Damn Gravity
Posted on Friday, January 10th, 2003 at 18:00.
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, the tale of a fateful trip. After living under the artificial lighting of the sub-divided Moscone Center for four days, I wanted to enjoy San Francisco and role play the traditional tourist. Matt and I scheduled a twenty minute tour, a twenty minute tour. [Cue thunder crash from Giligan's Island theme song.]
San Francisco Helicopter Tours was late picking Matt and I up from the hotel, so my plan of catching the last half of the Your Mac Life Friday broadcast was shattered. This upset me, but I thought that the helicopter tour of San Francisco’s most popular tourist traps would be worth the $100. [Cue half-step key change in Giligan's Island theme song.]
Less than 15 minutes into the flight and after flying over and under the Golden Gate Bridge, the helicopter had a mechanical failure. We dropped 600 feet (bridge height) in less than a minute. The pilot told us to put on our inflatable vests as he barked, "Mayday!" over the radio and inflated the helicopter’s pontoons on the skids. Had John McClelland’s masterful auto-rotation water landing not have been successful, us four men would have had about 20 minutes in the 54°F water before hypothermia set in.
The rapid decent did not allow for me to be scared. However, the 5-10 feet tall waves that tossed the floating helicopter beneath the bridge during the 20 minute wait for the U.S. Coast Guard did scare me. By God’s grace, the skillful pilot, and the prepared Coast Guard teams, I returned to shore without injury. An ambush of the local news media awaited us during our walk from the dock to the Coast Guard station. A taxi took Joe Ubaldo (a Macworld Expo attendee), Matt Locke, and me back to the Cartwright and Marriott hotels after watching the helicopter be towed into the dock.
I am thankful to be alive one more day. And I will be back in San Francisco to get the rest of my helicopter tour some day. :-)
