As you can see, we went on a chopper ride and I would just like to say that it was terrifying. Here is my sweet husband hanging on for dear life, as he surely ponders how he ever let me convince him to go on this ‘adventure’.
Now this is coming from someone who has been skydiving twice, loves(d) flying, as well has been on two other chopper rides, albeit much larger ones on sunny days. I’ve done almost every extreme sport there is to do, with the exception of bungee jumping as this does not entice me at all. There are also a multitude of other dumb activities that cannot be classified under ‘sport’, such as jumping off of a rail bridge (hitting water after a 4 second freefall doesn’t sound like much but I had a bruise on my butt the size of my head for 8 weeks), riding a sea doo in the pitch black at a cottage (nearly crashed it into a boat but instead only capsized it 5 times trying to do tricks), and rolling an ATV off a ravine (my fight-or-flight response is strong so I managed to jump off onto the gravel road miliseconds before watching it tumble down, juuuust like in the movies). Let’s also not forget how I moved to the Middle East for 3 years as a single woman in the midst of ongoing regional tensions because I felt like it …but I digress. Seriously though, I am kind of beginning to understand why my mother was always so worried about me.
Anyhow, the tour company nearly canceled our flight due to an oncoming storm but ended up taking the last few clients. I may have also pressed them light to do it because this was supposed to a nice, relaxing stroll in sky for my cousins visiting from out of town, and was the only time we could do it before their departure. In actual fact, the storm hit at 6pm and we were up in the air at 6:20pm, aswell the other nearby tour company did cancel all flights that day. It looked like a post-apocalyptic Gotham city out with dark grey skies, freezing rain and winds exponentially picking up speed by the minute. This would’ve been fine had we felt safe, but let me explain to you why we did not.
While booking I had pictured a bad ass military or hospital style chopper with the pointed beak that aims down after rising up, unfortunately my expectations fell short of reality and no such aerodynamic qualities existed on our bird. In fact it more closely resembled a bug than a bird, being a tight squeeze for 4 average sized people, and made of a rounded body comprised of 90% thin glass from top to bottom. The only metal I saw was approximately one cubic meter below us for our feet to rest, and perhaps the propeller, which would’ve hit us in the head had we not ducked going in. There is also no exit strategy in the form of parachutes or life vests etc. and the company had deceptively used another chopper in their advertisement. It was like the lame pony of helicopters, what I imagine aerial engineers came up with using the scraps of other choppers. It may very well have been THE copter that inspired My Little Pony’s Cherry Berry Rainbow Helicopter, if anyone recalls Poor Cherry Berry.
The pilot tried to appease our qualms by explaining he flies this route 140 times a week and wind-speeds were not yet near the levels at which he doesn’t feel safe flying. This verbiage had an inverse affect on me because it told me three things 1) the chopper has been used and abused atop of being old af – who knows when it was last serviced or if a bolt will fly off at any moment; 2) the pilot may be overly confident, which in my life experience is very dangerous as it leads to a lax attitude towards protocol and inattentiveness due to repetitive motions; 3) Where I feel safe and where he feels safe are two vastly different subjective emotions so this last part meant nothing to me and I thus felt like punching him in the back of the head. But I didn’t want him passing out so I let it slide. Additionally, my imagination started acting up; I calculated that even a medium sized bird flying into our chopper would be capable of taking us down, or at the very least smashing through the tiny glass barrier between us and sky. I also deducted that unlike a plane, which offers a small chance of survival by gliding to relative safety should engines fail, a chopper drops like a ball and chain in the event of any malfunctions whatsoever.
So there we were, getting thrusted every which way between the edges of Earth and The Abyss, while Mother Nature was seemingly laughing at the insignificant specs in the sky that we were as I sobbed internally for our lives. I was too petrified to actually let out any tears. That nauseating drop-turbulence feeling of a bad plane landing was amplified by the fact that the chopper seemed to have been guided by the wind, and the pilot was simply trying to adjust to get a handle of it the whole time. It would jar and jolt heavily in all directions, in one instance headed for a nosedive, the next to a side crash into oblivion.
I honestly have never feared for my life except on the occasion of this long and ardous 7 minutes of terror, since skydiving feels like you’re flying and things are moving too fast for you to even really process it in your brain. Adrenaline typically kicks in, but not when sitting still feeling like you’re having a near death experience. I will end my story now as even thoughout this traumatic recollection I’ve been alternating between states of panicky hot flashes and eerily calm cold sweats. Something changed in me, and I don’t even think im being dramatic.
Moral of the story: Don’t insist on flying in storms whilst in a micro-chopper, particularly if it look like it weighs less than most cars!