The Jim Creek Miracle

Not all stories are embellished for a laugh. Some are 100 percent true.

When I think of a US Naval station or base, I think of battleships, destroyers and aircraft carriers moored on long piers. Jeeps shuttle sailors up and down streets lined with large warehouses filled with supplies while tugs escort submarines into the harbor. The Jim Creek Naval Radio Station shattered that stereotype.

When I was in my twenties I worked for my dad as a helicopter pilot specializing in crop dusting.

One day in August he said to me, “I need for you to go do some spraying at the Jim Creek Naval Radio Station.”

“Where is that?” I asked.

“In the hills behind Arlington, Washington.”

“In the hills?”

“In the hills,” he said.

And so, I got my crew and we headed for the hills.

Jim Creek Naval Radio Station went into operation in 1953. It can transmit radio messages to our naval submarine fleet anywhere in the world.  200’ towers sit on the top of Wheeler Mountain and Blue Mountain. Between the two mountains is a 3000’ valley and strung between the two mountains and their towers, like a giant spider web, is the antenna.  The maximum output of the transmitter is 1.2 million watts compared to an average 100,000-watt commercial radio station. You can check it out on the web because it’s not a military secret.

As I flew the helicopter onto the grounds, I was totally amazed. There was a bowling alley, a store, many cabins and houses as well as the offices. The grounds were immaculate like a park and yet, there was no one around. It is run 24 hours a day by 21 civilians. They keep it nice for the big brass that need some R&R and want to go stream fishing.

On the slopes of the mountains lie 360 miles of copper cable which forms the grounding grid for the antenna. It is necessary to keep the brush down on the hillsides for the ground wires to work and that is what I was called in to spray. Wheeler Mountain is sprayed one year and Blue the next and they keep alternating.

I remember that looking at this antenna between the two mountains was like staring at a gigantic 3000’ spider web and I knew that if I got too close, I would be the fly in the web.

My job was to fly back and forth across the slope spraying the brush. The problem was that as I flew toward the antenna cables, I had no depth perception and didn’t really know how close I was to the cables. So, to show me when to stop, they laid fluorescent orange sheets of plywood on the slope as a “Do Not Cross” warning. Orange plywood on a green slope means nothing to a colorblind man.

My tank trucks were driven to the top of the mountain we were to spray. There was a gravel landing area cut into the side of the slope to create a place for me to land. The hillside next to the logging road went up very steeply with cedar trees along the edge which hung limbs over the road. I remember there being a steel sign on a steel post at the edge of the pad overlooking the valley 3000 feet below. It was warning hunters that this was government land and to stay away. We left the trucks on the mountain to start spraying in the calm of the next morning.

The FH-1100 helicopter I was flying is a four passenger aircraft with a single engine turbine. Unlike a gas reciprocal engine where you manually adjust the throttle, on a turbine when you put pitch in the rotors, the engine adjusts automatically for the power needed. When taking off in any aircraft, you try to point into the wind. The headwind helps aircraft to climb in the shortest amount of distance. In a helicopter, taking off with a tailwind makes the aircraft hard to control, takes more power and distance to begin flying.

Early the next morning the crew from the base and my crew met to start spraying. The tank trucks with chemical were on the mountain landing. The cool air from the highlands was flowing downhill into the valley. I flew up from the valley and landed coming over the top of the cliff and I set down facing the hillside in front of me. The tail of the helicopter hung out over the valley. When the crew had pumped in 60 gallons of chemical, I lifted up into a hover, backed out over the cliff and pointed the helicopter up the valley into the breeze and would start to fly. This went on for about two hours.

Then, as the sun heated the valley, the warm air started flowing up from the valley below. I did not recognize the 180 degree change in the wind.

Flying back onto the pad to reload chemical, I noticed four men from the base standing there watching. My two crewmen loaded the 60 gallons of chemical. I picked the helicopter up into a hover and backed out over the cliff but this time as I turned the helicopter up valley there was no head wind. Now the wind was coming up from the valley below giving me a tailwind.

The heavy helicopter did not want to fly and it started to drop backwards over the landing and off the cliff. Instinctively, I pulled pitch into the blades to grab more air for lift. The engine should have reacted by increasing power, but the sudden pulling of the collective, which increased the pitch of the blades, instead caused the engine to flame out.

Immediately, the bells and whistles in the cabin sounded. The lights on the console started flashing.

In normal straight and level flight at altitude, in the event of an engine failure the pilot would autorotate the helicopter to the ground. Autorotation means that you flatten the pitch of the main rotor blades, point the nose of the helicopter at a steep angle towards a landing spot on the ground. The steep angle and the flat pitched blades keep the RPMs of the blades up and you ride to the ground like in a parachute. But this was not the situation; I had zero airspeed in a hover going backwards off a cliff with the main rotor losing precious RPMs. The tail of the helicopter was dropping down and I could see the men on the pad running toward me as now the whole helicopter had dropped backwards off the cliff.

And then, the helicopter stopped falling. It just hung there in the air at that odd angle. Then, supernaturally, it started rising and it came up over the cliff edge, back towards the landing pad…. with the engine not running.

Normally in an engine-out situation, because the engine is not spinning the tail rotor, the body of the helicopter will start to spin in the opposite direction of the rotor blades. The helicopter flew straight and level. I remember seeing all the men on the landing pad scattering to get out of the way. I could see that I was coming down next to the steel hunting sign. The edge of the sign did cut through the skin of the tail.

I immediately dropped the landing skids onto the ground but because I had forward speed, I was sliding straight ahead towards the hillside at the road. There was nothing I could do but ride it as it slid. I waited for the main rotor blades to hit the hillside or the cedar limbs hanging over the road, but the helicopter slid to a stop. When everything was shut off and secured, I got out of the cockpit and walked to the front of the blades which were still rotating. The tips of the blades were one foot from the hillside and one foot below the cedar limbs, missing both. As the men came back together, they all just shook their heads because what they had seen was unexplainable.

Our shop was called, and wheels were brought to roll the helicopter out from under the cedar limbs back to the pad. Later, a patch was made of duct tape to cover the slice from the sign and the helicopter was airworthy again.

So now, how do you explain that? I felt like one of James Bond’s gin and vodka martinis — “shaken but not stirred.”

A bumble bee in theory should not be able to fly. A helicopter which has lost its engine and is going backwards off a cliff in theory should not be able to return to its landing pad. The normal scenario would have the helicopter lying 3000’ below in the valley as a crumpled pile of aluminum and plexiglass with a dead pilot inside.

My explanation is that it was the hand of God that caught the helicopter and lifted it back up to the landing pad. As I told the crew on the landing pad, ”It helps to be a Christian.”

Though I haven’t thought much about that flight 40 years ago, I do remember all of God’s miracles that have brought me to where I am today and I think to myself, “I’m glad that God’s not finished with me yet.”

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