Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  Once pilots had been taught to fly, they were trained to spray crops and put to work. Helicop-Air had won contracts in northern France to spray pesticides on cereals. It always seemed to me to be a lot of effort for little return. We were competing with tractors carrying eighty-foot spraying booms, which kept prices down, and it was dangerous and fatiguing work for helicopter pilots. There was a lot of grumbling from neighbouring farmers about spray blowing onto their land, and sometimes you could only apply dry insecticides – dust – for forty-five minutes in the morning before the wind got up. I always started off a contract, establishing the procedures and showing the pilots how it should be done, and our safety record was good. When the job was finished, the helicopters would be loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven to the next contract.

  Henry Boris had somehow landed a contract to spray the North East Polders – the vast tracts of land the Dutch were reclaiming from the Zuyder Zee – with a liquid chemical agent that helped to neutralise the salt, put nourishment in the soil and make the land productive for farming. It called for immensely accurate, very low flying, two or three feet above the ground, but it was relatively safe work because the land was flat and there were no trees or fences to catch a boom. A pilot could fly a five-mile strip before turning, but after the first hour the tediousness of it could catch him out. I date my ambivalence to crop spraying from these times; there never seemed to be a big enough return for the risk.

  Boris also won a contract with some of the big orange growers in Algeria, and as usual I went to get the job started. The DDT powder that was being applied used to blow everywhere, and it was normal practice to fly with the doors off to reduce weight. On one run across an endless vista of orange groves I was overcome by the powder swirling in the cockpit. I began seeing two rows of trees diverging where previously there had been only one, and fortunately had the presence of mind to plonk the Hiller dizzily down on a track before I passed out. The crew came running over, dragged me out and laid me in the mud, and somebody switched off the engine. Thereafter I ensured that pilots always wore masks when they flew. The chemical we were using was made by a Swiss company called Geigy, and it was applied strictly in compliance with Geigy’s recommendations. None of us really knew what was going on; at the end of the day our clothes were impregnated with this chemical dust, but we were pioneering a market with a new product, and crop spraying was the only way pilots could build up flying time on helicopters. One was always flying a couple of feet from disaster, and it called for exceptional levels of concentration and skill. Later, at Bristow Helicopters I found that many of my best pilots had cut their teeth as crop dusters.

  My next job was spraying the tsetse fly on a Ministry of Health contract Boris had won in Dakar. This is one of the jobs I’m proud to look back on because sleeping sickness was an absolute curse in those places, blinding and killing men, women and children in vast numbers, and the vector was of course the tsetse fly. The pilots had to be inoculated against every disease under the sun, and would fly up the river beds with the spray boom operating on one side only, discharging a powerful insecticide a couple of feet above the palm trees in which the flies bred. Then we would turn around and spray the trees down the other bank. We were flying at 40 mph a hundred feet off the ground, operating permanently in the ‘dead man’s curve’ where a helicopter is too low and slow to be able to land safely in the event of an engine failure. It was absolutely foolish to be doing it day after day – something was bound to go wrong. You wouldn’t get anybody to do it now, but back then we were pioneer fliers, keeping the company going. It was also felt that trying to eradicate this disease was important work, so the risk was made to seem acceptable.

  The Hiller 360A had a 165 hp six-cylinder Franklin engine mounted upright so the gearbox sat on top of the engine and the main rotor shaft followed the line of the crankshaft. The engine was suspended between two ‘A’ frames, each of which had bolts at the apex to hold the engine in place. There were big rubber bushes in each attachment point and stubbers at the base of the engine to restrict engine movement. The helicopter had an azimuth stick – cyclic – running directly from the rotor hub over the pilot’s head and down in front of him, with a big brass ring on the end that could be screwed up and down as a simple trimming device. On one flight, just as I was in a critical position with the boom over the trees there was a bang, one side of the engine dropped onto the stubbers and a violent vibration threatened to shake the machine to bits. The azimuth stick flailed wildly around the cockpit – how it didn’t spread my brains all over the Sahara I’ll never know – and with the engine and gearbox whirling around I had no idea of what was happening, other than being acutely aware that if I didn’t get the helicopter down immediately I was finished. I managed to keep a grip on the azimuth stick, dumped the collective and found myself rocking furiously on the sand, by happenstance alone the right way up. I cut the engine, the rocking slowly subsided and I got out to find one of the bolts holding the engine at the top of the ‘A’ frame had sheared clean through.

  I was a long way from anywhere, and none of the maintenance crew supporting the operation knew exactly where I was – the tsetse fly run covered a huge area. I didn’t have a spare main engine bolt with me, and there was nothing else in the helicopter that would suffice. The natives lived in kraals of mud and thatch and there were a few close by, but I held out little hope of finding anything there with which to repair the broken engine mount. As chance would have it, my eye fell on a coil of baling wire outside one of the huts. A small amount of local currency changed hands and it belonged to me. I wound it around the top of the ‘A’ frame and through the bolt-hole in the side of the engine several times, weaving a figure of eight, then torqued it up tight like a tourniquet with a piece of wood. Cautiously I started the engine, and would you believe it, you’d hardly know the bolt had sheared. In the hover, the vibration was only a little above normal. I nursed the Hiller gently into a climb and set course for home, alert every second for a sudden whiplash of the azimuth stick and constantly looking out for emergency landing sites. Half an hour later I was in Dakar, smoking a welcome cheroot and feeling pretty damned pleased with myself.

  Of course, you didn’t have to go to Africa to give the helicopter a chance to kill you. Henry Boris had lined up a series of stunts to popularise the helicopter and generate cash. One of these stunts had me flying around the French countryside handing out free woollen socks for the manufacturer Laine de Penguin. Part of the contract involved a circus high-wire act, a brave couple who did gymnastics on a trapeze slung under the helicopter while I flew up and down the Seine in Paris. In the summer the act went out across the country, drawing a crowd for a mobile shop that sold gimcracks and, of course, woollen socks. I flew with a stuntman called Valentine, whose act was to leap from the helicopter wearing ‘wings’ in the form of a cape-like cloak stiffened with battens, and glide to the ground to the applause of an amazed crowd. It certainly amazed me how he got away with it. He was a small chap, almost like a jockey, but I thought he was fearless to the point of insanity. During a display at a big air show at Vichy I dropped him from 2,000 feet over the town and he missed his target, gliding instead into a tree in the zoo, from which he had to be rescued by keepers who corralled the animals with pitchforks. It came as no surprise to me when I heard that Valentine had passed away after his battens failed and his cloak folded up, and he gave the crowd one last sensational display on the way out. Luckily I wasn’t flying him at the time. I had my own close call at the Vichy display when I lifted the high-wire chap off the back of a flatbed truck that was speeding down the runway. He climbed the ladder and got into the helicopter, after which I landed in front of the crowd to allow him to get out. At that point, a mechanic was supposed to undo the bolts attaching the ladder to the helicopter on the port side. As arranged, I got the thumbs up from the marshaller in front of the helicopter, so off I went on the short flight to the parking area. Unfortunately the mechanic had undone the nuts
but left the ladder hanging by the bolts. I could see neither him nor the ladder, and as I made a 45-degree turn to the left the ladder slapped against a flagpole, flicked up and tangled around the tail rotor transmission shaft, which broke in two. The nose of the helicopter made a lurch to the right. I cut off the engine and applied collective pitch, and at the same moment the aircraft hit the ground with great force, shattering the Perspex windscreen, bending the tail boom and driving the engine down into the fuel tank below. Fearing that the helicopter would catch fire and explode I got out with great speed, but found I was uninjured except for my left thumb – something had hit it and very soon the nail turned black. The machine was written off, Henry Boris fired the mechanic, and I smoked another cheroot and tried not to think about it too much.

  The Hiller 360A was a forgiving aircraft as long as you didn’t ask too much of it. I used to demonstrate it for potential buyers, and great helicopter pilots like John Fay, Jock Cameron and Cierva’s chief pilot Alan Marsh came to Paris to test-fly it with me – Marsh was later killed along with Jeep Cable when the Cierva Air Horse crashed near Southampton in 1950. They were all impressed by the way the Hiller could be flown hands-off and how you could turn it simply by leaning in the direction you wanted to go. But to Henry Boris’s chagrin, none of them were impressed enough to place an order.

  Henry had contacts in French Indo-China who reported that a puppet prince called Emperor Bao Dai was interested in buying a helicopter with funds provided by the French government. Bao Dai had three palaces where the helicopter could land, he was politically in good favour with the French national government, and no importation difficulties could be foreseen. Henry instructed me to go to Indo-China to see if I could do a deal. He obtained a visa for me in record time and gave me a ticket for an Air France DC-6 flight to Saigon, where first class accommodation had been arranged at the Continental Hotel.

  The morning after I arrived I was collected in a chauffeur driven car and delivered to the entrance to one of Bao Dai’s palaces, where I was to make a presentation, including slides and a short film with commentary as I felt appropriate, to the prince and a group of his acolytes. It was soon clear to me, however, that the story of the French government putting up the money was far-fetched, and I telephoned Henry Boris in Paris to tell him the bad news.

  ‘Forget it and come back,’ he yelled down the crackling long distance phone line.

  ‘Okay – wire me the air fare,’ I yelled back.

  ‘I gave you a return ticket!’ Boris said.

  This was not the case. ‘It was a one-way ticket,’ I shouted. ‘Send me some money.’

  Henry thought I was trying to chisel him for price of the fare. ‘You have it already,’ he screamed. ‘I’m not sending you any more.’

  I was tired and hot and disinclined to play games. ‘Are you calling me a liar? Send me the money now or I quit!’

  ‘You don’t quit,’ shouted Boris. ‘You’re fired!’

  And he slammed down the phone. I walked out onto the street in Saigon with no job, no air ticket and no money. I called at the British Embassy, where the staff helpfully contacted my mother and had her wire some cash. I’ve always been a supporter of British Consulates, Embassies and trade offices in foreign parts and have invariably found them helpful and useful, and I don’t understand those people who dismiss them as a waste of time. Often over the years they have come through for me.

  Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon was jointly controlled by the French military and the local civil authorities, with the military having the final say. The French were fighting a murderous, dirty war against the Vietminh in Indo-China, relying heavily on Foreign Legion forces made up largely of German mercenaries, and it was clear to me they would benefit from having five or six Hiller 360As fitted out in a rescue role for medical evacuation of wounded from the battlefield. I arranged to make my slide and film presentation to senior Armée de l’Air officers, but they wanted to see a helicopter perform under the local climatic conditions. How could I get hold of a machine?

  While working in Paris I had come to know Bill Vincent, the man whose finance had helped Stanley Hiller get started, and in desperation I now placed a phone call to Palo Alto in California to speak to him. Bill was vice president of Hiller, a straight-talking guy who handled the production side of the business while Stanley did the engineering and the inventing. I believe Bill actually bankrolled a lot of Hiller’s 360 production line – his grandfather had made an enormous fortune by buying up land in downtown San Francisco soon after the devastating 1906 earthquake when many people thought the city would never be rebuilt and were prepared to sign away their property deeds for a few dollars. How wrong they were. Bill was an Irish-American with the accent on the ‘Irish’, and on the outbreak of the Second World War he had joined the Irish Guards and soon had a commission. During the landings at Salerno he helped to secure the beachhead with a company of Irish Guards despite suffering a bullet wound that left a deep groove in his head just above his left ear, and for his outstanding bravery he won the Military Cross. After the war he spent some time in Paris, and it was there that I had met him.

  When the telephone call finally came through I battled the crackling line with as much volume as I could muster. I was in Saigon, I told him, and I believed I had a rock-solid prospect for helicopter sales if only he’d let me have one to demonstrate on a ‘sale or return’ basis. I’ve always prided myself on being a good salesman, but the best sales job I ever did in my life was persuading Bill Vincent to crate up a Hiller 360A helicopter and airfreight it from California to Saigon at Hiller’s expense, on my word that it would open up the market for many more sales. Bill agreed to throw in some spares and make me official Hiller Agent for Indo-China, which he confirmed in writing. I was destined to buy a lot of helicopters from Bill Vincent down the years, but that first one represented an act of faith on his part, which greatly impressed me.

  The crate arrived at Tan Son Nhat care of the Commanding Officer of the Escadrˆlle de Normandie – Normandy Squadron – in whose hangar the Hiller was to be assembled with the help of a sergeant chef mechanic who was a very good tradesman in airframes and engines but had no knowledge whatsoever of helicopters. In the corner of a big hangar there was a workbench with an aluminium worktop and a vice. Using the beautiful red box of Snap-on tools recommended by Hiller I began to assemble the 360A. The most important item was the folder of instruction documents from Hiller, leading me step-by-step through the assembly process. It was very much spanner in one hand and book in the other. Finding a steel mandrel and knife edges on which to balance the main rotor blades was time-consuming but ultimately successful. To help me balance the blades, the Normandy Squadron made a metal frame to carry the canvas panel that the coloured tips of the main rotor blades would strike as they revolved. The object of this exercise was to adjust the height of the blades so that there was little or no separation between each blade strike on the canvas, thus reducing vibration in flight. In return for the Commanding Officer’s hospitality, the least I could do was to invite him to join me on the first test flight. He was fascinated by the helicopter’s manoeuvrability and ability to hover out of ground effect, even in the hot and humid conditions in Saigon, and he offered to give me any help I needed to further the cause of providing such machines to French forces.

  The news that the Hiller 360A was available for demonstration flights spread quickly among the senior army and air force officers, and they queued up for the opportunity to fly. Despite their enthusiasm it seemed to me that I was not doing something right, because I could never extract the promise of an order even after I’d made detailed presentations on operations and costs. At one point I thought it would be best to cut my losses and get back to Europe as quickly as possible to sell the 360 while the market demand for it there was strong. My desperation was such that I even went back to Bao Dai and flew him around several of his palaces, but he wouldn’t commit to buy either. Saigon was not a congenial place in which
to live and work. Explosions were a regular occurrence as the Vietminh and the French settled their differences. Most of the street cafes in Saigon were surrounded by fine chicken wire to deter attackers who would ride past on bicycles and throw grenades into the lunchtime crowds. I quickly learned to follow the French officers’ example of keeping one eye on the road during a meal, and hitting the ground with my head under a chair when danger threatened.

  One morning at the airfield I had just completed a routine ground run on the 360 when the CO of the Normandy Squadron came running out in a state of agitation. There was a firefight going on about sixty miles out of Saigon and several gravely wounded men from a company of the 7th Parachute Brigade desperately needed to be got to hospital. Could I rescue them with my helicopter? My first reaction was to refuse. I told him I had come to Indo-China to sell helicopters, not to fight another war. Emotionally he reminded me that he’d been a pilot in one of the Free French squadrons flying Spitfires out of England during the Second World War, and said it was my turn now to help him as he had helped my country. I really didn’t want to do this, and walked to my Jeep shaking my head. As I got into the Jeep he made a final plea: ‘I’ll give you an escort of two F8F Bearcats, there and back.’ It was very hard to say no. Cursing my weakness I went with him to the crew operations room where he showed me the lie of the land. The battle was going on in the middle of a peninsula five miles long and a mile and a half wide, with the Vietminh entrenched on the mainland side. Wasn’t there a gunboat to take them men off, I asked. No, it would take more than twelve hours to get there, by which time the wounded would be dead. The CO offered me a parachute, a 9-mm pistol, six hand grenades and what looked like a commando knife. I shrugged my shoulders, and a few minutes later I was fully kitted out and airborne en route to the middle of a gunfight.

  With five miles to run to the evacuation point I was at 4,000 feet and planning my descent when the two Bearcats came screaming past me, close in on either side, creating tremendous turbulence, which almost caused me to lose control of the helicopter. They raced ahead and opened fire on the Vietminh positions with rockets and napalm bombs. I became keenly aware of the amount of small arms fire that was being directed at me by the Vietminh, so I put the 360A into a steep near-vertical spin, trying to make it look like the helicopter had been shot down. To avoid gunfire I landed about 150 yards from where a white cross had been set out for me, which was a stroke of luck because before I left an incoming mortar shell blew the white markers to pieces. Before the rotors had stopped turning a junior officer and sergeant from the 7th Parachute Brigade were explaining that they had eight seriously wounded men who needed to be in hospital pretty damned quickly.