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In the mid nineties, just as I was leaving a position with a tour operator. I got a call from a friend that had several type 1 and type 2 ships out on fire contracts. He had one contract that was being covered with a Bell 204B and even though the contract had only been running a couple of weeks the pilot and customer had both complained repeatedly about the mechanic on the job.

So my friend asked me if I would be interested in assuming a contract that was already in motion.  It turned out that the ship was out on a fire in southern Colorado very near the four corners area.

 I traveled out to where the helicopter was based, out of a large cow pasture we were sharing with two Bell 212’s from two other operators.  It was late in the afternoon when I arrived and the ship had flown a few hours during the day but the previous mechanic had left the night before. So being the first time I had met this particular Bell 204 I proceeded to give it an extensive daily, and a lot of grease, as well as several hours of cleaning .

   The next morning it was time to trade out pilots for mandatory days off.  It turns out that the relief pilot was my friend, the owner of the company and he was on site and ready before things warmed up and the first call came in from the fire line for helicopter support.

The first hour or so passed and the ship came in and got fuel while the pilot took care of his personal business , grabbed one of those infamous brown bag lunches that the forest service is so well known for, a fresh pack of smokes and he was off again.

About thirty minutes later a radio call came in that the 204 had lost tail rotor. The call came from a 212 that was behind him in line to dip water. Five or six very long minutes later the pilot of the 204 called in that he was inbound to the cow pasture, his tail rotor was ineffective and he was about 15 minutes out.

The available forest service personnel all grabbed fire extinguishers, and ran out to the helispot to await the inevitable crash and fire. It took a moment for me get them to understand that he would not be trying to land on the spot and that if something does go wrong having a dozen people standing around in the open is probably not a good idea. Next I managed to get them to rearrange all their trucks and equipment to open up the most space possible for an upwind run-on landing.

It was several minutes before the ship came into view and began his approach to the field. As he descended you could hear him working the throttle to keep the ship straight into the wind and he made a perfect touchdown with a total slide of about 6 feet. If you hadn’t already been aware most people would never have known there was a problem. The pilot cooled the engine normally while he smoked a cigarette and then shut down.

The problem was easy to locate, both bolts in the outboard end of the tail rotor pitch links had sheared off in the cross-head. The head of one bolt was still stuck in the cross-head so it was possible to see that the wrong hardware had been installed. There was no maintenance entry in the log book, but the bolts installed were so far under strength that it had to have been done recently.

There were a half dozen of the proper bolts in the field maintenance trailer so it was a simple process to check the pitch links and cross-head for additional damage , and finding none install the correct bolts. By the time we had examined the ship completely and performed a track and balance on the tail rotor fallowed by a test flight, it was too late in the day to go back to the fire and since the tail rotor had failed during a dip the pilot had punched the bucket and it was somewhere in the bottom of the pond.

That night at fire camp we ate dinner with the pilot of the 212 that had been watching the whole evolution from a couple hundred yards away, and after dissecting the manner in which my friend saved the 204 he mentioned how impressed he was that we had the ship back up in less than a day. We shared with him our bucket problem and that it was at least 5 days to get a new one. He told us that he had taken note of where our bucket had entered the pond when it was punched off.

The next morning he flew with us to the pond and hovering over the water showed us exactly where it had gone in at. We then returned to the cow pasture and began figuring a way to recover our bucket. After asking around and a not inconsiderable amount of time planning and re-planning one of the locals that was coming around selling water and snacks produced a three legged grappling hook from the back of his truck, and a new plan was formed immediately.

We attached the grappling hook to the end of a 200 foot line routed it around the aft crosstube and rolled it up on the cabin floor.

We flew out to the pond, where I then shoved the cable and hook arrangement out the door and it slipped past the skid heel as planned and hung beautifully under the ship. Starting where the 212 pilot had pointed out my friend began dragging the bottom of the pond for the bambi bucket. On his third try he scored. As the bucket came to the surface you could see that it was snagged by one of the shroud lines, and so could not be lifted free of the water without damaging it.  The plan was to drag it to the shore and to be honest we hadn’t thought much farther ahead than that.

The water in the pond was dark and murky; I realized that at some point I would need to get into it to get the bucket organized so it could be lifted out. The next problem arose when the 100 ft line that was still attached to the bucket would not cooperate as we attempted to drag the whole assembly to the water’s edge.

I was going to have to go in and see if I could get the line free of the snag or detach it from the remote cargo hook, sacrificing the cable in favor of saving the hook and bucket. So as we hovered 15 feet above the water I stripped out of my jeans and shirt and jumped in. We had guessed that the pond was 15 to 20 feet deep based on how much cable it had taken to drag the bottom, but after three unsuccessful attempts to swim down the cable to locate the snag I was forced to unscrew the shackle at the hook and let the cable sink.

After that it was a simple matter to drag the bucket over to the edge of the pond and up onto some reeds. Once in shallow enough water I disentwined the grappling hook from the bucket shrouds and placed the remote hook on the same shackle so that they were hanging side by side at the end of the long line on the ship. Then I disconnected the udder inside the bucket so that it would fly safely under the ship.

 There was no place to land the 204 so I swam back out into the pond and the pilot leaving the bucket lying in the shallows  came down to where I could clamber onto the skid and into the helicopter. The ship was lifting and I was getting situated in the back and when I was putting on my belt I saw that I was covered in leaches.

  In retrospect one would think that having over a dozen little creatures sucking your blood would be painful but actually you can’t feel them at all.

When we reached the cow pasture and landed it took my pilot who was also thankfully a good friend about thirty minutes with a buck knife and a cigarette lighter to get all the little critters off of me. Then we drove into town and found a doctor to get a tetanus shot and an antibiotic cocktail.

A hot shower and a night in the motel and we were back on contract the next morning only losing one day of availability for the whole episode.