unbelievable time for us, you know, the fire department, you know we have we don't know how to not get it done. You know, in aviation I learned later and we'll probably talk about on the show. It's something called mission I itis And for the fire department, en firemen in general, all of us, when I say mission iis, it means there's no solution other than get the job done.
I don't care what you do. Strap three ladders together, be it here, will almost kill yourself and we'll give you an a word for it. But the challenge when I've taken that into aviation, or you take that mentality into a world of aviation professional aviation, where the NTSB and the FA will show up at your accident sight. It's a horrible difference. It's it's like the Grand Canyon
of ideology differences. But you know, so the first part of my career was building that fireman heart, you know, like, you know, we kick down doors and we take names, and that's all I knew. And that's where you learn your creativity, right. You know, you're only giving a few tools as a rookie. They give you just the minimum to stay alive and to learn how to be told what to do and that you're stupid and worthless. And
then you you evolve by this missionitis. You know, you evolve by just getting or done and you just I mean a lot of it's on adrenaline.
You know.
After the fact, you come down and you're like, oh, I can't believe I just did what we did. But I was very blessed and fortunately the fire department was kind of an accident in that I was young and didn't know what I wanted and you know, couldn't afford to go to college, so I went to junior college.
That's a pretty reoccurring theme on the show. We've had two hundred and fifty six guests interviews, and I would say that that's a reoccurring You know, either either you came from you know, your dad, your granddad was was a fireman, and you followed in the footsteps. But if
it wasn't, it's almost always an accident. It's just you know, your next door neighbor, you know, guy six doors down just happens to give you an application that day your friend's going down and he don't make it, but you do, and you know, just like that, right, yeah it happened, you didn't make it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, got the lot of you hit the.
Lotto of life, right yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. You know you I can't tell you how many guys I've heard say, oh, I tried to get on a fire department or And the reality is everybody that really puts their back into it gets a job. And when I mean puts their back in there, you you make a decision and you commit, and it's everything. It's it's the college classes, it's the volunteer work, it's whatever you have
to do to know. And it may take years. It may take four or five, six, seven years to get on. But I think the average age of a rookie in La City when I got on the Fire department was thirty one years old and I was twenty. So my classmates were guys that had already gone through a career and realized they were unhappy, and you know, they you know, ship years. So yeah, we for me to be as young as I was to be, you know, to know what I want to do when after be successful. And
at that time it was tough. I was competing at the written test with fifty thousand candidates fifty thousand for you know, maybe three hundred jobs, so and I was just young and the little guys next.
Look I to show for a test one hundred.
I just heard.
I just found out that just today I was playing with a bunch of guys d the FDNY and he's at Provy School and he says they only got like eight thousand guys to take the Like I know, I said, I think we were thirty five thousand or something.
It's a it's a national crisis. And funny you say that we just did interviews today. I just did him so this morning and second round. I was lucky. I had forty guy. Remember forty something people applied. Really it was a short posting, but forty people applied. They're just the jobs are becoming scarce people and qualified people at the same time. Never met, never thinking about people that aren't even applying. It's getting good qualified people at the
same time. But that's the whole other subject.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys are you know, you may be subject. You guys are going to be behind us political correctness for La City. You know, back when I was a rookie, hazing and harassment were out of control and then we ran into i mean multiple back to back really bad lawsuits from stuff that was just you know, of course inappropriate. So the evolution Forirly City and professionalism and getting away from the hazy harassment, which is hard when you put ten dudes together and most.
Of the.
Come on the process. I understand that guys went overboard, but it is part of the process.
Sitting around.
Yeah, but I'll tell you it's you know, gone to the point where it's just for us at least the hiring. The last I heard was just it's a lottery system, and they, you know, once you meet all the prerequisites that the city Council and the government office have established, it's it's no longer trying to get the most qualified candidate, regardless of what their background is, race, religion, blah blah blah.
So you know, I think everybody's facing the same thing because when I know, when I got in the fire department, they were going after the best qualified candidates. It was a different fire department then. And you know, I don't know what's going to come of it and how we come out the back end on this, but yeah, absertions, yeah, we were, we faced a lot of that stuff. I think we're, for whatever reason, we're a lightning rod out here.
You know, we're we're a little bit ahead of the curb and all the lawsuits and the and it's not just find anything that was gone when I was a rookie. I don't think there was a day that I was dry. I got bucketed three three times, three times a day, and they'd wait until it changed my clothes and then I thought, I'll just walk around and got clothes and I'll teach them, and they bucket me again. So it was, you know, the hazing harassment. It wasn't because they like you.
You know, they say, ah, they like you if they're hazing it. Think, yeah, guys are mean.
Together.
And I want to Coops.
I just want to I want to, Well, we touched on it a little bit, but I want to get a little more deeper in that. What do you remember as far as like how long the ninety two riots lasted?
Do you remember any specific jobs?
I mean, you only had two years on the job, Like some of that stuff has to stick out to you, like.
Holy Machael man, this is a crazy job.
Am I gonna Has anything ever come you know, close to those days?
Like later on in your career.
I tell you, I wish you know again. I got so many stories and they usually trigger on We'll say something like, hey remember when you when was the first time you went on a stabbing or I will tell you that I've seen and done so much stuff I can't even I can't even believe it was in my lifetime. The the amount that we're exposed to his first responders out there is just it's staggering and the diversity of it. Like I said, our communities are a mish mash of
a little bit of everything. And you know, the riots were kind of a horrific time for us. And and and again, I'm a young white guy with short, flat top hair, and I'm on an engine with three other white guys and we're going into South Central and and'll, I have no free disposition or no prejudice, and all we want to do is help. And all I got is little ms box and some gloves on. And they still,
you know, immediately hate you. And you know, I can't tell you how many times I've been in the incidents around gang members or you know, with a gang member that shot and their buddies are screaming and yelling, I'm gonna fucking kill you if you don't get to take care of my buddy. It's just it was such an unbelievable time. And you know, we've again, we've never seen anything like it. Again. We see a lot of civil unrest and a lot of you know, little things, but
that was, you know, that was that was pretty big. Yeah. So and again, I'm twenty two years old and it's just you just can't even fathom, you know, the.
Things I forget. Do you remember was it weeks?
No?
No, no, it was a day. So really the worst of the riots went on for the first twenty four hours after the verdict. Remember the verdicts were the officers, and once they found them innocent, that's when all hell broke loose. And you know, the six officers you know that were on that video beating Rodney came were found innocent, which you know, now those are different times, but that's when everything broke loose. And then Reginald Any that was the day remember.
That they started the kid out of the truck, right that was the day.
That I had started, you know, and Reginald Denny was down in South Central an intersection and police weren't responding. Everybody was in tactical alert. The fire department was still responding. That's where we ended up. A lot of our crews got in trouble. My friends, you know, had the experience
of the driver getting shot. We had, you know, another experience where a task force you know guys game members came up and just riddled the apparatus with bullets and told them to walk away and they all ten of them walked away from their engines while they're in the middle of putting a fire out at a drugstore and market. So the I think the only thing that's kept the fire department safe is that, you know, we don't have guns.
We're not technically a threat, you know, and they may not like us because of whatever whatever our background is, but you know, I don't think we ever were seen as a threat, and that's what made us comfortable to go in and engage. And again remember mission itis. I mean, we there was no you put a bullet of bulletproof vests on. In the early part of my career, you wear a bulletproo vest under your turnout coat on almost everything,
you know, depending on what incident you went to. So you know, on top of all the stuff we wear in the turnout coat to bring the apparatus, the high rise hose pack, you know, put a bulletproof vests on underneath that thing. Man, Yeah, it starts adding up, but it's also yeah, you think about the psychology of that. You're like, what am in the wrong job? I got to wear a bulletroof vest. I'm gonna maybe get shot.
I'm just going to put a fire out. So we've we've definitely seen a lot, been to a lot of tragic events, a lot of just you know, over the years.
Did you live in the city when you were working in the city.
Yeah, so at the time, all LA f D members had to live in the city when you got hired. And then it wasn't until I had two or three years on that I purchased the house in one of the suburbs just outside of the city. But I was born and raised in La City. So I grew up in La City, and at least for the first couple of years of rookie I was, I was in La City.
How did the movie stars treat you guys when you worked in those areas?
Phenomenal? Yeah, phenomenal and just like I'm sure everywhere out by you guys, you know, the public was phenomenal. They loved us. We just got treated so well. And sometimes that make sure, you know, you got to keep your egg egoing check. You think, you start thinking real highly of yourself. And remember, you know, what was that silly movie.
When you Gotti sitting in the face you know, yeah.
Well I think you know. Backdraft came out in nineteen ninety, which you know that didn't do any harm to most of us.
Yeah, right, you roll the halls now.
So we have.
I'm not saying we didn't take advantage, but.
All right, uh he did.
All right, yeah, yeah it was uh you were married yet, right, yeah, I'm now I've been I have a girlfriend that I've been with for probably if we've been together for going on thirteen years, fourteen years.
Nice.
You know that you were saying that reaping the.
Well I say all the time.
Chief like, I don't know how Manhattan is another You know, the city's five burrows, right, so Brooklyn and Bronx and Queens Staten Island. But if we call the city Manhattan, right, it's not the five Borrows, even though they're all part of the city. But if you worked in the city in Manhattan, I mean every run you go on, I mean I could never work there just because of the
traffic and you never get anywhere type of thing. But I mean, and forget it, those guys, if you were single out there, you could just it's every day and then after work, if you was hanging out in between tours or something like that, forget about it.
It's just crazy.
I had a ritual when I was on sixty seventh and less. Get up early, brush the teeth, fixed the hair, get a little chair out, open the door and sit there with a chair to be like this, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.
It was insane, bro.
Yeah, listen, we've all spent many hours on the apron right washing the rigs, and you know, trust me, it happens on the West coast, East coast washing the rigs.
We're all, hey, no, what was.
That picture of the fuego that you put up there? Guns?
Which was the random picture?
Oh?
That was from the riots. While you guys were chatting, that was It was just one of the riot pics. I thought that was Scott of the motorcycle but shirtless Scott, a little warmer, we showed up in the battalion truck. He just took it for a right anyway, Well, you guys were chatting, Have.
We have we got any Scott's pictures?
No? No, no yet No, just their helicopter stuff. So when we get but I have a before we get to the helicopter stuff, I have a video that I want to share that's gonna lead us into uh getting body pumped up for the hell, you wan't do it over there. I don't want to cut us off.
There is anything else about the.
Right in the back step that you want to talk about before we transitioned to helicopter days.
No, you know, I I I got it. I mean I could have stayed a fireman and in the field and had an amazing career, and just I was in love with being a fireman. I was in love with being an engineer. You know, it was I didn't think it could get any better. Of course, you know, flying in my career that transitioned into the air operations section was spectacular, but I really was in love with being a fireman. And it started out just because I was panicked and I needed a job. I needed a paycheck,
and man, I just kept pinching myself. It was even my friends to this day, I look back and everybody I can recommend it to was It was an amazing brotherhood, an amazing experience, amazing culture, amazing everything that we learn as firemen, you know, the values we have, the friendships they stay forever. You know, I have thirty five plus years. All of my best friends are still firemen that I've
known for thirty plus years. These you know, loyalty and all of these things that we get, and then you know, you know, the big sacrifice, which is being willing to you know, standing up the way of a bullet for your friends. All of those things came from the fire service. And whether it's in LAFD or you know, a New York fire department and everything in between, it's the same. It's we all have that unique thing in common. And some of my funest stories are when I was you know, adope,
little fireman and the stuff we used to see. But oh my god, it gets a lot more flamboyant with the helicopters.
It's next year, but that's a shape to it.
Wait, just before we segue into into the helicopter video, were you already flying like as a fireman? Were you doing something on the side, Like how did that even? Were you doing any practice at all at this point?
It's a good question. I learned how to fly fixed wing when I was a kid. I was fifteen and a half years old, and I learned how to start flying. And you know, my dad, I just wanted a dirt bike, that's all I wanted. My dad said, oh, buy a dirt bike if you learned how to fly. It was a summer and a summer of my I was fifteen years old, going on sixteen, and so I learned how to fly, and all I wanted was a dirt bike. I didn't I didn't care about flying. So I flew,
you know, finished that and then gave it up. Didn't fly again. And it wasn't until I was twenty six years old, and after I promoted engineer. I was looking up at a picture. I was in the front office of our fire station. I just got off probation as an engineer, and I'm like, fuck, what am I going to do now? And I looked up and I saw the picture of our LAFD helicopters. I'm like, son of a gun, that's what I want to do. And man, it just right there in that moment, everything pivoted and
it was all air aircraft. I went out and got all my licenses, private license, commercial flight instructor. I got a job as a flight instructor to local flight school. I started building hours for us to get into operations. As a competitive process and for me specifically, I competed with thirteen other pilots for one job, and I was fortunate enough to get the job when I was when
I got into operations. But yeah, so I actually it was whether that flying fixed wing helped or not, I'm not sure it Definitely, I had enough of a taste of it that I knew, but i'd never flown a helicopter before, you know, before I decided what to do, and uh, yeah, it's it's the same story with everything in the fire service. You know, whether it's the swift water rescue, urban search and rescue, whether you want to
be the fire chief. Everything is attainable, and it's just about the discipline of putting your mind to it and you know, putting the throttle down and going.
So yeah, for sure, All right, Stewart John, which one do you want? Do you think is best? The airborne one or the little advertisement one you sent me for it's a couple of minutes.
I'll leave it up to you. Yeah, I sent you some good videos, some good stuff, so I'll leave it up to you.
All right, We'll do the The airb one is a little bit longer, but we'll do that. We'll do that one, uh, and then we'll get the other one. What what do you got?
Oh? I was gonna say the Airborne task Force. One is specific to our high Rise Rescue and Airborne Task Force. The other one is more of a capture little everything.
We'll do the other one.
Yeah Instagrammy gotcha instagrammy. Yeah we're you know, we're from Hollywood at here.
Yeah, here we go. Can you hear it?
Okay?
Yeah said.
If you can say?
Canst stupid?
You want whatever?
They believe you that the Judd somebot. Nobody needs to tell.
You what is rap all wrong?
They don't need to tell you.
Well you too that world.
Welcome to about world. Well to my world.
You can't say, can't just do what they want?
What they have?
They hipers and.
He needs to tell you what is wrath are wrong? They don't need to tell you anything. Welcome to my world.
I am cool.
See, I'll tell you what. Even for down here in South Florida where the helicopter comes in, it's still a fan favorite. Fly people to the hospital. Well for the county.
We don't have one, right yeah, aviation, the cops have one.
Yeah, but we have to borrow this.
We don't borrow ship they do it.
Dude, you just came to me. Brad Pitt with a beard right there, Brook at them.
Oh yeah, look at that.
Looks like who's the guy from Gladiator? He looks like the guy from Gladiator.
Nice, you keep it, girlfriend. I went to South Korea last month. I spoke at a conference for a bunch of the search and rescue pilots and firefighting pilots down there, and of course they don't speak English. I don't speak in East South Korean or Japanese. And we went out to dinner afterwards, and of course drinking is our culture. Everything is rice wine. I mean, I don't think anybody had anything, but and I'm a lightweight one drinking, you can take
advantage of me. And man, they're about six string sin in this one little South Korean guy walks up and he with hearts in his eyes. He stare at me and he goes, you look just like Brad Pitt. And I look at the host and I'm like, I gotta get out of here because if this is not going well.
Are you sure you didn't go? What?
Did we just become best friends?
Yep?
Yeah?
What did we just become best friends? Yep?
Yeah?
He wanted to love you long time?
Like when I was watching that video, what's it like when you're coming in and you see like that whole mountain on fire, and like that's got to be a pretty good like that's just like turning the corner, like like seeing fire out the window.
Is that the same type of rush you get?
It's exact, it's exact.
You know.
We and and for us brush fire seasons four or five months. I mean we we go on average thousand brush fires a year, sometimes five six brush fires that day. And we get into the busy season. We're hustling, you know, three hundred hoist rescues a year. We're just we're hustling.
And every hundred what's a hoys stresscue? Three hundred rescues you mean picking people up out of Holy.
Ship YEP, day and night. So we're twenty four to seven. We have five pilots on duty around the clock. We're one of the few agencies US in Early County Fire Department that run our operations, our air operations around the clock twenty four to seven. That's for aerial firefighting and hoisting and air ambulance. You know, we do a bunch of stuff. VIP transport, we work with LAPD, We transport the SWAT teams and the bomb squad guys. So we can move a lot of people really fast, and we
respond rapidly. Our biggest tactical advantage is how quick we respond and keep the fire small. And you're just you're right, lou man. It's every fire is exciting. There's nothing like it. The challenge is you're running at redline. You're at the maximum capability. What the helicopter can do, what you can do, and the a fleet, you know, make a difference. We
work and integrate with the ground crews. So our objective is to keep them moving, you know, anchor, flank and pinch, which is a tactic everybody knows from brush fire fighting. Our job is to stay out in front of those crews and then keep them safe. And it is just you know, it's most of the time you feel like a kid. It's a video game. But there's ends of thousands of hours that lead to that skill to either. But when you're in the seat, oh my god. Sometimes
you know, those the helicopters are twenty million dollars. It's just like there are Their complexity is unparalleled. You know, it takes an airline transport pilot rating to fly these aircraft. And we were talking about earlier in the show. That is the highest rating the FA gives. It's the same rating that all the captains that fly all the commercial airlines United Delta American have, So our pilots are of that caliber and quality in knowing how to operate the
aircraft safely underneath the FA's rules and regulations. And then we take the aircraft and we use it in a way that the manufacturer's never intended.
You know.
We go into these hostile environments and try to do good and we don't ever get in the smoke or heat because aerodynamically heat is bad. Blades do not fly in hot air. So what you're seeing is us working the perimeters of the fire. We're tactically staying out in good air and trying to get our water into the
bad air. But it's just and and just knowing that you're at the limit of what the helicopter could do max gross weight air speed, you're low in altitude, you got fifty mili hour winds, up and down drafts, you're getting thrown all over. And then to pull the trigger at the right time and release.
Your I'm just gonna say cheap, that's all that comes with timing, Like I see these guys, right, they're coming and coming and coming, and all of a sudden the water comes out, and you know that's all timing.
Yeah, it's it's and it's a you know, it's proficiency the guys. When you see all the guys out here, and that's I think the West Coast has, you know,
the predominantly the most amount of aerial firefighting helicopters. You say, these guys are good, they're profession and whether it's US or at like County Fire or Venture County, Orange County, We've we've got quite a few agencies that have aerial firefighting helicopters, and you know, they're all experts at what they do and they take it very serious, very professional. But you know, later in the show we'll kind of get into the challenges. You know, like we were talking
about the mission itis. You know, firemen just get the job done with do anything. But that's the worst thing for the NTSB and FAA. You know, they they just don't understand that ideology. So you know, how how we marry those two things and stay safe and and you know, minimize risk. And that's what everything's been for us at our operations. It's really it's walking that fine line. And at our operations what we learned to say, and you
guys all have to cover your ears. We learn how to say no, there are some things we can't do, not because I can't be a hero and go fly the helicopter in harms way to you know, do a hero drop. It's that no means there's limits that if we go beyond and something happens, the liability goes off the chart. The NTSBN FA show up and they start asking questions and what the FAA determines that is. There's
a term for it. It's called careless and reckless. Can you imagine as a fireman doing your job and saving some lady on the fifth balcony with four ladders dropped together, and after it was all done, they brought you up on charges for careless.
And reckless for God's sakes.
Yeah, So the f is a whole different you know, it's a whole different beast. And we operate in government aviation. We're unregulated. And for you guys to understand what that means, everybody that flies in the federal air space, all civilian aviation is regulated by the FA. There's a federal aviation regulations, but government, police and fire across America are unregulated. The FAA actually has a term for it. They leave us to self regulate. We were talking about dopey immateur fireman
and a fire station. Leave it up to us to self regulars.
Keep up a remote somewhere. How how are we going to get twenty nine dollars helicopter.
It's like, give me one.
Hundred million dollars in helicopters and tell me to self regulate. So for us, you know, we have you know, it's been an amazing jury. We had a fatality crash under your ambulance back in nineteen ninety eight, so it was right before I got to your operations. A tail roader came off of the helicopter we were transporting a twelve year old girl, and we had several of our crew
members perished in the accident. The twelve year old girl perish in the accident, and we had quite a few audits that were done at the time, and they kind of gave us a roadmap that you guys are you know, mission itis. You guys have no policies and procedures, and it took a bit for us to get traction, And when I became the chiepile on in twenty eleven, we really went back and focused on our business model and said, you know, in aviation they say it's not if it's
when you're gonna have an accident. You know, it's inevitable. We're in a high risk environment where people are gonna get hurt. But there's no reason we can't act professional and be doing it the way the FA expects us to do it. So if something does happen and they come and investigate, they can go they were doing it right and they were professional and everything we would expect,
and things just went wrong. So yeah, for me and my you know when I pivoted and got into helicopters because it was just fun and it really evolved into something more. And you know the fire department in general, being a fireman gives us all purpose. Right, we have this just unbelievable sense of purpose.
We do good.
We do good for people. There's nothing like looking somebody in the eye after you've done something for them, and there's just there's there's this feedback you get and you're like, man, I did that. That feels really good. And that's my whole career and like you guys, I'm sure it's your career, but the helicopters has just magnified it. I mean I've been and then being the chief pilot, it gave me the opportunity to really kind of lead the ship and take my team with me and say, hey, we're going
to set the standard. This is this is where we need to be and still still do a good job and still effect change. But yeah, so's it's been an amazing journey.
You do take me through you're quarters and you get a call for a forest fire or whatever. You get a fire, you know, now what happens? Like do you wait for somebody to confirm that? Does it get confirmed? And then you go like how does that work?
That's a good question. The air operations for La City Fire Department were all based at Vani's airports, so all seven helicopters, all the pilots are based at one fire station. When the when the dispatch comes in Metro our dispatch center basically wrings us down and goes bupa up above brush fire bubba bup a hoist train craft you railment. If it's an incident, we get dispatched. No different than a fire engine and the city does the way that
logistically it goes down the process. We in the mornings when we come on duty, just like every fire station you do do you do relief, you change over, you check your rigs. We pre flight our aircraft. The crew summer crew are assigned to specific aircraft. The air ambulance crew, the Hoyst crew is assigned to one specific helicopter with a pilot for that day. That's part of our risk assessment, you know, managing like a mission like this comes in one of the line pilots will be up for and
let's say it's a transport of LAPD SWAT team. And what you see here in the picture is we practice not just for transporting at a normal heliport, but we practice for taking off and landing off site where there is no landing. So you see the pilot hovering on one wheel there and loading the hes hovering. So the whole intent is rooftop insertion or landing somewhere where it
cannot support the way to the helicopter. The helicopter's weigh just over fifteen thousand pounds, So we practice and train as if so these SWAT teams, all of LAPD's members are certified and they do an annual training and we do you know, we integrate in with their training, so we do pick up and drop offs as part of their exercise and you know, getting them comfortable getting into and out of the aircraft. What you see is the AW one thirty nine. It's made by Leonardo. It's we
have five. It's our primary mission aircraft. It's what we hoist and firefight and air ambulance. Each aircraft can do everything, but we'll configure them different for the day. You know, if it's brush season, all of them have water tanks on. If it's the winter time, we'll take the water tanks off. They've all got the hoists on and they're set up for our ambulance and they can all be quickly converted to take two critical patients at one time. We've had
mass casualty incidents. And for you guys, remember it was about two thousand and eight. Two trains ran into each other out here in California. A guy, the conductor was texting a twelve year old boy. He ran into a metro rail that was full of passing. So in this day and age, the fact that two trains can run into each other is staggering. But it was within about three miles of our base, so we were the first. We were the first the second an engine had just
arrived ahead of us. We landed next to the train crash, and I was a copilot that day. I got out. It was just like you see in these ems videos, you know, the training videos were the walking wounded. I got out and I took our bolt cutters and I cut through the fence and I opened up the fence and there was a melee of trains upside down and half burning, and people laying on the train, laying on the tracks, walking around, bloody, disoriented. It was the most
surreal scene. And like we were talking about earlier, you know, about the riots. I mean, I have so many of these memories that in that moment I can picture everything. It's it's like it happened yesterday. But we we basically launch when Metro dispatches us to circle around. Sorry lou along way, You're you're good. The We're just like a normal fire station. So we launch no different. So we're tactically ready. We do all our pre flighting, we brief
we do risk assessments. The crews know their jobs, they know their positions. It's just like a fire engine. We just wait for the run to come in and in the middle of the day we're out doing training. We take our crews in the aircraft, so we're on the air like you guys probably I don't know what you call it, but you're out doing your business of the day, shopping, doing that kind of stuff.
Yeah, none, that does building.
How many guys are on that crew? You have a pilot, a co pilot.
And yep, we have. So there's five pilots full time and two flight paramedics assigned air operations twenty four to seven, and a second crew of paramedics that is on a rescue that comes over to fill in behind. So we in all we have four paramedics flight paramedics working per
day with five pilots. And then for me, I was in a special duty position, you know, working the desk Monday through Friday and then just filling in doing check rides and like we said earlier, filling in for overtime over time.
So when you're picking up water, it's a cable with a bucket, is that?
What?
How you guys do that with that?
No, for us, we use water tanks. So if you look into the helicopter, we have a four hundred and fifty gallon tank attached. And there was reasoning. Yep, if you look underneath, they're real underneath that box, that white box between the wheels, that's a four hundred and fifty gallon water tank. And we do that because of the urban environment wires. We fight fire date one night, so we're yeah, we're in really hostile terrain. Like this is a great example, this picture. We look at the homes
behind and we're down in canyons. We're telephone wires and the danger of trying to run a buff a bucket, a band they called a Bambi bucket, or a cable one hundred right. This allows us tactically to get down very close and like we were talking about, insert the water and get out. So it gives us really good maneuverability, good accuracy. It allows us to make rapid trips. We we set up improvised helispots, so we have about twenty six there's a perfect perfect picture there. We set up
these improvised helospots throughout the city. They're all pre identified, wellout hose. It only takes a minute to fill the helicopter.
It's going to ask you that chief, how long does it take to refill that yep?
Two and a half. We're pumping a two and probably one hundred psi and a two and a half inch hose, so open butt. So we put one hundred four hundred fifty gallons into that thing in about a minute and we're to go. So the guys that what you see in orange there are hell attack they're firefighters. Also, they're certified. They're from the fire station right next to us. They are indoctrinated and trained and certified in all of our operations. So they support us for everything. Every brush fire goes,
they go with us and they run operations. We do hot fueling. Now this picture, you'll see the aircraft's running. We're actually taking water on board and we're hot fueling. And what that means is we're pumping jed a into the side. You can see the hose going up into the side there, So we're hot fueling. The aircraft's running, filling up with water. All that takes a couple of minutes. They unplug and then we're off to the off to the races.
So you guys are like when you're doing these type this type of operation, yeah, obviously something like this. Are the helicopters talking to each other?
Are you like? How does that? Absolutely talking to each other?
And that fire Most of these pictures I gave you guys are from the Palisades fires. So this was the most recent fire that we had down and kind of on the border of Malibu.
And we have that video too from that fire.
Right cute, lou I forgot your question.
Each other?
Oh yeah, yeah, talking to each other. So you know, everything with the aircraft is very coordinated. It's almost so. We have a command and control helicopter. Usually I would be in it or one of our lead pilots basically running air traffic control and running tactically the helicopters in and out of the drop zone, coordinating with the retardant dropping planes. The airspace is very controlled. Everybody has an assignment, everybody's talking to each other. Everybody knows where they are.
We set up what we call fence lines and barriers so you don't cross over into somebody else's airspace. We have traffic patterns coming in, we have common terminology, so it is even though it looks chaotic, it is extremely disciplined and everybody knows where everybody is, so that you don't have that, you know, freak chance of running into each other.
Chief is that.
The How does that play into the fixed wing craft You guys are all on the same page kind of the things. I know, obviously a big operation. You have just been beside your helicopters. You have to fixed wing aircraft. And I've seen some of these guys get some close calls. I'm like, oh shit, you know, watching some videos and whatnot.
Yeah, So we have automatic aid and mutual aid and that comes in the form of other agencies that have helicopters that come in to meet with us. So Ala City in La County Fire Department, helicopters are always working with each other. We're always going to each other as fires. But when the fire gets a little big and gets a little out of control where we can't manage it, we start bringing in retard and dropping aircraft. Now that's managed by the state or the FEDS US for Service Califire,
and that's when it gets real expensive. But as far as the coordination piece goes, they bring their own management piece. It's called Air Attack Air Tactical Group Supervisor who then works with HELCO Helicopter Command. Those two controlling agencies are the ones they're quarterbacking all of the movement of the helicopters in the fixed wing. And typically when a big fixed wing like you see these we call them v lats, very large air tankers DC tens, these Monster seven we're
using to drop the card. When they bring one of those in, they'll move helicopters from one side of the fire to the other side of the fire while the seven forty seven is dropping retardant and as soon as he's done, the helicopters move back in. So the helicopters are really reinforcing the retardant line. Holding the retard line. The retardant is how you really control the big fires. It's very expensive and you know, the water will suppress it for a minute, but the retardant will hold it.
So it's a it's a collaboration between those two. But again it's like we mentioned earlier, what we're doing very well on the West coast is the automatic aid, mutual aid, the collaboration, Yeah, working together. Yeah, So they're they're you know, and the fixed wing that are retardant droppers come in all shapes and sizes. They're using big commercial jets.
You know, the guy turn it on a dime, that's for sure.
Don't have utility. But you know most of those pile you know, the typical American Airlines pilot isn't trained to fly fifty feet off the ground and right. You know, they're very disciplined. They do a takeoff and a landing and so so these guys there's a DC ten and but they found that these big planes can carry a lot of retardants, so they can do a lot of good, but they can also do a lot of damage. We've had a lot of firemen that have been hurt because
they've been hit by retardant. Some of the bigger helicopters up to and including killed.
You know, I was going to actually ask that that's got if they're trying to get close to the fire and you're you guys are on the edge there, it's got to be really yeah.
We a couple of years ago we had a really bad year. We had a couple of firemen, a captain and a couple of guys killed in different incidents. And they were byproducts like the water drop hits a tree breaks a limb, the limb hits the head or a rock gets you know, Jarred Lewis goes down the hill and takes out a fireman. So you know that working in close proximity is important for us for tactics and strategy.
But it's something everybody's aware of. A lot is done to make sure the management dropping around people is you know, managed well.
But you know what I want to ask you too cheap.
When I was looking at some of the video, like you were saying that you don't There's got to be times when you're flying, like where your visibility gets taken out by smoke, right, Like, does that happen a lot? Or you try and stay out of that most of the.
Time, Yeah, one hundred percent. So there's two types of flying and it doesn't matter about firefighting. It's called visual flight rules and instrument flight rules. So visual flight rules means you have to maintain visual reference with the ground at all times. You can't go in the clouds, you can't do smoke, you can't do anything. Instrument flight rules allows you to go into the clouds. It's under the
control of the FAA. Now for firefighting, we absolutely do not get into the smoke or clot or heat, and mostly because of the products of combustion being dangerous to the turbine, engines and the blades, but mostly to the pilot because if you can't see anything and you're in the smoke, so yeah, no, the answer is no. There may be a wisp of smoke, you know, you're into that area, and sometimes you get the light smoker it's but never to the point where you've lost visibility or
and we really train our guys to work discipline away from the smoke and the heat. You know, how to effectively put a twenty million dollars helicopter as close as you can to the fire line, drop your water, but still leave yourself. We call it an escape route, you know, for search and rescue or firefighting pilot, everything is about your escape route. Everything is about preparing to lose your engine or both engines, or a tail rotor. And we
send our guys to simulator training every year. We practice and train it. We spend probably seventy five percent of our resources and flight hours in training a loan and preparing for emergencies that will probably never happen. But a lot of things can go wrong with these things. Lots of redundant systems, but our guys are prepared and trained for all of those eventualities. Same thing when we're hoisting, you know, we're using quite a bit of the helicopter's
capability to hoist. And if you lose an engine, mostly helicopters cannot sustain flight, which means you've got to do something fast and to an including sharing the cable if you've got a live body on it, or taking them with you, losing a tail rotor. All those things we practice inside and out in the simulator. We have these huge were called Level D simulators are up on hydraulic rams. They are the it's like you're sitting in the actual aircraft.
They're very expensive, absolutely yep, full visuals. You think you're in that you think you're in the real helicopter, and the simulator instructor in the back is setting up all kinds of scenarios while you're on a mission and all of a sudden you're engine I mean it really fails. You have a fire, you're pulling fire handles, you're you're managing a tail rotor failure, you're landing without a tail rotor. All of those things have increased safety and especially the
helicopters community. It's one of the things Kobe Bryant's accident, his pilot did not have. He was a very highly trained skilled pilot, but didn't have any real simulator training. You know that it's possible that accident never would have happened. We call it invert and mediological conditions. But he went
into the clouds and lost control immediately. And that's another reason we don't go in the smoke because if you go going to smoke, or you go in a cloud under visual, you have a high likelihood of not surviving. Very quickly. Kobe Bryant's pilot lost control of the aircraft within seconds. He was and because you have, you guys, a little bit of medical background. You've got your your three canals in your ear, the vegetable canals, and there's
fluid moving around in there. Our stability is based on ninety percent visual. We look around and our equiliter is good. But if you take your eyes away and you count on that fluid in your ears, if I spin you in a chair, you guys ever seen that thing where you blind? Yeah, and it takes seconds and they eject
that the chair. So The same thing happens to a pilot that gets in the clouds because the aircraft, you know, depending on how it moves around get out of trim, the fluid moves and it starts your brain stop.
If they say something like you have to I think what happened with John F. Kennedy Jr. Like, like when you're flying Horion, right, what But you have to trust what you're seeing, even though your mind is telling you that you're upside down or your left or you're right, like, you have.
To trust the trust your instruments, instruments.
That's right, That's basic. So what we do is in all of our pilots are are instrument flight rated, so they're all i FR. But you you as a pilot, as a good pilot, you trust your instruments and you fight that. And that's part of the similar training. You have to fight it, right, I mean some of these
false belief you will actually think you're spinning backwards. Your inner ear will tell you you're actually in a barrel roll, and you fight that by looking at the instruments and going my airspin, altimeter, my HS, everything is telling me I'm okay, and you're literally sweating. I mean, your body is fighting you to say we're out of control. And you were trained as pilots, uh to fly on our instruments.
So did you ever have that O shit moment?
Yeah? I've had.
You know, I've had a lot of moments in the helicopter, mostly firefighting at night in the wind. You know where you just go, oh man, this is what we call it. You know, we we have some real good we have something just culture. Yeah, so this is night aerial fire fighting. You know, we run on night vision goggles and sometimes we're aided and not aided, and when we're when we're firefighting,
but you know, it's it's an instinctual thing. And you know when the first guy goes and this just doesn't feel good or you know, this doesn't feel right, you know, we communicate that to the rest or the command pilot. Well, like the night of the Palisades fire, they were clocking one hundred one hour winds. Now that there's yeah, there are are Santana conditions are typically thirty to fifty miles an hour. So are you know our normal business model is to fly these aircraft and thirty to fifty mile
on our winds and do good work. But it's you know, it's like going and it's going down the freeway at fifty miles an hour and throw a glass of water out and try to hit the bush. So we learn how to tactically use our air.
Little over that you're not timing.
And I can do that now.
That's why I believe it took me thirty years to get there, but I got that.
So the uh, you know, the night of the Palisades, the first night, Now we don't we don't shut down airspace. We don't usually land air draft. I mean, we usually can do some good. There's been a couple of instances where the guys are just like, this is, we're not doing any good. Let's go back to the base. Let's regroup. But the night of the Palisades, my replacement who took my job as chief pilot, was running as the helicopter command pilot and they were clocking hunter them on our winds.
And what I mean by that is they'd come to a hover over a fixed position and his airspeed indicator right one hundred miles an hour. Now, when you're in a laminar flow, when you're in clean air, it's not a big deal. But when you start getting into the turbulence. You know, when you get close to the ground, the air does the same thing that water does, it tur you know, you get the turbulence from the friction of the earth. And some of the pictures are going to show.
I think there's a couple videos, but that night, I think a couple guys that you know, gone down to do water drops and go ooh, that's that was a little that was a little sketchy. And you start hearing very profect, high skilled pilots saying stuff like, well, that was that was close. And my replacement, you know, we had a great conversation after him, he goes, hey, I just knew the moment I started to hear the guys say stuff like, hey, that was that was a little close.
I don't know if I did any good there, And he felt it was appropriate to shut the airspace down and he sent everybody home. And that was probably midnight the first night. So all the helicopters landed that first night, and then at six in the morning they woke up, the winds died down a little bit, and they all went back to work.
But that was my next question today, have to pull the plug on you like if if they feel like it's not good.
Well, so we're the ones that are in control of that. So the pilots now, most of the ground companies, the chiefs, you know, every all the chief officers, the INCID commander, you know, they're they're they're looking for our guidance. They're basically they're they're wanting us to say, hey, this is what your capabilities are. And what is amazing about our culture there is they're just great about when we say this is what we can do and what we can't do.
They're on board. There's no come on, you got to get out here. You know, we got guys in there. You got to do this. Yeah, you've really done a good job of training the new chief officers and changing the culture in the mindset that you know, these aircraft are amazing, but there's some things we just can't do with them. And we we don't want to go until we crash, you know, we don't want to We don't want to go until right. Yeah, And when I got
through operations, that's what it was. You literally took off on a mission until you couldn't go any farther and you go, oh, I guess we got to go back. We didn't know how to say no.
So you're your own safety chief.
Basically, we you basically check yourself and self regulated.
Baby, do what tell you want?
Be self regulated? And I'll tell you what scares me the most. This is this is why we self regulate. This is why in twenty eleven I became the chief pilot. I was terrified about the NTSBNFA showing up to an accident where we had a fatality, God forbid, with a patient or any of our crew members, or god forbid, civilians, innocent civilians that we crash into. Because everything we fly over is urban urban interface. It's a school yard, it's a pie rise building. I was scared to death of
what that would look like. And you know, we we had to be prepared. And I spent the next fifteen years of my career preparing for our next accident. And by that meaning, we introduced policies and procedures, we introduced standardization, and we brought in something called safety management systems. And if you guys haven't heard about it, it's something that's going to be integrated into every fire service at some point before we're all dead. But there's something in it
called the just culture. And what that is is it's your freedom to say, hey, I messed up, I fucked up, and this is what I did, and let everybody know. And in some cases you may have caused damage, but there may be a lesson for everybody else in that and Aviation Civil Aviation has done an amazing job with that safety management system and just culture. You know, we adopted and embraced it and manned my people there. I mean, I just I was in love with them when I left.
They were just such a great bunch of decision makers, you know, guys that were just I was so proud no mission you know, it wasn't I didn't feel like there was one cowboy pilot or a mission itis or any of that stuff. I really, I'm you know, very proud of Leaven, Like we were talking about it, I feel like I'm left on top. I'm so proud of the way, you know, we all grew that place together. And so now I just get a you know, going podcasts and brag the.
Two idiots three idiots. Yeah. True.
You something well while you were talking before, and you said, you know, when you showed the swat guys, uh with the two wheels down.
And the one up.
It made me think of something I've watched a few I don't know what, you know, I get to see a lot of this on social media and it's probably older ones obviously, but it seemed to me like anytime a helicopter was closer to the ground, like like I've seen him on like hikers might maybe or skiers or something where they're they're getting close to the ground, something happens, like you were saying, maybe like there's this downdraft and all of a sudden, the helicopter will be sitting perfect
and then all of a sudden it will like do like this incredible like jar to the right and the will hit the ground and basically like open Is that is that from being too close to the ground or something swell or something like that.
Yeah, there's so what you're probably just talking about is it's an anomaly called brownout and it's or it can be a white out if it's in snow. When a helicopter gets close to the ground and you have loose soil or dust or snow, it can pick up and the vortices I'll do it tight, but the vortices on a helicopter blade readjust into themselves. So what happens is that dust comes back and re ingest in any enghols the helicopter. And remember what we're talking about VFR, it's
like going in a cloud. The pilot immediately loses visual reference with the ground and it matter of seconds loses control of the helicopter.
And that's why you see that what's happening.
That's exactly. So there's training and disciplines and how to land in those types of environments, you know, getting in with purpose and landing before the brown out establishes. Of course we don't have to deal with white out by us. There's just dust and dirt.
But yeah, it's better to have a hoist at that point than to get that ghost maybe something right.
Obviously, a lot of.
Times we can't actually land because of the conditions of the ground, and we choose to hoist, so we'll insert our flight paramedics, our rescue technicians will basically package the patient and then hoist everybody out of that location because it's untenable to land in.
We had on Rob O'Neil, the Navy's heel who shot Osama bin Laden, and he was talking about that that one of the helicopters they didn't account.
For I guess just the height of the wall or something.
And then it was a downdraft from the other helicopter when it was hovering. Of course the other wall was I think it had something to do with the other helicopter when they were coming in. I just watched that Osama movie, right, we watched the same thing. Maybe that's what it was. I don't know if it was the wall.
Yeah, it could be either one of those. The wall is another scenario with the helicopters aerodynamically aroblematic for us, so it's one of his dust. The second is when you get into structures and you're landing between structures, it causes that vorticy to develop and get worse and you actually start losing lyft you Actually the helicopter won't fly because it's re ingesting its own vortices and mostly because the walls that are next to it are causing it.
I don't know what happened in his case, but more likely.
I think you're right, Coops. I think that's what it was. It had to do with exactly what you're explaining, right. There was something to do with though that was unique to see here to learn.
Really, what do you think about those cheap What do you think about those guys in Alaska? They're doing the same thing right obviously, like search and rescue up there. They go for hundreds of miles, they jump out in the ice cold water when it's blown fifty one hundred miles an hour, right, same exact thing.
Crazy, Yes, you know, gosh, there's a coast guard mostly I think. Yeah, Canada has an amazing search and rescue. Same thing. Those guys they fill up with fuel and they'll fly for an hour and a half two hours to the rescue site out in the middle of nowhere to do a rescue and then come back. It's there's certain parts of the world that are amazing. Guys that are going into the North Atlantic, you know, yeah, that's crazy.
I mean just stuff that's just wicked. We are, you know, as crazy as our missions are, all the aerial firefighting, hoisting, and you know, we're in a pretty safe area. If you have a problem with helicopter, you can almost land anywhere.
You know.
We train our we call them precautionary landings, but we train our guys to put her put it down in a park on a freeway. I don't care land anywhere. Don't keep flying to try to go to an airport if the helicopters coming apart. But when you're in the North Atlantic or when you're in the area, of course and you can't land, and yeah, so that there are some amazing people out there, mostly military Coast Guard that
kind of stuff. Alaska, Canada proof. I mean for Ireland, it's you know, I've come across a lot of neat people over my career and doing some some really neat stuff with helicopters.
And you said you haven't flown since you retired, right.
Yeah, no, I just retired on Marstory first, but I haven't flown, so I don't know. You know, I got my Uh, you're.
Gonna have to get the grease out and start oiling up the tin man here, you know, a little stiff, always getting.
A little My girlfriend she's got me out digging holes and planting flowers. I am working harder now than I ever worked. I told her I got to go back to work to get a break.
You know who I am helicopters.
Scott Scott Scott, I was. I used to be the chief pilot in the L A F T. Now I'm just.
Exactly that's what it sounds like.
I have I have that video to the little short air drop out of the hoistline rescue and then you sent me another one, so I don't know how really quick before you go, yeah, I got hand brought my chiru.
Ohs are right there, bulls are bro bulls eye right. So so that's where you that's a great example. You know, they got thirty forty mili hour winds, The fire is moving fast, it's in light fuels, flashy fuels. That just that's what kills firemen. But you know, our our ground
cruis are trained to anchor, flanking, pinch. They run out there with hose, they start running wetline and where we can you know, tactically the helicopter comes in and you get one opportunity every you know, thirty seconds and if you can use the wind to your advantage. And look look what he did. He did a lot of great, great good with just a little bit of water.
So the window got there's a cigarette, but I got the bitch.
We'll get it right and you away otherwise out there.
Now, well, you guys say it was the.
Nots and months got the look if you uh, if you keep it there for a minute gone. So the one of the things that we have in la is we have about four hundred miles linear miles of flood control channels and they are dry all the time. So of course the kids and homeless and everybody plays in them all year. The homeless live in them, and then we get one big rainstorm and boom they fill up,
you know, twenty mile an hour water. And during the course of my entire career, our swift thoughter rescue program started back in nineteen ninety because we lost there was a young boy that was swept away and the l a f D had no way to get him out of the river. And I was working that day. I was in the West Valley and I was a rookie, and uh, you know, we had some weird pictures of
guys that were just you know, mission it us. We had a battalion chief who took a rope around his waist, tied a knot or anything that he was ready to jump in and the boy, the little boy ended up dying. Well, his family sued the fire department, but all they asked for was training and equipment to be able to affect the rescues in this two scenario. So it was amazing. His name was Adam Vishoff. I mean to this day, thirty five years I later, I remember, so I was
again fortunate enough in that time I joined. One of the guys at my station was joining and we joined the Soapwater Rescue team. We went out and got the training for land based rescue. When I got to air operations, you know, we started and before I even got there, they started, you know, doing affecting rescues with the helicopter
and over the years we've perfected. And what you just saw was we took you know, a helicopter with a rescuer that was just waiting above the water, and as soon as the victim came down the river at fifteen miles an hour, they dropped the rescuer and the helicopter takes off and paces the same speed as the water. The post operators haunting the pilot so he's conning him to stay with the scree to the liver while the rescuer is making a quick capture. It all happens in seconds, just like he saw.
Because if you stay there and you drop him he guy's going to go past him, you know, if he doesn't grab him.
Yeah, So swift water rescues are a big deal. LA County Fire Department, doesn't We do quite a bit. We probably do. We affect several swift fotter rescues every year. You know, the guys just make it look easy, but it is extreme.
How are you how are you coordinating that? Obviously as a pilot, you can't. You're facing the wrong way obviously, and you can't see anything. Are you listening to the guy who's peeking out the window?
Is that what's happening?
That's exactly right. You have a crew chief that's running the hoist cable and then you've got a safety member next to him in the door, and then the rescuers out on the hook. So the pilot is putting the crew in position downstream waiting for the victims. So they've already identified the victim, they know the victim's coming. They'll set up downstream a couple hundred yards quickly lower a rescuer, and the pilot is in position and waiting for the
command from the hoist operator to start his movement. So we have discipline, six different commands and as soon as the rescuer is dropped in the water, the hoystoperator says, start your pace, Increase your pace, increase your pace. Pace is good, Hold your pace. He's making the capture. He's giving me the okay sign. Pace is good. I'm taking on weight and that's it. He brings him out of the water. As soon as out of the water, slow
your pace to a stop. The pilot comes to a stop and then they bring him up into the cabin and it's a two minute ride to a trauma center. So we've had a lot of great success with the swift water rescue stuff, and.
I got a brake storm for a new TV series problem this guy could star and the Brad.
Looking like.
There's no way that guy doesn't look.
Like You guys are doing great for my ego.
I love it. Yes, damn, that's Russell crow To. But you.
Chat, who does you look like? Russell crawl?
Come on now, come on.
The little Asian guy thought it was Brad Bitt want.
I would have come on your show earlier if I knew it was gonna go like this.
You guys are doing great. Keep it in. What's the contingency if that this victim gets past you, you have a ground swift water unit ready to go or is it all based on you guys?
Yeah, great question, man, You get me fired up. So we when we launched on a swift Wotter rescue, we launched two swift Wotter rescue helicopters in a command and control aircraft. The primary aircraft goes to the rescue site, which is what you just saw. The secondary hoist aircraft goes downstream and sets up. We have a second rescue
or downstream ready to go. So that second helicopter if the first helicopter fails, the second helicopter is two three hundred yards downstream ready to affect the backup rescue or if something goes wrong with the first helicopter, they're there to affect a rescue of that first helicopter. So we have that redundant leap frog capability with those two rescue helicopters. On swift water days, we staff up so we have to rescue swift water helicopters ready to go. They run
in tandem every dispatch. They go together, they don't go out by themselves. And then they have a command and control aircraft that works with the incident commander takes a lot of the radio chatter off, right because you guys, know you've been to an incident. Sometimes it's just it's too much. You're overwhelmed by all the ridiculous chatter. We don't want the hoist pilot or the Hoyst crew to
hear all that stuff. So the command pilot, the helicopter command and the different aircraft, he's managing all the radio traffic with the incident commander. That way, the search and rescue, that Hoyst aircraft has a very clean environment to operative. They don't hear a whole bunch of screaming and yelling and you know, tactics and strategy stuff they don't need to use. So that's where we you know, we start
minimizing risk and liability. We have redundancy with the second poised aircraft ready to go, and then we have a command and control aircraft that's you know, relieving them of all the radio traffic.
Jat said Sean Connery.
Sean, Yeah, couple of Russell crows in that. Yeah, there's a couple of Russell crows in that. Do you feel like like when you get the run, like if that was a kid in the water, and you guys get the call from from sitting at the kitchen table to hovering over the you know, if it's close by. So let's say, how well, how long are we talking? Are we talking ten minutes? We talk at five minutes, we talked at twenty minutes, Like what are you thinking?
Oh?
Great question.
So you remember, when our guys get to work, they basically do relief. They do all their pre flighting. We call it leaving the aircraft in a precock position, so the pilot will go through all of his safety checks or run fuel, says some checks, hydraulic checks, so he'll spend an hour with the aircraft pre flighting in but he leaves everything in a precock position, meaning all he's got to do is flip the switch and hit the button, so that aircraft is now ready alert. We call it
alert ready. When the alarm goes off, it takes and all of our aircraft are hangared. So as soon as alarm goes off, everybody comes out. Ground crew come out to the tug. They start towing the aircraft out on the line. The crew starts suiting up the rescuers, putting on his dry suit. The pilot's getting all the briefing,
mission briefing on where the incident is. It takes from the time of alarm to the time the aircraft is airborne seven minutes, and of that seven minutes, it takes about four minutes to start both engines and get up to one hundred percent get our clearance from air traffic control, So about seven minutes were airborne in the valley, which is the north part of the city. It's only a four minute flight to any part of the city. So what that rescue you just saw that channel was in
the north northeast corner of the valley. It would have been around the eleven to twelve minute mark that they were on station ready to go, and that's probably six miles from air operations. The farthest reaches of the city. It's probably eleven minute flight. Our aircraft do about one hundred and seventy miles an hour, so they bugy once they get up and they move pretty fast, so we
can get around the city. But one of our tactical advantages is that quick deployment, you know, having everything the risk assessment's done, the aircraft pre flight and precock ready to go, all systems checks done. All the crew has to do is get in, start it and go. It goes very quick. To put in perspective, to put it in perspective, the Coast Guard Coast Guartation l A, and they're they're very professional. They do all the off water stuff and off water ocean stuff. Scares me. That's you know,
that's some some really brave stuff. But the Coast Guard, they're alert aircraft. It takes thirty minutes to launch out of face in LA. So they're just you know, the military, so they're just not set up for that alert, you know, that fire department alert. You know, moments mattered. Thirty minutes later that the rescue's over, the victims either drowned or right,
you know, he's downstream in the ocean somewhere. Yeah, minutes, minutes matter, So we try to try to condense that time and yet still be as safe as possible so that we're you know, we're we're we're not reckless.
What was your least favorite run?
Oh man, that's a good question.
My least favorite run was man well man on man under a train or man. So I hated manholes. Yeah, because you don't have to check all the you know, apartments and everything.
Yeah, you know, the worst for me, And still to this day, it's the kids. It's anything to do with the kids. You know, in the valley, the summer's out there of the pools, drownings and traffic acts and ship I've got. I got so many nightmare stories and you know, like you guys know, thirty five years later and I can still feel that day I held a baby and the blood was going down my arm. It's just that
ship just stays with you. And and sometimes, you know, I work with my girlfriend on this a lot because I as a fireman, you conmpartmentalize that stuff. You know, you just feel like it's another day of work. And you don't even realize how we lose empathy, you know, we we just lose ourselves. We're just we're soulless, emotionless creatures.
And mostly because of everything that we've seen and and you know what human can go through that ship and see that, you know, body parts and burned and that, and it's not seeing a bird body, it's smelling a bird body. My you know, my first experience was the smell of a burned body. But the kids to answer question, the kid by far as the kids, I've seen a lot of bad stuff, but anything to do with those.
You know, I'm a cold, hot at bastard. I don't care about it, I see. I mean, I don't. Even My wife's like, what's the matter with you? I'm like, I don't know. It just doesn't.
Yeah, the man under a train, especially in the subway.
In the summer, blood everywhere, all the electric gone humming, like right next to your.
Trash.
Except for special operations, we're on the track with a block of gear.
You know.
No, Yeah, you get a guy who just tried to kill himself. You know you're trying to save him. You know, like you know you're in like this fall, you know, like this blood everywhere. You know you're trying to save him for a guy who tried to you know, you know, you know, I'll tell.
You a funny story because it just came to when you're asking the worst story. I was young, I was probably four or five years on it. I was on the rescue. We all rotate truck, rescue engine, and we went to I was working a part of Hollywood, and uh, we went on this whole guy was a and he was in his bathroom and he tried to stab himself. He'd had a couple of years old, he's probably eighty five,
probably terminal cancer. It was kind of sad. But he finally he lets us in the bathroom and he's you know, he's got a wife, beat her shirt, white shirt on. It's all bloody and the blood's kind of coagulated because he's been there for a while. And he you know, he poked himself enough to bleed, but not enough to hit his caroated already, and uh, he just kept sitting way no, no, he failed at that right, So, but he wanted to die. I want to die, you know,
I'm finding I'm done. I'm done. And and uh you are you guys familiar with Cedars Hospital or you so some of our big trauma centers UCLA and uh USC we got all these big college hospitals, trauma centers, and we have one called Cedars, which is one of the primary, you know, leading centers for everything. And but some of the people, some of the communities, the cultures didn't like Cedars Hospital. So we're you know, we're sitting there with
him and we finally get in the door. You know, he's he's live, he's we're gonna take in the hospital. He's not successful. He's poking himself and he's pissed. He's kind of fighting us, and and he's like, I want to leave me alone. I want to die, you know, I just I want to end it. And and then I look at my partner and I just confirmed them. I go, we're going to Cedars, right, and my partner yeah, and the guy, the old man goes.
Don't take me to Cedars.
They're gonna kill you there.
What you wanted anyway?
Bro, you don't even make this.
Shut up, dude, yeah, make up? You know, so I don't bring me there millions oh million?
You know, remember thirty five years ago HIV, I mean ship you have an exposure of blood. We go through the whole post six month exposure and it was so scary. There's just yeah, different times.
But did you get any of those pictures?
I said, oh yeah, I was. I text you to let you know a load. Which one do you want to pull up?
You don't know what's his name? One seventeen sent it to me. These are I think FDNY helicopters.
No, I don't see the picture of the helicopter or there's obviously there's only five of them, and they're all just is this one. I don't know if they might recognize as a beautiful I can't really.
Take what did he send me? Send me something?
I don't have a helicopter?
Got what's his name? From one seventeen? Who is the truck? He one seventeen?
Like a barge explosion in Great Kills BFI a corps so from one of you guys from yeah, y, but it's from VF. I'm assuming that's what do you call that? BFI? Is uh?
Fire investigation?
Yeah, he was a Marshall.
Yeah, yeah, King, Okay, yeah, King, that's so that's that must be King there. That was his crew. We got a little bit of a oh that's the barge. It's like explosion. That's the Bardger Staten.
Italy or something over there.
These are great. I mean, I still think that the man goes all with these helicopters. It's still it's a fan favorite. Doesn't get old.
I would say the NYPD, Uh, yeah, they're they make a lot of grabs with that. Like there's a lot of people in the riverage by us, and now they don't they don't. I mean, I'm sure they hoist, but I've seen the guys jump out grab them and then they you know, I don't know what they do after that, but that's like their main thing.
Without being connected, I don't know what they do.
Most of the time that the Harbor Patrol has boats there too, so I think they're just trying to grab them to stay afloat, and then they'll have the boats and everybody, you know, New York's is harbor patrol everywhere. For the most part, FDNY has a lot of boats.
What do we got.
I was just waiting for a loaded up another one. But when I have to share a screen, it takes a second. But if you want to watch, it's only a minute. Yeah, there we go.
I'll give you the background in that. We get a lot of hoist rescues in the city.
It's another Saturday, by the way, it's just another Saturday. Crowd watch it.
And in this case, the it was a construction site. The roof had collapsed. They had a cherry picker inside the building. The roof collapse. The two guys in the cherry picker. The roof collapsed on the cherry picker and cut some of the hydraulic lines. So They had been in that thing for about thirty minut and the ground companies didn't know. They had no way to get them out. They couldn't get close to them. They were afraid if they start taking the gear off, the hydraulics would have
failed and they dropped. So yeah, they called in and what you saw in the capture is that's exactly what we do. The same thing with the swoft on rescue. It's a you know, a surgical placement, a quick capture strap within seconds and then pull them out. So they pulled those two guys out, but we get crane rescues, you know. You know maybe in New York same way. You know who the crane operators are in LA there because it's the highest paying job, the most sent senior
ten yured guys. The sixty year old guy is a crane operator. You know how they get to the top of the crane. They got to climb whatever fifty flights of stairs a ladder to get up there. And then what do they do when they get up there?
They have a heart attack. So I can't tell you.
How many we've pulled. I don't know my career, A dozen guys really heart attacks hoisted them off the top of a crane, because no urban search and rescue in the city has got a four hundred foot you know, ballet line that they can belay a guy off of cream. So tactically there's you know, some it's weird in an urban environment, you know, the necessity for the helicopters or how we've been able to put them to use.
So is that rope, sorry, the rope is four hundred feet? Is that your backs?
No, I we don't even have so our guys wouldn't even try it. I think our you know, and I don't know what our urban search and rescue teams, you know. I know that the rigs at one point when I was driving a fire engein our our ballet line and mainlines were I think one hundred and seventy feet or two hundred feet two feet two.
Yeah, the helicopter you don't have it. What's the length of the oh, I'm sorry, hoistline?
Yeah, our our hoist on the on the helicopters, so most of our hoist happened around one hundred feet plus or minus ninety to one hundred and fifty feet.
The full length of the cable is.
It's eluding you right now. I don't know why I can't remember that number. It's over two hundred feet, but the uh, rarely do you hoist that high? We really like you saw the sot futter of rescue hoist was about thirty feet. Our typical hoist in the mountain district is about one hundred feet. You get up to a certain point and the crew has a difficult time with vertical reference and seeing, especially at night, where the rescuer is and if they've made the capture. And I don't
know if you see. We have also radios where the guys can just talk without key and the mic, and a secondary backup is the head movement, which says I'm okay, I'm ready for left.
So we've got.
Redundancy in not only physical commands or hand commands, but if the radios fail.
So it has a good question in the chat chief.
He says, with a crew of five you have or four or five, how many extra people can you just on the Yeah?
How many extra people can we put in the what on the choppa?
Like?
Interesting? So, yeah, our hoist crew is combined. There's three a hoist operator, to rescue, paramedics, flight paramedics in the back, the three crewmen, and depending on the type of hoist or mission, there'll be a single pilot or two pilots, so we can have about a five person crew. The aircraw have are capable of taking up to twelve passengers in the back, but we've got to configure with seats. Our typical configuration for air amens and firefighting only has
five seats in the back. So to answer the question exactly, we could technically pay two more take two more people in seats with seat belts, plus the patient in the litter system. We don't fly around with anybody not builted in. Everybody's got to be in a seat belt or in a harness that's clipped into a part of the ceiling. So and then for hoisting, weight becomes an issue because we're hovering out of ground. Effect is taking a ton of power. The aircraft's working really hard, so we want
to stay as light as possible. So everybody is essential to the mission. Every single crew has a purpose. We don't like to take around extra people.
If we don't have to.
So that's that's what If I'm not just saying, oh, correct me if I'm wrong that when you guys are hovering and you go to do your lift, that's the helicopter is operating and max power just about. That's why normally I see helicopters take off into the wind because people always ask why you have to have that kind of a runway if you will, because it's that power for the helicopter. It does a direct lift.
Yeah, that's that's a aerodynamic magic.
I love it.
Excellent.
You're exactly right. Hovering out of ground effect is the hardest for a helicopter to do. It takes the most amount of power. You're in the most danger, you have the least amount of escape routes and option the most danger the most. We call it translational left. But as the helicopter takes off it the more air speed you get, the more air is rammed into the top of the rotor system and it becomes more efficient. It's translational lift. So the aircraft, the helicopter wants to go fast and
be moving like an airplane. We have a lot of options. We can tea, we can do a lot of things, but the second you hover out of ground effect, we start running out of.
Quick So when people are when the helicopters are just standing still. That's the most dangerous, correct, Yeah, it's the most dangerous. You have the least amount of options if you lose your engines or you.
Lose a tail roader, if you're moving, if you're doing one hundred knotsor one hundred and fifty miles an hour, you've.
Got a lot ofis now that you say that, every time I ever see a helicopter knock on wood, it's usually standing still and then all of a sudden something happens, like it looks like it jerks out of the way or something like something happens.
Actually, the only so you'll see the news media, however, out of Groz they do it.
Forever, they do it. I'm like, see them do it.
Because they're those guys are risking their lives to get the shot. You know, they'll they'll set up for the camera, that's they're doing everything for the camera shot, and then hoist pilots you know, or we call it external load or sling pilots, guys that are lifting you know, heavy loads underneath the helicopter. That that's where they're at the most risk. That's where the helicopter.
We've had a lot of helicopter crashes in New York, even crazy lately in my in my time, I've bet the two or three of them.
Yeah, yeah, we had the one here. I'm just going to share your talking about it. If you guys remember the Greening video. But our our air rescue down here crash last year.
I went to a into a building, right to a house, went to.
Uh right here, Well he looks like he's smoking there.
Well, he was on fire. And I think that was you know, Scott was talking about earlier. She was talking about it earlier. Where they they didn't from what I understood, I don't have all the details. They didn't realize that. They realized something came on and the alarms came on. So they saw that they weren't that far from the airport. So get back to the get back to the airport. And as you can see in this picture, the tail roader snapped at the I guess the fuselage if that's
my terminology is correct. It just spun and then it just dropped here. But you know that this is what it looked like obviously, but since then they had too But it's just you talk about that, uh, responsibilities of policies. They're the problem. You mentioned it earlier about landing right away and get down. I don't part of them. What I'm understanding is they didn't know that there was an actual fire and there which contributed to the weakening of
the craft and crashing it. I believe, but I want to miss it.
Yeah, it's tough, you know, it's not normal in helicopter community to you know, all pilots are trained go back to the airport and go back to you know, big safe landing or we specifically train our pilots. Anything goes. I don't care what if they feel like something wrong land because we can be on the ground in fifteen to twenty seconds. We're thirty seconds later. You may have something like this where you know, the tail boom components caught on fire and then you start losing control of
the aircraft. But it's not second guessing those guys. But for us, you know, our ideology about having an escape route and preparing for the eventuality of something bad to happen. You've got seconds to get on the ground, and if you're over land, there's always somewhere to land a helicopter. I mean, we can at rotate and part of our training, we spend we have two small helicopters there are Bell
five oh fives or training helicopters. We spend a very large amount of time doing what's called autootative training, which is you turn the engine out, you basically roll the engine idol and you you descend into a target at will and then land without your engine and your engine
is uncoupled, kind of like a ten speed bike. So we practice that that behavior pattern so that we know how to get down fast and land so that you know, we hopefully avert that type of a disaster where you know, you try to fly too long with the aircraft coming apart, it doesn't work.
Out well, so well, fortunately lost. Sorry, good buddy, Not good buddy. I was going to say that they were saying that this house actually the two guys walked away from it and two people parish the captain Terry Jackson was the captain from the fire department, and the resident inside the house here. But they were saying that this house actually helped a little bit cact like a cushion when the helicopter landed on almost like an or trampoline kind of a thing. Or again that kind of helped,
that's all. Just going to make a mention of that. I got a little side tracked from that.
So what makes you want to hang it up after thirty five years?
You know, it's so a lot of things. I think, you know, one thing I'm acutely aware of as the actual aarial study. The longer we stay on the fire department, the shorter our lifespan is. You know, we've got the first part of my career thirty five years ago breathing out brass. We didn't wear them as much as we should have. There's a lot of bad stuff that's probably
floating around in my bloodstream. So you know, part of me was if I could get out young and get as many good years, you know, hopefully really a long time because I literally could be at work and work for another thirty years.
I just loved it.
I didn't, you know, I left my passion, I left what I loved. But I was maxed out on our service pension. You know, our service pension out here is thirty three years to get your maximum service pension. And then I was, you know, I'm young, and I just thought, you know, this is it was the hardest decision I've ever made, but I still think it was the right one. I'm really pleased. Like I said, I went out on top.
And I also you know, I retired, I lost ten pounds, I'm eating better, you know, the stress, the anxiety.
Sleep better. I just went and flowers, beautiful everything.
I don't think I knew.
It's the old lady's chasing you around the house all the time.
Now, so that's just chasing you around. That's what's weight bro chasing around the house.
Because you know he's got all those movie offers.
You know, I want to say, the vote is in.
We got seven Russell Crows one, Sean Connery zero, Brad Pitt's.
The man himself. Who do you think you look like?
No?
I listen, you know.
We can't get any better than this guy. Man, it might be the coolest guy even.
Like no, no, no, wait, let me tell you, Sam, you're that's good stuff. Man. It's a good time to bring it up anyway.
Where we are, Okay, I think it might be that time.
It might be if you give me like three here we go. All right, it's tired. Are you ready? Are you ready? Scott?
I'm ready?
All right, here we go.
It's time for the old.
Now we'll say what it really close?
Oh, here we go, Hey, Brian, how you all right? Russell Crowe take it away too, you know, I so I did. Uh.
You know, I thought about it when Gonzo mentioned the old school tip of the day, and I thought, you know, I'm full of a lot of advice and be us and I'll talk anybody's ear off on what to do. I'm good at that. But I think what I'll leave everybody with. It's you know, it's a phrase that I heard when I was a young firefighter from kind of a legend on the fire Department, and they ended up placarding the front of our training center downtown with it.
So every time you walk in the doors, you see it above the doors and it's train as if your life depends on it. And for me, it was you know, it encompasses everything. It encompasses professionalism, it encompasses preparing for that moment when you'll fall back on your training you won't rise to the occasion. So for me, that's, you know, train as if your life depends on it. For all of our brothers and sisters out there in the fire service across the country, you know, too many people I
think get complacent. They get to those slow assignments and they you know, they hang it up and cruise. But every day, all the way to the end of my thirty fifth year, I was out training and practicing emergencies and being prepared for that moment that an engine failed. I think I'm probably the most highly trained helicopter pilot in the world on emergency landings with engine failures, and I never experienced an engine failure, so that I'm proud to say I left ready for something to go wrong,
but it never went wrong. So training as if your life depends on it, that's gonna be mildki old school ticket.
I like it, like it.
I like God. I have a question.
You could pick another guest, get us another one.
I have. I have another question, though this is gonna be This is a retirement question, now, Scott. We normally asked, I'm not there yet, so I haven't had the dream yet, But we normally ask have you had the dream yet? In your case, it's going to be a I don't know what You're dream is going to be like, and the dream is do you wake up you can't find your gear and your clase. Is it going to come out in the helicopter's going to be gone wherever supposed
to fly. I wonder what your dream is going to be.
Like, well, Ship, you know it's funny you said, because I I had I had several mornings, you know that I woke up and I was late to work, or the first thing I went to grab is my email, Like, oh shit, I got checked my email, and it's taken me some time to set my phone down and and to not have those I'm like, Ship, I don't have to be anywhere, you know, I mean the last racing from one meeting to the nest and juggling budgets and buying this and convincing city council members, and I'm like,
oh my god, I don't have to be anywhere. And then I can just say that my beautiful partner comes in and tells me to start digging holes in the backyard.
So let's Scott bullshit you he had to have excavated out there today, was digging with it was all working controls.
I got a little just take off, like what's going on?
You wouldn't believe the things I've run into with that thing. You know, you think I would be precision surgical with that thing, and I've already knocked over a broken cup.
I would say it takes about a year before you you get comfortable, because it kind of still feels like you're on vacation sometimes or whatever. Like it's about a year before you start. And and like you said, we said in the pre show, like, you know, you got to do this stuff while you can. You know, if you want to go see the pyramids, you're not doing that when you're seventy five. You know, like you can, but it's better to do it now. And uh, and do that stuff while you can.
You know, well what's on the bucket list. You got some on the bucket list, so.
You know what we're developing it. We were we were talking about going to Africa on Safari and the South Korea thing popped up. I never would have gone to South Korea or Japan, and we ended up laying over for a week in Japan, a week in South Korea, and it was amazing. I mean, I never would have gone to Asia on my own. I'm just not one to leave America. I'm like, I feel safe here. I'm not I'm not leaving.
Communicate like, yeah, all the kind of thing.
So I think that my you know, my beautiful partner and I are going to spend some time doing you know, some adventures like that. Traveling is something I haven't done a lot of. You know, it's a typical fireman. It's ski boat trips and houseboat trips and you know, snow ski trips and all the shorties. But you know, the big thing is slowing down and enjoying all the friends and family. Because for many years, I like you guys may be the same. I missed every I for thirty
five years. I worked every everything, giving every holiday. You know where I was in the fire station, so everybody got used to come to the fire station to see me on the holidays.
So you know, it's kind of new.
Now we're having all the holidays at home with all the family. And so I'm excited and I'm I'm really blessed. I'm young, I'm healthy, and I had an amazing career and you know, just like opportunities like this, you know, chance to share my story with some really great people, and uh, the community as a whole in the fire service is unparalleled. It's you know, I can I could show up in New York and you guys have probably put me up in a bedroom.
Hell yeah, same thing.
You guys show up in Montana next year.
You're coming on a boat.
Yeah, we got a boat, right, Yeah, hell yeah, you gotta come to the city.
All all our guests come on a boat. Right, We go around the Statue of Liberty, we go on.
Well, listen, you know Dave Downey took me on Miami Dads fireboat around Miami. So you got some work to do.
To the scene we have.
You don't have to Brooklyn Bridge and Power and coming.
Well, it was Miami in the summer, and we went down some corridor where every girl is in a bikini.
All right, so he's got to speak.
Yeah, that's visual. That's a Florida. Actually, we're saying California is very similar.
If you're going to be in New York from the water August. Second, we're going on this year. If you want to, If you could make it this year, you're welcome.
Second, you and your lady.
Yeah, man, we'll take you guys up on it.
Neither was.
She spent time in Boston, so she's got a little boss.
Yeah. Wow, Dragon in New York wicked smart.
Oh, No, Rhode Island we gotta do the oldest full health and safety tip.
Yes, here we go.
The First Responder Center for Excellence is a not for profit organization dedicated to protecting their lives and livelihoods of first responders. Their education and research initiatives aimed to bring greater awareness and understanding the challenges to the health, safety and well being of firefighters, EMS, personnel, and other first responders too. They are an affiliate of the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation.
And I'm going to use a tip that our guest gave us tonight. Back then, they didn't use mass hardly ever, right, and he retired early because why because he wants to enjoy his retirement.
So please the.
Whole not wearing masks, not washing up, So it's out the window now, bro, take care of yourself, take care of your lungs, take care of your health so you can live a long retirement on a fixed income.
Beautiful, wonderful. What we got next week, Ruffy.
We got chief boys next weekend, Chief boys.
And we also have I will fill you in on how Ellie Coobler, eighty six years old started her week career.
My mother, what can go wrong?
She dabbled with, we what could go wrong.
Help you have a video? Should Scott.
Problem?
Wonderful job, great Korea, great stories learned.
Yeah, a lot of stuff.
I was interested and did. Okay, he can stay another week.
I'm ready. I can go fly helicopter. No, let's go.
Yeah, yeah, thanks for having guys.
Yeah.
I really appreciate it and I had a good time. It's good. Good to spending some time with you guys.
And you can go get us another guest now, gonz you did such a fun, wonderful job.
It was fun. We'll talk about after the show. But anyway, a couple of shoutouts, you guys have any I just have those two firefighters that.
Go ahead.
I'm just gonna make mention. I'm gonna screw his name up, but from Tawilada forty one was it? Yeah? Forty one? Yes, I can't pronounce his name, Matthew the co Geo Cochia. Forgive me if I'm pronouncing it wrong. He was killed in a motorcycle accident on the FDR just the other day. Condolences to his family, and we had a firefight from Saint Lucie County. We passed away all the job. His name is Saint Lucie County Fire Jarias Hodge. He had some illness. I'm not really sure. That's very vague in
the story. He went home from work now feeling so good and ended up passing away. So I believe they're gonna they're gonna consider that a lot of duty death for him. That's by you, Yeah, Saint Lucie County, just about an hour or so in both of me, excuse.
Me, that's a line of duty. We're gonna give him the five belts. Brother too young, too young, my.
Friend too young, and another shout out, my last shout, I'll be the chief Dave Downey for hooking us up with Scott, hooking me up, getting him in here. A little kudos to Chief. I know he said he was watching earlier. I don't know if he caught that Scott. Yeah, they thought he was a Chief Downy from FDM. I but I'm sure he gets that all the time.
That guy comes on our show. We're gonna make a lot of money because was he's talking to us beyond the grave.
That guy, Oh that guy.
So yeah, alright, guys, until next week. I was gonna I won't even talk about the membership, just go sign up for the membership.
We'll talk about We'll get it out there a little, get it on Instagram. We'll get it guys. Yeah, we had another new member today, so it's stats.
What I say, Stay low and go.
Thanks again, Chief. We'll see it the big one. Everybody take care.
All right, Thanks again, Scott. Remember we're rolling heavy down the South Florida. As I like to say, stay salty, my friend. Have a good night.