Speaker 1: Disclaimer.
Speaker 2: We'd like to know before the start of this interview
Speaker 2: that the opinions about to be expressed by the guest
Speaker 2: of tonight's Getting Salty Experience podcast are that of the
Speaker 2: guest and do not directly or necessarily reflect the views
Speaker 2: of the host of the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Speaker 3: You're listening to the Getting Salty Experience Podcast.
Speaker 4: Hello, and a whole week ago.
Speaker 5: Let me tell you something mean, Pete, Welcome to another episode.
Speaker 4: Laughing well, I'll come to another episode of Getting Salty Experience.
Speaker 4: His brothers frozen? Is he frozen? He's frozen?
Speaker 6: Man.
Speaker 7: Let me tell you I'm joined by my brother be
Speaker 7: Pete Oakland and Jimmy's Super pissy Pants Snucker.
Speaker 5: Episode of the Getting Salty spears the only podcast brother
Speaker 5: that brings the firehouse kitchen table to you.
Speaker 7: Brother there is thanks for having me.
Speaker 8: Oh my god, you guys are out of your mind.
Speaker 5: That is something by Getting Salty Dogga.
Speaker 4: Maniacs, Craig bro Bro, drink.
Speaker 7: Your titos, subscribing and go to jobs.
Speaker 4: Brothers. Brother, this is the chief of past.
Speaker 9: He'll be missed, Yes, he will be.
Speaker 4: I'm talking about Pete.
Speaker 9: No, let me tell you something I'll tell you.
Speaker 4: Welcome, welcome back on. So how is your little cruise?
Speaker 9: That's good, it's good. I have no complaints. So actually
Speaker 9: I shouldn't say the's no complaints. The uh, this is
Speaker 9: probably not a good time of year to get on
Speaker 9: those big boats. The kids, a ton of kids, and
Speaker 9: the parents don't control them. There's no personal space. They
Speaker 9: it was just a little overwhelming. But yeah, you thought
Speaker 9: about it a few times. I'll tell you.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Any we got a guy on tonight.
Speaker 8: Man, because he's still in the back, he said, you
Speaker 8: put it.
Speaker 9: He hold up his sign right now, says I'm.
Speaker 4: Out these guys professionals.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but you know, it's actually it's funny. This is
Speaker 9: the first for us. If you guys don't realize that
Speaker 9: what's that that we've actually told them with somebody that
Speaker 9: from an aviation person, an aviation this is a first
Speaker 9: for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Man, So he's he's we're honoring him.
Speaker 5: He rode the backstep first in l A. He was
Speaker 5: going to jobs like it's nobody's business. So he's, uh,
Speaker 5: he come a full circle.
Speaker 9: You know what I mean. It's like a circle.
Speaker 4: That's a like a circle, a circle.
Speaker 5: You gotta play our you know what, I was gonna
Speaker 5: tell my the weed story with my mother, but we
Speaker 5: will save that for next week.
Speaker 8: Crushed the chief that much. He already had to sit
Speaker 8: through that last thing.
Speaker 9: My god, he's like, oh my, he's gonna calling Chief
Speaker 9: Downy right now. It's like what you get me into?
Speaker 4: Broh got him Dave Downey.
Speaker 9: Chief down Yeah, he's uh from that. He hooked me
Speaker 9: up with him.
Speaker 4: Oh this is your guest.
Speaker 9: Yeah, this is my guy. This is my guys, my guy.
Speaker 4: Thank you for contributing. I appreciate it.
Speaker 9: I'm trying. It's like a contributed for a first for us,
Speaker 9: like a little that's good.
Speaker 8: I've been looking forward to it.
Speaker 10: Actually, yeah, God's playing the commercials so you can get
Speaker 10: him on all right.
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Speaker 8: All right, coming to the stage, l A f D.
Speaker 8: Chief Pilot, Scott Davidson, geta.
Speaker 9: Get away for get away from.
Speaker 5: Than for having me before we dive into the early
Speaker 5: days of Scott Davison.
Speaker 4: We gotta get the patriotic, do it, sir?
Speaker 9: Here we go.
Speaker 3: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States
Speaker 3: of America and to the Republic, for which it stands,
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Speaker 9: For all.
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Speaker 5: All right, chief, let's go get the way back machine.
Speaker 5: I'm too far back. You're not that old. Where'd you
Speaker 5: grow up? Where you're from? Give us a little family
Speaker 5: life in the early days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm I'm from the West Coast, so I'm on
Speaker 1: the other side of the world from you, guys. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Los Angeles in one of the suburbs,
Speaker 1: and I actually got on the fire department young. I
Speaker 1: was only twenty years old, so very fortunate. I was
Speaker 1: involved in the Explorer program. I did volunteer work everything
Speaker 1: as degree in fire science, you know, a typical path
Speaker 1: at that time. And I got on the fire department
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety. He's a firefighter and.
Speaker 4: Aman.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, man, that the story's funny, but it's shit's short.
Speaker 1: My dad was an LA County sheriff. He came out
Speaker 1: of Vietnam. Both my grandparents were in World War Two.
Speaker 1: But I was in high school and around seventeen eighteen,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what I was going to do
Speaker 1: and taking SATs. All my friends were going to colleges,
Speaker 1: and I told my dad, hey, I'm thinking about going
Speaker 1: to some of these colleges that my friends are going to,
Speaker 1: a preparatory loyal and merrymount of expensive schools. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know, I was living out of my my my expectations,
Speaker 1: and his weren't in alignment. And he said, hey, that's good.
Speaker 1: You're going to make it on your own. And I panicked,
Speaker 1: and I had some buddies that were going to this
Speaker 1: explorer thing when uh and I I kind of jumped
Speaker 1: on board and and uh so getting on the fire
Speaker 1: department was kind of a last ditch effort for me.
Speaker 1: I was panicking, I needed survival, I needed a paycheck.
Speaker 1: And so I never fantasized. I never looked at fire
Speaker 1: trucks and fantasized about being a fireman, And man, was
Speaker 1: it the best decision ever did So once I decided,
Speaker 1: you know that's what I wanted, I went full tilt
Speaker 1: and got on young and and then the you know,
Speaker 1: the thing about La City Fire Department is and you know,
Speaker 1: you say in the interview getting in there, the opportunity
Speaker 1: is unlimited to what you can do, and I'm kind
Speaker 1: of proof. I was just a snot notice kid and
Speaker 1: I just wanted to be a rookie. I want to
Speaker 1: be successful. And that was a time that was different,
Speaker 1: right we you know, the bloods and the crips weren't
Speaker 1: putting out rap music, they weren't killing each other, and
Speaker 1: we were going to those incidents and every day it
Speaker 1: was putting a bulletproof vests on and going into neighborhoods
Speaker 1: where it was just bad stuff happening, structure fires every day.
Speaker 9: It was.
Speaker 1: It was crazy, and I was young. I was twenty
Speaker 1: years old, and being exposed to all that was just
Speaker 1: you know, overwhelming. So, you know, on my normal trajectory,
Speaker 1: I spent the first five or six years the fireman
Speaker 1: decided I wanted to start to promote. You know, a
Speaker 1: normal process in the La City Fire Department is you
Speaker 1: promote the engineer your apparatus operator first, then Captain one,
Speaker 1: Captain two, Battanian, chief, on and on. So I took
Speaker 1: that normal first step, became an engineer. I drove the
Speaker 1: fire engine. I was successful with six years on and
Speaker 1: then after that I got a probation and La City
Speaker 1: Fire Department had fire helicopters. We are, you know, in
Speaker 1: the area business.
Speaker 5: To she let's go back a little while you're a fineman.
Speaker 5: I don't really understand the whole thing with La County.
Speaker 5: Is that a whole bunch of counties put together in
Speaker 5: one fire department.
Speaker 4: How does that work?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good question. So La City sits within
Speaker 1: La County. La City is about four hundred square miles.
Speaker 1: La County has four thousand square miles. So La City
Speaker 1: has everything in a metropolitan like New York has high
Speaker 1: rise structure, fires, brush, everything, all the money sits in
Speaker 1: La City. La County is predominantly urban interface, you know,
Speaker 1: large properties, wildland, desert. Yet La County Fire Department La
Speaker 1: City Fire Department have about the same size fire department,
Speaker 1: same size personnel personnel, about the same amount of fire stations, helicopters.
Speaker 1: We are almost parallels. Just La County covers a much
Speaker 1: larger region around us, and then we have tons of
Speaker 1: small little municipalities and pities around us that have fire
Speaker 1: departments that we do mutual aid with. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things coming out of nine to eleven
Speaker 1: was it was a big learning curve for all of us.
Speaker 1: But what we learned how to do well was to
Speaker 1: integrate with our partnering agencies, automatic aid, mutual aid, and
Speaker 1: basically just as simple as being able to talk to
Speaker 1: each other, you know, having radio frequencies and you know,
Speaker 1: just like on the fire engine, same thing in the helicopter.
Speaker 1: You know, Hurricane Katrina, the helicopters they had whiteboards up
Speaker 1: and they were scribbling notes to each other while they're
Speaker 1: flying next to each other and say, hey, go to
Speaker 1: this frequency. I mean, it was just silly. So you know,
Speaker 1: everything has evolved. If anything good came out of nine
Speaker 1: to eleven for public safety and Katrina was our where
Speaker 1: our ability to communicate before and incident command. All of
Speaker 1: those things are just at light speed, the evolutions. But yeah,
Speaker 1: My first twelve years was in the Fire Service before
Speaker 1: I got into to the flying and Air operation from.
Speaker 4: You know, it was it was we was signed to
Speaker 4: an engine? What engine were you assigned to?
Speaker 1: When everything? I worked all over the city. So in
Speaker 1: my twelve years, you know, as a rookie, you rotate
Speaker 1: through three different houses and three different parts of the city.
Speaker 1: For me, south central Hollywood and one of the the
Speaker 1: San Fernanda Valley, which is one of the urban areas
Speaker 1: or one of the more you know, affluent areas. And
Speaker 1: then after that I had promoted, I had transferred to
Speaker 1: several different stations. You spend a year or two in
Speaker 1: each station to get experience because the city and the
Speaker 1: one hundred and four stations are so diverse. You know,
Speaker 1: you go from one station that's got high rise to
Speaker 1: another one Beverly Hills high rent district. Extreme the type
Speaker 1: that you you know, you possibly are mindful when you
Speaker 1: walk in somebody's house on an ems around about your
Speaker 1: bootprints because all are put.
Speaker 9: The little yeah, all the.
Speaker 11: I can't even imagine that, you know, I'm sure in Manhattan,
Speaker 11: but in Manhattan, like you got listen, You're you're going
Speaker 11: to a ten million dollar houses, right.
Speaker 1: You're I mean we we clean our underneath our fire engines.
Speaker 1: So I was an engineer for six years. We go
Speaker 1: under our fire engines and clean them with my gloves
Speaker 1: and rags for.
Speaker 9: As long you guys still have wooden ladders.
Speaker 8: Right yeah, yeah, Oh my god.
Speaker 9: I do. I do have a quick question before we
Speaker 9: get too bus When you were driving, did your rig
Speaker 9: get narrow at the fancy you drove or any garbage
Speaker 9: cans in the way?
Speaker 8: I don't know, shot bro, just like starbage cans.
Speaker 4: Hey cheep.
Speaker 11: Let me ask you if we've had we've had one
Speaker 11: of two guys from la on. If I remember, just
Speaker 11: refresh my memory if you remember, like what how the
Speaker 11: turnout is? Like how many what companies you get? If
Speaker 11: for each type of if you had a regular fire
Speaker 11: and in an area, do you get in like two
Speaker 11: trucks and three engines or something like that.
Speaker 8: I don't you remember anything.
Speaker 1: Well, So I've been out of the fire department, out
Speaker 1: of the ground resource side of the fire department for
Speaker 1: twenty five years. I've been in your operations. But I
Speaker 1: can tell you we are we are manpower heavy. We
Speaker 1: overwhelm incidents. Yeah, I mean when I was downtown. I
Speaker 1: was a task force downtown. I spent a couple of
Speaker 1: years and we would literally the alarm would come in
Speaker 1: and within three minutes, three task forces would be nosed
Speaker 1: to those of the incident. That's thirty firefighters and nine
Speaker 1: apparatus within minutes, and you're literally running each other over
Speaker 1: with ladders to get to wherever you wanted to go.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in La City, I would say, our tactical advantage
Speaker 1: is just we overwhelmed the incident with man man.
Speaker 4: That's what we do too.
Speaker 1: You beat it out with Yeah, we beat it.
Speaker 11: That's exactly what we always say. How many guys can
Speaker 11: you fit in? If you were in the squad, which
Speaker 11: me and Kevin, how many guys can you fit in.
Speaker 8: A fire department? At least five?
Speaker 11: So Mike Thomas is asking if the chief was were
Speaker 11: you working for the ninety two riots.
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was a rookie. So I got out in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety so ninety two I only had two years
Speaker 1: on and uh, you know one of my one of
Speaker 1: my good buddies, who was a classmate, was in South
Speaker 1: Central when after you know, the Rodney King extent, and
Speaker 1: they just started to burn down everything, and and the
Speaker 1: police at that time, you know, you had LAPDN La
Speaker 1: County Sheriff, two totally different ideologies at that time and
Speaker 1: how they managed. But for whatever reason, nothing was happening
Speaker 1: and they, you know, everybody was going nuts and burning everything.
Speaker 1: And my good buddy was and we both you know,
Speaker 1: we had two years on, so we're rookies. We're just
Speaker 1: riding the behind the apparress operator as the top man,
Speaker 1: and there we were getting shot at. The fire department
Speaker 1: was getting shot at. But in this instance, the driver
Speaker 1: got shot in the neck. They're going down the road
Speaker 1: and my buddy Tom Carroll jumps over and grabs the
Speaker 1: steering wheel.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile the driver's got his old as neck with a
Speaker 1: bullet in it, and he survived, thank god. But it
Speaker 1: was an unbelievable time for us, you know, the fire department,
Speaker 1: you know we have we don't know how to not
Speaker 1: get it done. You know, in aviation I learned later
Speaker 1: and we'll probably talk about on the show. It's something
Speaker 1: called mission I itis And for the fire department, en
Speaker 1: firemen in general, all of us, when I say mission iis,
Speaker 1: it means there's no solution other than get the job done.
Speaker 1: I don't care what you do. Strap three ladders together,
Speaker 1: be it here, will almost kill yourself and we'll give
Speaker 1: you an a word for it. But the challenge when
Speaker 1: I've taken that into aviation, or you take that mentality
Speaker 1: into a world of aviation professional aviation, where the NTSB
Speaker 1: and the FA will show up at your accident sight.
Speaker 1: It's a horrible difference. It's it's like the Grand Canyon
Speaker 1: of ideology differences. But you know, so the first part
Speaker 1: of my career was building that fireman heart, you know, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we kick down doors and we take names,
Speaker 1: and that's all I knew. And that's where you learn
Speaker 1: your creativity, right. You know, you're only giving a few
Speaker 1: tools as a rookie. They give you just the minimum
Speaker 1: to stay alive and to learn how to be told
Speaker 1: what to do and that you're stupid and worthless. And
Speaker 1: then you you evolve by this missionitis. You know, you
Speaker 1: evolve by just getting or done and you just I
Speaker 1: mean a lot of it's on adrenaline.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 1: After the fact, you come down and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can't believe I just did what we did. But
Speaker 1: I was very blessed and fortunately the fire department was
Speaker 1: kind of an accident in that I was young and
Speaker 1: didn't know what I wanted and you know, couldn't afford
Speaker 1: to go to college, so I went to junior college.
Speaker 11: That's a pretty reoccurring theme on the show. We've had
Speaker 11: two hundred and fifty six guests interviews, and I would
Speaker 11: say that that's a reoccurring You know, either either you
Speaker 11: came from you know, your dad, your granddad was was
Speaker 11: a fireman, and you followed in the footsteps. But if
Speaker 11: it wasn't, it's almost always an accident. It's just you know,
Speaker 11: your next door neighbor, you know, guy six doors down
Speaker 11: just happens to give you an application that day your
Speaker 11: friend's going down and he don't make it, but you do,
Speaker 11: and you know, just like that, right, yeah it happened,
Speaker 11: you didn't make it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah, got the lot of you hit the.
Speaker 1: Lotto of life, right yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. You
Speaker 1: know you I can't tell you how many guys I've
Speaker 1: heard say, oh, I tried to get on a fire
Speaker 1: department or And the reality is everybody that really puts
Speaker 1: their back into it gets a job. And when I
Speaker 1: mean puts their back in there, you you make a
Speaker 1: decision and you commit, and it's everything. It's it's the
Speaker 1: college classes, it's the volunteer work, it's whatever you have
Speaker 1: to do to know. And it may take years. It
Speaker 1: may take four or five, six, seven years to get on.
Speaker 1: But I think the average age of a rookie in
Speaker 1: La City when I got on the Fire department was
Speaker 1: thirty one years old and I was twenty. So my
Speaker 1: classmates were guys that had already gone through a career
Speaker 1: and realized they were unhappy, and you know, they you know,
Speaker 1: ship years. So yeah, we for me to be as
Speaker 1: young as I was to be, you know, to know
Speaker 1: what I want to do when after be successful. And
Speaker 1: at that time it was tough. I was competing at
Speaker 1: the written test with fifty thousand candidates fifty thousand for
Speaker 1: you know, maybe three hundred jobs, so and I was
Speaker 1: just young and the little guys next.
Speaker 9: Look I to show for a test one hundred.
Speaker 8: I just heard.
Speaker 11: I just found out that just today I was playing
Speaker 11: with a bunch of guys d the FDNY and he's
Speaker 11: at Provy School and he says they only got like
Speaker 11: eight thousand guys to take the Like I know, I said,
Speaker 11: I think we were thirty five thousand or something.
Speaker 9: It's a it's a national crisis. And funny you say
Speaker 9: that we just did interviews today. I just did him
Speaker 9: so this morning and second round. I was lucky. I
Speaker 9: had forty guy. Remember forty something people applied. Really it
Speaker 9: was a short posting, but forty people applied. They're just
Speaker 9: the jobs are becoming scarce people and qualified people at
Speaker 9: the same time. Never met, never thinking about people that
Speaker 9: aren't even applying. It's getting good qualified people at the
Speaker 9: same time. But that's the whole other subject.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys are you know, you may
Speaker 1: be subject. You guys are going to be behind us
Speaker 1: political correctness for La City. You know, back when I
Speaker 1: was a rookie, hazing and harassment were out of control
Speaker 1: and then we ran into i mean multiple back to
Speaker 1: back really bad lawsuits from stuff that was just you know,
Speaker 1: of course inappropriate. So the evolution Forirly City and professionalism
Speaker 1: and getting away from the hazy harassment, which is hard
Speaker 1: when you put ten dudes together and most.
Speaker 9: Of the.
Speaker 8: Come on the process. I understand that guys went overboard,
Speaker 8: but it is part of the process.
Speaker 4: Sitting around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I'll tell you it's you know, gone to
Speaker 1: the point where it's just for us at least the hiring.
Speaker 1: The last I heard was just it's a lottery system,
Speaker 1: and they, you know, once you meet all the prerequisites
Speaker 1: that the city Council and the government office have established,
Speaker 1: it's it's no longer trying to get the most qualified candidate,
Speaker 1: regardless of what their background is, race, religion, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: So you know, I think everybody's facing the same thing
Speaker 1: because when I know, when I got in the fire department,
Speaker 1: they were going after the best qualified candidates. It was
Speaker 1: a different fire department then. And you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know what's going to come of it and how we
Speaker 1: come out the back end on this, but yeah, absertions, yeah,
Speaker 1: we were, we faced a lot of that stuff. I
Speaker 1: think we're, for whatever reason, we're a lightning rod out here.
Speaker 1: You know, we're we're a little bit ahead of the
Speaker 1: curb and all the lawsuits and the and it's not
Speaker 1: just find anything that was gone when I was a rookie.
Speaker 1: I don't think there was a day that I was dry.
Speaker 1: I got bucketed three three times, three times a day,
Speaker 1: and they'd wait until it changed my clothes and then
Speaker 1: I thought, I'll just walk around and got clothes and
Speaker 1: I'll teach them, and they bucket me again. So it was,
Speaker 1: you know, the hazing harassment. It wasn't because they like you.
Speaker 1: You know, they say, ah, they like you if they're
Speaker 1: hazing it. Think, yeah, guys are mean.
Speaker 9: Together.
Speaker 8: And I want to Coops.
Speaker 11: I just want to I want to, Well, we touched
Speaker 11: on it a little bit, but I want to get
Speaker 11: a little more deeper in that. What do you remember
Speaker 11: as far as like how long the ninety two riots lasted?
Speaker 8: Do you remember any specific jobs?
Speaker 11: I mean, you only had two years on the job,
Speaker 11: Like some of that stuff has to stick out to you, like.
Speaker 8: Holy Machael man, this is a crazy job.
Speaker 11: Am I gonna Has anything ever come you know, close
Speaker 11: to those days?
Speaker 8: Like later on in your career.
Speaker 1: I tell you, I wish you know again. I got
Speaker 1: so many stories and they usually trigger on We'll say
Speaker 1: something like, hey remember when you when was the first
Speaker 1: time you went on a stabbing or I will tell
Speaker 1: you that I've seen and done so much stuff I
Speaker 1: can't even I can't even believe it was in my lifetime.
Speaker 1: The the amount that we're exposed to his first responders
Speaker 1: out there is just it's staggering and the diversity of it.
Speaker 1: Like I said, our communities are a mish mash of
Speaker 1: a little bit of everything. And you know, the riots
Speaker 1: were kind of a horrific time for us. And and
Speaker 1: and again, I'm a young white guy with short, flat
Speaker 1: top hair, and I'm on an engine with three other
Speaker 1: white guys and we're going into South Central and and'll,
Speaker 1: I have no free disposition or no prejudice, and all
Speaker 1: we want to do is help. And all I got
Speaker 1: is little ms box and some gloves on. And they still,
Speaker 1: you know, immediately hate you. And you know, I can't
Speaker 1: tell you how many times I've been in the incidents
Speaker 1: around gang members or you know, with a gang member
Speaker 1: that shot and their buddies are screaming and yelling, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna fucking kill you if you don't get to take
Speaker 1: care of my buddy. It's just it was such an
Speaker 1: unbelievable time. And you know, we've again, we've never seen
Speaker 1: anything like it. Again. We see a lot of civil
Speaker 1: unrest and a lot of you know, little things, but
Speaker 1: that was, you know, that was that was pretty big. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So and again, I'm twenty two years old and it's
Speaker 1: just you just can't even fathom, you know, the.
Speaker 8: Things I forget. Do you remember was it weeks?
Speaker 11: No?
Speaker 1: No, no, it was a day. So really the worst
Speaker 1: of the riots went on for the first twenty four
Speaker 1: hours after the verdict. Remember the verdicts were the officers,
Speaker 1: and once they found them innocent, that's when all hell
Speaker 1: broke loose. And you know, the six officers you know
Speaker 1: that were on that video beating Rodney came were found innocent,
Speaker 1: which you know, now those are different times, but that's
Speaker 1: when everything broke loose. And then Reginald Any that was
Speaker 1: the day remember.
Speaker 8: That they started the kid out of the truck, right
Speaker 8: that was the day.
Speaker 1: That I had started, you know, and Reginald Denny was
Speaker 1: down in South Central an intersection and police weren't responding.
Speaker 1: Everybody was in tactical alert. The fire department was still responding.
Speaker 1: That's where we ended up. A lot of our crews
Speaker 1: got in trouble. My friends, you know, had the experience
Speaker 1: of the driver getting shot. We had, you know, another
Speaker 1: experience where a task force you know guys game members
Speaker 1: came up and just riddled the apparatus with bullets and
Speaker 1: told them to walk away and they all ten of
Speaker 1: them walked away from their engines while they're in the
Speaker 1: middle of putting a fire out at a drugstore and market.
Speaker 1: So the I think the only thing that's kept the
Speaker 1: fire department safe is that, you know, we don't have guns.
Speaker 1: We're not technically a threat, you know, and they may
Speaker 1: not like us because of whatever whatever our background is,
Speaker 1: but you know, I don't think we ever were seen
Speaker 1: as a threat, and that's what made us comfortable to
Speaker 1: go in and engage. And again remember mission itis. I mean,
Speaker 1: we there was no you put a bullet of bulletproof
Speaker 1: vests on. In the early part of my career, you
Speaker 1: wear a bulletproo vest under your turnout coat on almost everything,
Speaker 1: you know, depending on what incident you went to. So
Speaker 1: you know, on top of all the stuff we wear
Speaker 1: in the turnout coat to bring the apparatus, the high
Speaker 1: rise hose pack, you know, put a bulletproof vests on
Speaker 1: underneath that thing. Man, Yeah, it starts adding up, but
Speaker 1: it's also yeah, you think about the psychology of that.
Speaker 1: You're like, what am in the wrong job? I got
Speaker 1: to wear a bulletroof vest. I'm gonna maybe get shot.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to put a fire out. So we've
Speaker 1: we've definitely seen a lot, been to a lot of
Speaker 1: tragic events, a lot of just you know, over the years.
Speaker 8: Did you live in the city when you were working
Speaker 8: in the city.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so at the time, all LA f D members
Speaker 1: had to live in the city when you got hired.
Speaker 1: And then it wasn't until I had two or three
Speaker 1: years on that I purchased the house in one of
Speaker 1: the suburbs just outside of the city. But I was
Speaker 1: born and raised in La City. So I grew up
Speaker 1: in La City, and at least for the first couple
Speaker 1: of years of rookie I was, I was in La City.
Speaker 5: How did the movie stars treat you guys when you
Speaker 5: worked in those areas?
Speaker 1: Phenomenal? Yeah, phenomenal and just like I'm sure everywhere out
Speaker 1: by you guys, you know, the public was phenomenal. They
Speaker 1: loved us. We just got treated so well. And sometimes
Speaker 1: that make sure, you know, you got to keep your
Speaker 1: egg egoing check. You think, you start thinking real highly
Speaker 1: of yourself. And remember, you know, what was that silly movie.
Speaker 8: When you Gotti sitting in the face you know, yeah.
Speaker 1: Well I think you know. Backdraft came out in nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: which you know that didn't do any harm to most
Speaker 1: of us.
Speaker 8: Yeah, right, you roll the halls now.
Speaker 9: So we have.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we didn't take advantage, but.
Speaker 4: All right, uh he did.
Speaker 1: All right, yeah, yeah it was uh you were married yet, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm now I've been I have a girlfriend that I've
Speaker 1: been with for probably if we've been together for going
Speaker 1: on thirteen years, fourteen years.
Speaker 9: Nice.
Speaker 4: You know that you were saying that reaping the.
Speaker 8: Well I say all the time.
Speaker 11: Chief like, I don't know how Manhattan is another You know,
Speaker 11: the city's five burrows, right, so Brooklyn and Bronx and
Speaker 11: Queens Staten Island. But if we call the city Manhattan, right,
Speaker 11: it's not the five Borrows, even though they're all part
Speaker 11: of the city. But if you worked in the city
Speaker 11: in Manhattan, I mean every run you go on, I
Speaker 11: mean I could never work there just because of the
Speaker 11: traffic and you never get anywhere type of thing. But
Speaker 11: I mean, and forget it, those guys, if you were
Speaker 11: single out there, you could just it's every day and
Speaker 11: then after work, if you was hanging out in between
Speaker 11: tours or something like that, forget about it.
Speaker 8: It's just crazy.
Speaker 5: I had a ritual when I was on sixty seventh
Speaker 5: and less. Get up early, brush the teeth, fixed the hair,
Speaker 5: get a little chair out, open the door and sit
Speaker 5: there with a chair to be like this, good morning,
Speaker 5: good morning, good morning, good morning.
Speaker 4: It was insane, bro.
Speaker 1: Yeah, listen, we've all spent many hours on the apron
Speaker 1: right washing the rigs, and you know, trust me, it
Speaker 1: happens on the West coast, East coast washing the rigs.
Speaker 9: We're all, hey, no, what was.
Speaker 4: That picture of the fuego that you put up there? Guns?
Speaker 8: Which was the random picture?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 9: That was from the riots. While you guys were chatting,
Speaker 9: that was It was just one of the riot pics.
Speaker 9: I thought that was Scott of the motorcycle but shirtless Scott,
Speaker 9: a little warmer, we showed up in the battalion truck.
Speaker 9: He just took it for a right anyway, Well, you
Speaker 9: guys were chatting, Have.
Speaker 4: We have we got any Scott's pictures?
Speaker 9: No? No, no yet No, just their helicopter stuff. So
Speaker 9: when we get but I have a before we get
Speaker 9: to the helicopter stuff, I have a video that I
Speaker 9: want to share that's gonna lead us into uh getting
Speaker 9: body pumped up for the hell, you wan't do it
Speaker 9: over there. I don't want to cut us off.
Speaker 4: There is anything else about the.
Speaker 5: Right in the back step that you want to talk
Speaker 5: about before we transitioned to helicopter days.
Speaker 1: No, you know, I I I got it. I mean
Speaker 1: I could have stayed a fireman and in the field
Speaker 1: and had an amazing career, and just I was in
Speaker 1: love with being a fireman. I was in love with
Speaker 1: being an engineer. You know, it was I didn't think
Speaker 1: it could get any better. Of course, you know, flying
Speaker 1: in my career that transitioned into the air operations section
Speaker 1: was spectacular, but I really was in love with being
Speaker 1: a fireman. And it started out just because I was
Speaker 1: panicked and I needed a job. I needed a paycheck,
Speaker 1: and man, I just kept pinching myself. It was even
Speaker 1: my friends to this day, I look back and everybody
Speaker 1: I can recommend it to was It was an amazing brotherhood,
Speaker 1: an amazing experience, amazing culture, amazing everything that we learn
Speaker 1: as firemen, you know, the values we have, the friendships
Speaker 1: they stay forever. You know, I have thirty five plus years.
Speaker 1: All of my best friends are still firemen that I've
Speaker 1: known for thirty plus years. These you know, loyalty and
Speaker 1: all of these things that we get, and then you know,
Speaker 1: you know, the big sacrifice, which is being willing to
Speaker 1: you know, standing up the way of a bullet for
Speaker 1: your friends. All of those things came from the fire service.
Speaker 1: And whether it's in LAFD or you know, a New
Speaker 1: York fire department and everything in between, it's the same.
Speaker 1: It's we all have that unique thing in common. And
Speaker 1: some of my funest stories are when I was you know, adope,
Speaker 1: little fireman and the stuff we used to see. But
Speaker 1: oh my god, it gets a lot more flamboyant with
Speaker 1: the helicopters.
Speaker 9: It's next year, but that's a shape to it.
Speaker 11: Wait, just before we segue into into the helicopter video,
Speaker 11: were you already flying like as a fireman? Were you
Speaker 11: doing something on the side, Like how did that even?
Speaker 11: Were you doing any practice at all at this point?
Speaker 1: It's a good question. I learned how to fly fixed
Speaker 1: wing when I was a kid. I was fifteen and
Speaker 1: a half years old, and I learned how to start flying.
Speaker 1: And you know, my dad, I just wanted a dirt bike,
Speaker 1: that's all I wanted. My dad said, oh, buy a
Speaker 1: dirt bike if you learned how to fly. It was
Speaker 1: a summer and a summer of my I was fifteen
Speaker 1: years old, going on sixteen, and so I learned how
Speaker 1: to fly, and all I wanted was a dirt bike.
Speaker 1: I didn't I didn't care about flying. So I flew,
Speaker 1: you know, finished that and then gave it up. Didn't
Speaker 1: fly again. And it wasn't until I was twenty six
Speaker 1: years old, and after I promoted engineer. I was looking
Speaker 1: up at a picture. I was in the front office
Speaker 1: of our fire station. I just got off probation as
Speaker 1: an engineer, and I'm like, fuck, what am I going
Speaker 1: to do now? And I looked up and I saw
Speaker 1: the picture of our LAFD helicopters. I'm like, son of
Speaker 1: a gun, that's what I want to do. And man,
Speaker 1: it just right there in that moment, everything pivoted and
Speaker 1: it was all air aircraft. I went out and got
Speaker 1: all my licenses, private license, commercial flight instructor. I got
Speaker 1: a job as a flight instructor to local flight school.
Speaker 1: I started building hours for us to get into operations.
Speaker 1: As a competitive process and for me specifically, I competed
Speaker 1: with thirteen other pilots for one job, and I was
Speaker 1: fortunate enough to get the job when I was when
Speaker 1: I got into operations. But yeah, so I actually it
Speaker 1: was whether that flying fixed wing helped or not, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure it Definitely, I had enough of a taste
Speaker 1: of it that I knew, but i'd never flown a
Speaker 1: helicopter before, you know, before I decided what to do,
Speaker 1: and uh, yeah, it's it's the same story with everything
Speaker 1: in the fire service. You know, whether it's the swift
Speaker 1: water rescue, urban search and rescue, whether you want to
Speaker 1: be the fire chief. Everything is attainable, and it's just
Speaker 1: about the discipline of putting your mind to it and
Speaker 1: you know, putting the throttle down and going.
Speaker 9: So yeah, for sure, All right, Stewart John, which one
Speaker 9: do you want? Do you think is best? The airborne
Speaker 9: one or the little advertisement one you sent me for
Speaker 9: it's a couple of minutes.
Speaker 1: I'll leave it up to you. Yeah, I sent you
Speaker 1: some good videos, some good stuff, so I'll leave it
Speaker 1: up to you.
Speaker 9: All right, We'll do the The airb one is a
Speaker 9: little bit longer, but we'll do that. We'll do that one, uh,
Speaker 9: and then we'll get the other one. What what do
Speaker 9: you got?
Speaker 1: Oh? I was gonna say the Airborne task Force. One
Speaker 1: is specific to our high Rise Rescue and Airborne Task Force.
Speaker 1: The other one is more of a capture little everything.
Speaker 9: We'll do the other one.
Speaker 1: Yeah Instagrammy gotcha instagrammy. Yeah we're you know, we're from
Speaker 1: Hollywood at here.
Speaker 9: Yeah, here we go. Can you hear it?
Speaker 6: Okay?
Speaker 12: Yeah said.
Speaker 6: If you can say?
Speaker 4: Canst stupid?
Speaker 3: You want whatever?
Speaker 6: They believe you that the Judd somebot. Nobody needs to tell.
Speaker 3: You what is rap all wrong?
Speaker 6: They don't need to tell you.
Speaker 3: Well you too that world.
Speaker 12: Welcome to about world. Well to my world.
Speaker 6: You can't say, can't just do what they want?
Speaker 12: What they have?
Speaker 4: They hipers and.
Speaker 6: He needs to tell you what is wrath are wrong?
Speaker 6: They don't need to tell you anything. Welcome to my world.
Speaker 8: I am cool.
Speaker 9: See, I'll tell you what. Even for down here in
Speaker 9: South Florida where the helicopter comes in, it's still a
Speaker 9: fan favorite. Fly people to the hospital. Well for the county.
Speaker 8: We don't have one, right yeah, aviation, the cops have one.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but we have to borrow this.
Speaker 8: We don't borrow ship they do it.
Speaker 4: Dude, you just came to me. Brad Pitt with a
Speaker 4: beard right there, Brook at them.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, look at that.
Speaker 11: Looks like who's the guy from Gladiator? He looks like
Speaker 11: the guy from Gladiator.
Speaker 1: Nice, you keep it, girlfriend. I went to South Korea
Speaker 1: last month. I spoke at a conference for a bunch
Speaker 1: of the search and rescue pilots and firefighting pilots down there,
Speaker 1: and of course they don't speak English. I don't speak
Speaker 1: in East South Korean or Japanese. And we went out to
Speaker 1: dinner afterwards, and of course drinking is our culture. Everything
Speaker 1: is rice wine. I mean, I don't think anybody had anything,
Speaker 1: but and I'm a lightweight one drinking, you can take
Speaker 1: advantage of me. And man, they're about six string sin
Speaker 1: in this one little South Korean guy walks up and
Speaker 1: he with hearts in his eyes. He stare at me
Speaker 1: and he goes, you look just like Brad Pitt. And
Speaker 1: I look at the host and I'm like, I gotta
Speaker 1: get out of here because if this is not going well.
Speaker 9: Are you sure you didn't go? What?
Speaker 4: Did we just become best friends?
Speaker 12: Yep?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 9: What did we just become best friends? Yep?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: He wanted to love you long time?
Speaker 11: Like when I was watching that video, what's it like
Speaker 11: when you're coming in and you see like that whole
Speaker 11: mountain on fire, and like that's got to be a
Speaker 11: pretty good like that's just like turning the corner, like
Speaker 11: like seeing fire out the window.
Speaker 8: Is that the same type of rush you get?
Speaker 1: It's exact, it's exact.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 1: We and and for us brush fire seasons four or
Speaker 1: five months. I mean we we go on average thousand
Speaker 1: brush fires a year, sometimes five six brush fires that day.
Speaker 1: And we get into the busy season. We're hustling, you know,
Speaker 1: three hundred hoist rescues a year. We're just we're hustling.
Speaker 8: And every hundred what's a hoys stresscue? Three hundred rescues
Speaker 8: you mean picking people up out of Holy.
Speaker 1: Ship YEP, day and night. So we're twenty four to seven.
Speaker 1: We have five pilots on duty around the clock. We're
Speaker 1: one of the few agencies US in Early County Fire
Speaker 1: Department that run our operations, our air operations around the
Speaker 1: clock twenty four to seven. That's for aerial firefighting and
Speaker 1: hoisting and air ambulance. You know, we do a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff. VIP transport, we work with LAPD, We transport
Speaker 1: the SWAT teams and the bomb squad guys. So we
Speaker 1: can move a lot of people really fast, and we
Speaker 1: respond rapidly. Our biggest tactical advantage is how quick we
Speaker 1: respond and keep the fire small. And you're just you're right,
Speaker 1: lou man. It's every fire is exciting. There's nothing like it.
Speaker 1: The challenge is you're running at redline. You're at the
Speaker 1: maximum capability. What the helicopter can do, what you can do,
Speaker 1: and the a fleet, you know, make a difference. We
Speaker 1: work and integrate with the ground crews. So our objective
Speaker 1: is to keep them moving, you know, anchor, flank and pinch,
Speaker 1: which is a tactic everybody knows from brush fire fighting.
Speaker 1: Our job is to stay out in front of those
Speaker 1: crews and then keep them safe. And it is just
Speaker 1: you know, it's most of the time you feel like
Speaker 1: a kid. It's a video game. But there's ends of
Speaker 1: thousands of hours that lead to that skill to either.
Speaker 1: But when you're in the seat, oh my god. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you know, those the helicopters are twenty million dollars. It's
Speaker 1: just like there are Their complexity is unparalleled. You know,
Speaker 1: it takes an airline transport pilot rating to fly these aircraft.
Speaker 1: And we were talking about earlier in the show. That
Speaker 1: is the highest rating the FA gives. It's the same
Speaker 1: rating that all the captains that fly all the commercial
Speaker 1: airlines United Delta American have, So our pilots are of
Speaker 1: that caliber and quality in knowing how to operate the
Speaker 1: aircraft safely underneath the FA's rules and regulations. And then
Speaker 1: we take the aircraft and we use it in a
Speaker 1: way that the manufacturer's never intended.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: We go into these hostile environments and try to do
Speaker 1: good and we don't ever get in the smoke or
Speaker 1: heat because aerodynamically heat is bad. Blades do not fly
Speaker 1: in hot air. So what you're seeing is us working
Speaker 1: the perimeters of the fire. We're tactically staying out in
Speaker 1: good air and trying to get our water into the
Speaker 1: bad air. But it's just and and just knowing that
Speaker 1: you're at the limit of what the helicopter could do
Speaker 1: max gross weight air speed, you're low in altitude, you
Speaker 1: got fifty mili hour winds, up and down drafts, you're
Speaker 1: getting thrown all over. And then to pull the trigger
Speaker 1: at the right time and release.
Speaker 11: Your I'm just gonna say cheap, that's all that comes
Speaker 11: with timing, Like I see these guys, right, they're coming
Speaker 11: and coming and coming, and all of a sudden the
Speaker 11: water comes out, and you know that's all timing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's and it's a you know, it's proficiency
Speaker 1: the guys. When you see all the guys out here,
Speaker 1: and that's I think the West Coast has, you know,
Speaker 1: the predominantly the most amount of aerial firefighting helicopters. You say,
Speaker 1: these guys are good, they're profession and whether it's US
Speaker 1: or at like County Fire or Venture County, Orange County,
Speaker 1: We've we've got quite a few agencies that have aerial
Speaker 1: firefighting helicopters, and you know, they're all experts at what
Speaker 1: they do and they take it very serious, very professional.
Speaker 1: But you know, later in the show we'll kind of
Speaker 1: get into the challenges. You know, like we were talking
Speaker 1: about the mission itis. You know, firemen just get the
Speaker 1: job done with do anything. But that's the worst thing
Speaker 1: for the NTSB and FAA. You know, they they just
Speaker 1: don't understand that ideology. So you know, how how we
Speaker 1: marry those two things and stay safe and and you know,
Speaker 1: minimize risk. And that's what everything's been for us at
Speaker 1: our operations. It's really it's walking that fine line. And
Speaker 1: at our operations what we learned to say, and you
Speaker 1: guys all have to cover your ears. We learn how
Speaker 1: to say no, there are some things we can't do,
Speaker 1: not because I can't be a hero and go fly
Speaker 1: the helicopter in harms way to you know, do a
Speaker 1: hero drop. It's that no means there's limits that if
Speaker 1: we go beyond and something happens, the liability goes off
Speaker 1: the chart. The NTSBN FA show up and they start
Speaker 1: asking questions and what the FAA determines that is. There's
Speaker 1: a term for it. It's called careless and reckless. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine as a fireman doing your job and saving
Speaker 1: some lady on the fifth balcony with four ladders dropped together,
Speaker 1: and after it was all done, they brought you up
Speaker 1: on charges for careless.
Speaker 8: And reckless for God's sakes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the f is a whole different you know,
Speaker 1: it's a whole different beast. And we operate in government aviation.
Speaker 1: We're unregulated. And for you guys to understand what that means,
Speaker 1: everybody that flies in the federal air space, all civilian
Speaker 1: aviation is regulated by the FA. There's a federal aviation regulations,
Speaker 1: but government, police and fire across America are unregulated. The
Speaker 1: FAA actually has a term for it. They leave us
Speaker 1: to self regulate. We were talking about dopey immateur fireman
Speaker 1: and a fire station. Leave it up to us to
Speaker 1: self regulars.
Speaker 11: Keep up a remote somewhere. How how are we going
Speaker 11: to get twenty nine dollars helicopter.
Speaker 9: It's like, give me one.
Speaker 1: Hundred million dollars in helicopters and tell me to self regulate.
Speaker 1: So for us, you know, we have you know, it's
Speaker 1: been an amazing jury. We had a fatality crash under
Speaker 1: your ambulance back in nineteen ninety eight, so it was
Speaker 1: right before I got to your operations. A tail roader
Speaker 1: came off of the helicopter we were transporting a twelve
Speaker 1: year old girl, and we had several of our crew
Speaker 1: members perished in the accident. The twelve year old girl
Speaker 1: perish in the accident, and we had quite a few
Speaker 1: audits that were done at the time, and they kind
Speaker 1: of gave us a roadmap that you guys are you know,
Speaker 1: mission itis. You guys have no policies and procedures, and
Speaker 1: it took a bit for us to get traction, And
Speaker 1: when I became the chiepile on in twenty eleven, we
Speaker 1: really went back and focused on our business model and said,
Speaker 1: you know, in aviation they say it's not if it's
Speaker 1: when you're gonna have an accident. You know, it's inevitable.
Speaker 1: We're in a high risk environment where people are gonna
Speaker 1: get hurt. But there's no reason we can't act professional
Speaker 1: and be doing it the way the FA expects us
Speaker 1: to do it. So if something does happen and they
Speaker 1: come and investigate, they can go they were doing it
Speaker 1: right and they were professional and everything we would expect,
Speaker 1: and things just went wrong. So yeah, for me and
Speaker 1: my you know when I pivoted and got into helicopters
Speaker 1: because it was just fun and it really evolved into
Speaker 1: something more. And you know the fire department in general,
Speaker 1: being a fireman gives us all purpose. Right, we have
Speaker 1: this just unbelievable sense of purpose.
Speaker 9: We do good.
Speaker 1: We do good for people. There's nothing like looking somebody
Speaker 1: in the eye after you've done something for them, and
Speaker 1: there's just there's there's this feedback you get and you're like, man,
Speaker 1: I did that. That feels really good. And that's my
Speaker 1: whole career and like you guys, I'm sure it's your career,
Speaker 1: but the helicopters has just magnified it. I mean I've
Speaker 1: been and then being the chief pilot, it gave me
Speaker 1: the opportunity to really kind of lead the ship and
Speaker 1: take my team with me and say, hey, we're going
Speaker 1: to set the standard. This is this is where we
Speaker 1: need to be and still still do a good job
Speaker 1: and still effect change. But yeah, so's it's been an
Speaker 1: amazing journey.
Speaker 11: You do take me through you're quarters and you get
Speaker 11: a call for a forest fire or whatever. You get
Speaker 11: a fire, you know, now what happens? Like do you
Speaker 11: wait for somebody to confirm that? Does it get confirmed?
Speaker 11: And then you go like how does that work?
Speaker 1: That's a good question. The air operations for La City
Speaker 1: Fire Department were all based at Vani's airports, so all
Speaker 1: seven helicopters, all the pilots are based at one fire station.
Speaker 1: When the when the dispatch comes in Metro our dispatch
Speaker 1: center basically wrings us down and goes bupa up above
Speaker 1: brush fire bubba bup a hoist train craft you railment.
Speaker 1: If it's an incident, we get dispatched. No different than
Speaker 1: a fire engine and the city does the way that
Speaker 1: logistically it goes down the process. We in the mornings
Speaker 1: when we come on duty, just like every fire station
Speaker 1: you do do you do relief, you change over, you
Speaker 1: check your rigs. We pre flight our aircraft. The crew
Speaker 1: summer crew are assigned to specific aircraft. The air ambulance crew,
Speaker 1: the Hoyst crew is assigned to one specific helicopter with
Speaker 1: a pilot for that day. That's part of our risk assessment,
Speaker 1: you know, managing like a mission like this comes in
Speaker 1: one of the line pilots will be up for and
Speaker 1: let's say it's a transport of LAPD SWAT team. And
Speaker 1: what you see here in the picture is we practice
Speaker 1: not just for transporting at a normal heliport, but we
Speaker 1: practice for taking off and landing off site where there
Speaker 1: is no landing. So you see the pilot hovering on
Speaker 1: one wheel there and loading the hes hovering. So the
Speaker 1: whole intent is rooftop insertion or landing somewhere where it
Speaker 1: cannot support the way to the helicopter. The helicopter's weigh
Speaker 1: just over fifteen thousand pounds, So we practice and train
Speaker 1: as if so these SWAT teams, all of LAPD's members
Speaker 1: are certified and they do an annual training and we
Speaker 1: do you know, we integrate in with their training, so
Speaker 1: we do pick up and drop offs as part of
Speaker 1: their exercise and you know, getting them comfortable getting into
Speaker 1: and out of the aircraft. What you see is the
Speaker 1: AW one thirty nine. It's made by Leonardo. It's we
Speaker 1: have five. It's our primary mission aircraft. It's what we
Speaker 1: hoist and firefight and air ambulance. Each aircraft can do everything,
Speaker 1: but we'll configure them different for the day. You know,
Speaker 1: if it's brush season, all of them have water tanks on.
Speaker 1: If it's the winter time, we'll take the water tanks off.
Speaker 1: They've all got the hoists on and they're set up
Speaker 1: for our ambulance and they can all be quickly converted
Speaker 1: to take two critical patients at one time. We've had
Speaker 1: mass casualty incidents. And for you guys, remember it was
Speaker 1: about two thousand and eight. Two trains ran into each
Speaker 1: other out here in California. A guy, the conductor was
Speaker 1: texting a twelve year old boy. He ran into a
Speaker 1: metro rail that was full of passing. So in this
Speaker 1: day and age, the fact that two trains can run
Speaker 1: into each other is staggering. But it was within about
Speaker 1: three miles of our base, so we were the first.
Speaker 1: We were the first the second an engine had just
Speaker 1: arrived ahead of us. We landed next to the train crash,
Speaker 1: and I was a copilot that day. I got out.
Speaker 1: It was just like you see in these ems videos,
Speaker 1: you know, the training videos were the walking wounded. I
Speaker 1: got out and I took our bolt cutters and I
Speaker 1: cut through the fence and I opened up the fence
Speaker 1: and there was a melee of trains upside down and
Speaker 1: half burning, and people laying on the train, laying on
Speaker 1: the tracks, walking around, bloody, disoriented. It was the most
Speaker 1: surreal scene. And like we were talking about earlier, you know,
Speaker 1: about the riots. I mean, I have so many of
Speaker 1: these memories that in that moment I can picture everything.
Speaker 1: It's it's like it happened yesterday. But we we basically
Speaker 1: launch when Metro dispatches us to circle around. Sorry lou
Speaker 1: along way, You're you're good. The We're just like a
Speaker 1: normal fire station. So we launch no different. So we're
Speaker 1: tactically ready. We do all our pre flighting, we brief
Speaker 1: we do risk assessments. The crews know their jobs, they
Speaker 1: know their positions. It's just like a fire engine. We
Speaker 1: just wait for the run to come in and in
Speaker 1: the middle of the day we're out doing training. We
Speaker 1: take our crews in the aircraft, so we're on the
Speaker 1: air like you guys probably I don't know what you
Speaker 1: call it, but you're out doing your business of the day, shopping,
Speaker 1: doing that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: Yeah, none, that does building.
Speaker 4: How many guys are on that crew? You have a pilot,
Speaker 4: a co pilot.
Speaker 1: And yep, we have. So there's five pilots full time
Speaker 1: and two flight paramedics assigned air operations twenty four to seven,
Speaker 1: and a second crew of paramedics that is on a
Speaker 1: rescue that comes over to fill in behind. So we
Speaker 1: in all we have four paramedics flight paramedics working per
Speaker 1: day with five pilots. And then for me, I was
Speaker 1: in a special duty position, you know, working the desk
Speaker 1: Monday through Friday and then just filling in doing check
Speaker 1: rides and like we said earlier, filling in for overtime
Speaker 1: over time.
Speaker 8: So when you're picking up water, it's a cable with
Speaker 8: a bucket, is that?
Speaker 9: What?
Speaker 8: How you guys do that with that?
Speaker 1: No, for us, we use water tanks. So if you
Speaker 1: look into the helicopter, we have a four hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty gallon tank attached. And there was reasoning. Yep, if
Speaker 1: you look underneath, they're real underneath that box, that white
Speaker 1: box between the wheels, that's a four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: gallon water tank. And we do that because of the
Speaker 1: urban environment wires. We fight fire date one night, so
Speaker 1: we're yeah, we're in really hostile terrain. Like this is
Speaker 1: a great example, this picture. We look at the homes
Speaker 1: behind and we're down in canyons. We're telephone wires and
Speaker 1: the danger of trying to run a buff a bucket,
Speaker 1: a band they called a Bambi bucket, or a cable
Speaker 1: one hundred right. This allows us tactically to get down
Speaker 1: very close and like we were talking about, insert the
Speaker 1: water and get out. So it gives us really good maneuverability,
Speaker 1: good accuracy. It allows us to make rapid trips. We
Speaker 1: we set up improvised helispots, so we have about twenty
Speaker 1: six there's a perfect perfect picture there. We set up
Speaker 1: these improvised helospots throughout the city. They're all pre identified,
Speaker 1: wellout hose. It only takes a minute to fill the helicopter.
Speaker 11: It's going to ask you that chief, how long does
Speaker 11: it take to refill that yep?
Speaker 1: Two and a half. We're pumping a two and probably
Speaker 1: one hundred psi and a two and a half inch hose,
Speaker 1: so open butt. So we put one hundred four hundred
Speaker 1: fifty gallons into that thing in about a minute and
Speaker 1: we're to go. So the guys that what you see
Speaker 1: in orange there are hell attack they're firefighters. Also, they're certified.
Speaker 1: They're from the fire station right next to us. They
Speaker 1: are indoctrinated and trained and certified in all of our operations.
Speaker 1: So they support us for everything. Every brush fire goes,
Speaker 1: they go with us and they run operations. We do
Speaker 1: hot fueling. Now this picture, you'll see the aircraft's running.
Speaker 1: We're actually taking water on board and we're hot fueling.
Speaker 1: And what that means is we're pumping jed a into
Speaker 1: the side. You can see the hose going up into
Speaker 1: the side there, So we're hot fueling. The aircraft's running,
Speaker 1: filling up with water. All that takes a couple of minutes.
Speaker 1: They unplug and then we're off to the off to
Speaker 1: the races.
Speaker 11: So you guys are like when you're doing these type
Speaker 11: this type of operation, yeah, obviously something like this. Are
Speaker 11: the helicopters talking to each other?
Speaker 8: Are you like? How does that? Absolutely talking to each other?
Speaker 1: And that fire Most of these pictures I gave you
Speaker 1: guys are from the Palisades fires. So this was the
Speaker 1: most recent fire that we had down and kind of
Speaker 1: on the border of Malibu.
Speaker 9: And we have that video too from that fire.
Speaker 1: Right cute, lou I forgot your question.
Speaker 8: Each other?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, talking to each other. So you know,
Speaker 1: everything with the aircraft is very coordinated. It's almost so.
Speaker 1: We have a command and control helicopter. Usually I would
Speaker 1: be in it or one of our lead pilots basically
Speaker 1: running air traffic control and running tactically the helicopters in
Speaker 1: and out of the drop zone, coordinating with the retardant
Speaker 1: dropping planes. The airspace is very controlled. Everybody has an assignment,
Speaker 1: everybody's talking to each other. Everybody knows where they are.
Speaker 1: We set up what we call fence lines and barriers
Speaker 1: so you don't cross over into somebody else's airspace. We
Speaker 1: have traffic patterns coming in, we have common terminology, so
Speaker 1: it is even though it looks chaotic, it is extremely
Speaker 1: disciplined and everybody knows where everybody is, so that you
Speaker 1: don't have that, you know, freak chance of running into
Speaker 1: each other.
Speaker 8: Chief is that.
Speaker 9: The How does that play into the fixed wing craft
Speaker 9: You guys are all on the same page kind of
Speaker 9: the things. I know, obviously a big operation. You have
Speaker 9: just been beside your helicopters. You have to fixed wing aircraft.
Speaker 9: And I've seen some of these guys get some close calls.
Speaker 9: I'm like, oh shit, you know, watching some videos and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we have automatic aid and mutual aid and
Speaker 1: that comes in the form of other agencies that have
Speaker 1: helicopters that come in to meet with us. So Ala
Speaker 1: City in La County Fire Department, helicopters are always working
Speaker 1: with each other. We're always going to each other as fires.
Speaker 1: But when the fire gets a little big and gets
Speaker 1: a little out of control where we can't manage it,
Speaker 1: we start bringing in retard and dropping aircraft. Now that's
Speaker 1: managed by the state or the FEDS US for Service Califire,
Speaker 1: and that's when it gets real expensive. But as far
Speaker 1: as the coordination piece goes, they bring their own management piece.
Speaker 1: It's called Air Attack Air Tactical Group Supervisor who then
Speaker 1: works with HELCO Helicopter Command. Those two controlling agencies are
Speaker 1: the ones they're quarterbacking all of the movement of the
Speaker 1: helicopters in the fixed wing. And typically when a big
Speaker 1: fixed wing like you see these we call them v lats,
Speaker 1: very large air tankers DC tens, these Monster seven we're
Speaker 1: using to drop the card. When they bring one of
Speaker 1: those in, they'll move helicopters from one side of the
Speaker 1: fire to the other side of the fire while the
Speaker 1: seven forty seven is dropping retardant and as soon as
Speaker 1: he's done, the helicopters move back in. So the helicopters
Speaker 1: are really reinforcing the retardant line. Holding the retard line.
Speaker 1: The retardant is how you really control the big fires.
Speaker 1: It's very expensive and you know, the water will suppress
Speaker 1: it for a minute, but the retardant will hold it.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a collaboration between those two. But
Speaker 1: again it's like we mentioned earlier, what we're doing very
Speaker 1: well on the West coast is the automatic aid, mutual aid,
Speaker 1: the collaboration, Yeah, working together. Yeah, So they're they're you know,
Speaker 1: and the fixed wing that are retardant droppers come in
Speaker 1: all shapes and sizes. They're using big commercial jets.
Speaker 8: You know, the guy turn it on a dime, that's
Speaker 8: for sure.
Speaker 1: Don't have utility. But you know most of those pile
Speaker 1: you know, the typical American Airlines pilot isn't trained to
Speaker 1: fly fifty feet off the ground and right. You know,
Speaker 1: they're very disciplined. They do a takeoff and a landing
Speaker 1: and so so these guys there's a DC ten and
Speaker 1: but they found that these big planes can carry a
Speaker 1: lot of retardants, so they can do a lot of good,
Speaker 1: but they can also do a lot of damage. We've
Speaker 1: had a lot of firemen that have been hurt because
Speaker 1: they've been hit by retardant. Some of the bigger helicopters
Speaker 1: up to and including killed.
Speaker 11: You know, I was going to actually ask that that's
Speaker 11: got if they're trying to get close to the fire
Speaker 11: and you're you guys are on the edge there, it's
Speaker 11: got to be really yeah.
Speaker 1: We a couple of years ago we had a really
Speaker 1: bad year. We had a couple of firemen, a captain
Speaker 1: and a couple of guys killed in different incidents. And
Speaker 1: they were byproducts like the water drop hits a tree
Speaker 1: breaks a limb, the limb hits the head or a
Speaker 1: rock gets you know, Jarred Lewis goes down the hill
Speaker 1: and takes out a fireman. So you know that working
Speaker 1: in close proximity is important for us for tactics and strategy.
Speaker 1: But it's something everybody's aware of. A lot is done
Speaker 1: to make sure the management dropping around people is you know,
Speaker 1: managed well.
Speaker 8: But you know what I want to ask you too cheap.
Speaker 11: When I was looking at some of the video, like
Speaker 11: you were saying that you don't There's got to be
Speaker 11: times when you're flying, like where your visibility gets taken
Speaker 11: out by smoke, right, Like, does that happen a lot?
Speaker 11: Or you try and stay out of that most of the.
Speaker 1: Time, Yeah, one hundred percent. So there's two types of
Speaker 1: flying and it doesn't matter about firefighting. It's called visual
Speaker 1: flight rules and instrument flight rules. So visual flight rules
Speaker 1: means you have to maintain visual reference with the ground
Speaker 1: at all times. You can't go in the clouds, you
Speaker 1: can't do smoke, you can't do anything. Instrument flight rules
Speaker 1: allows you to go into the clouds. It's under the
Speaker 1: control of the FAA. Now for firefighting, we absolutely do
Speaker 1: not get into the smoke or clot or heat, and
Speaker 1: mostly because of the products of combustion being dangerous to
Speaker 1: the turbine, engines and the blades, but mostly to the
Speaker 1: pilot because if you can't see anything and you're in
Speaker 1: the smoke, so yeah, no, the answer is no. There
Speaker 1: may be a wisp of smoke, you know, you're into
Speaker 1: that area, and sometimes you get the light smoker it's
Speaker 1: but never to the point where you've lost visibility or
Speaker 1: and we really train our guys to work discipline away
Speaker 1: from the smoke and the heat. You know, how to
Speaker 1: effectively put a twenty million dollars helicopter as close as
Speaker 1: you can to the fire line, drop your water, but
Speaker 1: still leave yourself. We call it an escape route, you know,
Speaker 1: for search and rescue or firefighting pilot, everything is about
Speaker 1: your escape route. Everything is about preparing to lose your
Speaker 1: engine or both engines, or a tail rotor. And we
Speaker 1: send our guys to simulator training every year. We practice
Speaker 1: and train it. We spend probably seventy five percent of
Speaker 1: our resources and flight hours in training a loan and
Speaker 1: preparing for emergencies that will probably never happen. But a
Speaker 1: lot of things can go wrong with these things. Lots
Speaker 1: of redundant systems, but our guys are prepared and trained
Speaker 1: for all of those eventualities. Same thing when we're hoisting,
Speaker 1: you know, we're using quite a bit of the helicopter's
Speaker 1: capability to hoist. And if you lose an engine, mostly
Speaker 1: helicopters cannot sustain flight, which means you've got to do
Speaker 1: something fast and to an including sharing the cable if
Speaker 1: you've got a live body on it, or taking them
Speaker 1: with you, losing a tail rotor. All those things we
Speaker 1: practice inside and out in the simulator. We have these
Speaker 1: huge were called Level D simulators are up on hydraulic rams.
Speaker 1: They are the it's like you're sitting in the actual aircraft.
Speaker 1: They're very expensive, absolutely yep, full visuals. You think you're
Speaker 1: in that you think you're in the real helicopter, and
Speaker 1: the simulator instructor in the back is setting up all
Speaker 1: kinds of scenarios while you're on a mission and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you're engine I mean it really fails.
Speaker 1: You have a fire, you're pulling fire handles, you're you're
Speaker 1: managing a tail rotor failure, you're landing without a tail rotor.
Speaker 1: All of those things have increased safety and especially the
Speaker 1: helicopters community. It's one of the things Kobe Bryant's accident,
Speaker 1: his pilot did not have. He was a very highly
Speaker 1: trained skilled pilot, but didn't have any real simulator training.
Speaker 1: You know that it's possible that accident never would have happened.
Speaker 1: We call it invert and mediological conditions. But he went
Speaker 1: into the clouds and lost control immediately. And that's another
Speaker 1: reason we don't go in the smoke because if you
Speaker 1: go going to smoke, or you go in a cloud
Speaker 1: under visual, you have a high likelihood of not surviving.
Speaker 1: Very quickly. Kobe Bryant's pilot lost control of the aircraft
Speaker 1: within seconds. He was and because you have, you guys,
Speaker 1: a little bit of medical background. You've got your your
Speaker 1: three canals in your ear, the vegetable canals, and there's
Speaker 1: fluid moving around in there. Our stability is based on
Speaker 1: ninety percent visual. We look around and our equiliter is good.
Speaker 1: But if you take your eyes away and you count
Speaker 1: on that fluid in your ears, if I spin you
Speaker 1: in a chair, you guys ever seen that thing where
Speaker 1: you blind? Yeah, and it takes seconds and they eject
Speaker 1: that the chair. So The same thing happens to a
Speaker 1: pilot that gets in the clouds because the aircraft, you know,
Speaker 1: depending on how it moves around get out of trim,
Speaker 1: the fluid moves and it starts your brain stop.
Speaker 11: If they say something like you have to I think
Speaker 11: what happened with John F. Kennedy Jr. Like, like when
Speaker 11: you're flying Horion, right, what But you have to trust
Speaker 11: what you're seeing, even though your mind is telling you
Speaker 11: that you're upside down or your left or you're right, like,
Speaker 11: you have.
Speaker 8: To trust the trust your instruments, instruments.
Speaker 1: That's right, That's basic. So what we do is in
Speaker 1: all of our pilots are are instrument flight rated, so
Speaker 1: they're all i FR. But you you as a pilot,
Speaker 1: as a good pilot, you trust your instruments and you
Speaker 1: fight that. And that's part of the similar training. You
Speaker 1: have to fight it, right, I mean some of these
Speaker 1: false belief you will actually think you're spinning backwards. Your
Speaker 1: inner ear will tell you you're actually in a barrel roll,
Speaker 1: and you fight that by looking at the instruments and
Speaker 1: going my airspin, altimeter, my HS, everything is telling me
Speaker 1: I'm okay, and you're literally sweating. I mean, your body
Speaker 1: is fighting you to say we're out of control. And
Speaker 1: you were trained as pilots, uh to fly on our instruments.
Speaker 4: So did you ever have that O shit moment?
Speaker 9: Yeah? I've had.
Speaker 1: You know, I've had a lot of moments in the helicopter,
Speaker 1: mostly firefighting at night in the wind. You know where
Speaker 1: you just go, oh man, this is what we call it.
Speaker 1: You know, we we have some real good we have
Speaker 1: something just culture. Yeah, so this is night aerial fire fighting.
Speaker 1: You know, we run on night vision goggles and sometimes
Speaker 1: we're aided and not aided, and when we're when we're firefighting,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's it's an instinctual thing. And you
Speaker 1: know when the first guy goes and this just doesn't
Speaker 1: feel good or you know, this doesn't feel right, you know,
Speaker 1: we communicate that to the rest or the command pilot. Well,
Speaker 1: like the night of the Palisades fire, they were clocking
Speaker 1: one hundred one hour winds. Now that there's yeah, there
Speaker 1: are are Santana conditions are typically thirty to fifty miles
Speaker 1: an hour. So are you know our normal business model
Speaker 1: is to fly these aircraft and thirty to fifty mile
Speaker 1: on our winds and do good work. But it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's like going and it's going down the freeway at
Speaker 1: fifty miles an hour and throw a glass of water
Speaker 1: out and try to hit the bush. So we learn
Speaker 1: how to tactically use our air.
Speaker 8: Little over that you're not timing.
Speaker 1: And I can do that now.
Speaker 9: That's why I believe it took me thirty years to
Speaker 9: get there, but I got that.
Speaker 1: So the uh, you know, the night of the Palisades,
Speaker 1: the first night, Now we don't we don't shut down airspace.
Speaker 1: We don't usually land air draft. I mean, we usually
Speaker 1: can do some good. There's been a couple of instances
Speaker 1: where the guys are just like, this is, we're not
Speaker 1: doing any good. Let's go back to the base. Let's regroup.
Speaker 1: But the night of the Palisades, my replacement who took
Speaker 1: my job as chief pilot, was running as the helicopter
Speaker 1: command pilot and they were clocking hunter them on our winds.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is they'd come to
Speaker 1: a hover over a fixed position and his airspeed indicator
Speaker 1: right one hundred miles an hour. Now, when you're in
Speaker 1: a laminar flow, when you're in clean air, it's not
Speaker 1: a big deal. But when you start getting into the turbulence.
Speaker 1: You know, when you get close to the ground, the
Speaker 1: air does the same thing that water does, it tur
Speaker 1: you know, you get the turbulence from the friction of
Speaker 1: the earth. And some of the pictures are going to show.
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple videos, but that night, I
Speaker 1: think a couple guys that you know, gone down to
Speaker 1: do water drops and go ooh, that's that was a
Speaker 1: little that was a little sketchy. And you start hearing
Speaker 1: very profect, high skilled pilots saying stuff like, well, that
Speaker 1: was that was close. And my replacement, you know, we
Speaker 1: had a great conversation after him, he goes, hey, I
Speaker 1: just knew the moment I started to hear the guys
Speaker 1: say stuff like, hey, that was that was a little close.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I did any good there, And
Speaker 1: he felt it was appropriate to shut the airspace down
Speaker 1: and he sent everybody home. And that was probably midnight
Speaker 1: the first night. So all the helicopters landed that first night,
Speaker 1: and then at six in the morning they woke up,
Speaker 1: the winds died down a little bit, and they all
Speaker 1: went back to work.
Speaker 11: But that was my next question today, have to pull
Speaker 11: the plug on you like if if they feel like
Speaker 11: it's not good.
Speaker 1: Well, so we're the ones that are in control of that.
Speaker 1: So the pilots now, most of the ground companies, the chiefs,
Speaker 1: you know, every all the chief officers, the INCID commander,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're looking for our guidance. They're
Speaker 1: basically they're they're wanting us to say, hey, this is
Speaker 1: what your capabilities are. And what is amazing about our
Speaker 1: culture there is they're just great about when we say
Speaker 1: this is what we can do and what we can't do.
Speaker 1: They're on board. There's no come on, you got to
Speaker 1: get out here. You know, we got guys in there.
Speaker 1: You got to do this. Yeah, you've really done a
Speaker 1: good job of training the new chief officers and changing
Speaker 1: the culture in the mindset that you know, these aircraft
Speaker 1: are amazing, but there's some things we just can't do
Speaker 1: with them. And we we don't want to go until
Speaker 1: we crash, you know, we don't want to We don't
Speaker 1: want to go until right. Yeah, And when I got
Speaker 1: through operations, that's what it was. You literally took off
Speaker 1: on a mission until you couldn't go any farther and
Speaker 1: you go, oh, I guess we got to go back.
Speaker 1: We didn't know how to say no.
Speaker 8: So you're your own safety chief.
Speaker 5: Basically, we you basically check yourself and self regulated.
Speaker 9: Baby, do what tell you want?
Speaker 1: Be self regulated? And I'll tell you what scares me
Speaker 1: the most. This is this is why we self regulate.
Speaker 1: This is why in twenty eleven I became the chief pilot.
Speaker 1: I was terrified about the NTSBNFA showing up to an
Speaker 1: accident where we had a fatality, God forbid, with a
Speaker 1: patient or any of our crew members, or god forbid, civilians,
Speaker 1: innocent civilians that we crash into. Because everything we fly
Speaker 1: over is urban urban interface. It's a school yard, it's
Speaker 1: a pie rise building. I was scared to death of
Speaker 1: what that would look like. And you know, we we
Speaker 1: had to be prepared. And I spent the next fifteen
Speaker 1: years of my career preparing for our next accident. And
Speaker 1: by that meaning, we introduced policies and procedures, we introduced standardization,
Speaker 1: and we brought in something called safety management systems. And
Speaker 1: if you guys haven't heard about it, it's something that's
Speaker 1: going to be integrated into every fire service at some
Speaker 1: point before we're all dead. But there's something in it
Speaker 1: called the just culture. And what that is is it's
Speaker 1: your freedom to say, hey, I messed up, I fucked up,
Speaker 1: and this is what I did, and let everybody know.
Speaker 1: And in some cases you may have caused damage, but
Speaker 1: there may be a lesson for everybody else in that
Speaker 1: and Aviation Civil Aviation has done an amazing job with that
Speaker 1: safety management system and just culture. You know, we adopted
Speaker 1: and embraced it and manned my people there. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just I was in love with them when I left.
Speaker 1: They were just such a great bunch of decision makers,
Speaker 1: you know, guys that were just I was so proud
Speaker 1: no mission you know, it wasn't I didn't feel like
Speaker 1: there was one cowboy pilot or a mission itis or
Speaker 1: any of that stuff. I really, I'm you know, very
Speaker 1: proud of Leaven, Like we were talking about it, I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm left on top. I'm so proud of
Speaker 1: the way, you know, we all grew that place together.
Speaker 1: And so now I just get a you know, going
Speaker 1: podcasts and brag the.
Speaker 8: Two idiots three idiots. Yeah. True.
Speaker 11: You something well while you were talking before, and you said,
Speaker 11: you know, when you showed the swat guys, uh with
Speaker 11: the two wheels down.
Speaker 8: And the one up.
Speaker 11: It made me think of something I've watched a few
Speaker 11: I don't know what, you know, I get to see
Speaker 11: a lot of this on social media and it's probably
Speaker 11: older ones obviously, but it seemed to me like anytime
Speaker 11: a helicopter was closer to the ground, like like I've
Speaker 11: seen him on like hikers might maybe or skiers or
Speaker 11: something where they're they're getting close to the ground, something happens,
Speaker 11: like you were saying, maybe like there's this downdraft and
Speaker 11: all of a sudden, the helicopter will be sitting perfect
Speaker 11: and then all of a sudden it will like do
Speaker 11: like this incredible like jar to the right and the
Speaker 11: will hit the ground and basically like open Is that
Speaker 11: is that from being too close to the ground or
Speaker 11: something swell or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's so what you're probably just talking about is
Speaker 1: it's an anomaly called brownout and it's or it can
Speaker 1: be a white out if it's in snow. When a
Speaker 1: helicopter gets close to the ground and you have loose
Speaker 1: soil or dust or snow, it can pick up and
Speaker 1: the vortices I'll do it tight, but the vortices on
Speaker 1: a helicopter blade readjust into themselves. So what happens is
Speaker 1: that dust comes back and re ingest in any enghols
Speaker 1: the helicopter. And remember what we're talking about VFR, it's
Speaker 1: like going in a cloud. The pilot immediately loses visual
Speaker 1: reference with the ground and it matter of seconds loses
Speaker 1: control of the helicopter.
Speaker 8: And that's why you see that what's happening.
Speaker 1: That's exactly. So there's training and disciplines and how to
Speaker 1: land in those types of environments, you know, getting in
Speaker 1: with purpose and landing before the brown out establishes. Of
Speaker 1: course we don't have to deal with white out by us.
Speaker 1: There's just dust and dirt.
Speaker 11: But yeah, it's better to have a hoist at that
Speaker 11: point than to get that ghost maybe something right.
Speaker 8: Obviously, a lot of.
Speaker 1: Times we can't actually land because of the conditions of
Speaker 1: the ground, and we choose to hoist, so we'll insert
Speaker 1: our flight paramedics, our rescue technicians will basically package the
Speaker 1: patient and then hoist everybody out of that location because
Speaker 1: it's untenable to land in.
Speaker 5: We had on Rob O'Neil, the Navy's heel who shot
Speaker 5: Osama bin Laden, and he was talking about that that
Speaker 5: one of the helicopters they didn't account.
Speaker 4: For I guess just the height of the wall or something.
Speaker 9: And then it was a downdraft from the other helicopter
Speaker 9: when it was hovering. Of course the other wall was
Speaker 9: I think it had something to do with the other
Speaker 9: helicopter when they were coming in. I just watched that
Speaker 9: Osama movie, right, we watched the same thing. Maybe that's
Speaker 9: what it was. I don't know if it was the wall.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be either one of those. The wall
Speaker 1: is another scenario with the helicopters aerodynamically aroblematic for us,
Speaker 1: so it's one of his dust. The second is when
Speaker 1: you get into structures and you're landing between structures, it
Speaker 1: causes that vorticy to develop and get worse and you
Speaker 1: actually start losing lyft you Actually the helicopter won't fly
Speaker 1: because it's re ingesting its own vortices and mostly because
Speaker 1: the walls that are next to it are causing it.
Speaker 1: I don't know what happened in his case, but more likely.
Speaker 9: I think you're right, Coops. I think that's what it was.
Speaker 9: It had to do with exactly what you're explaining, right.
Speaker 9: There was something to do with though that was unique
Speaker 9: to see here to learn.
Speaker 11: Really, what do you think about those cheap What do
Speaker 11: you think about those guys in Alaska? They're doing the
Speaker 11: same thing right obviously, like search and rescue up there.
Speaker 11: They go for hundreds of miles, they jump out in
Speaker 11: the ice cold water when it's blown fifty one hundred
Speaker 11: miles an hour, right, same exact thing.
Speaker 1: Crazy, Yes, you know, gosh, there's a coast guard mostly
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, Canada has an amazing search and rescue.
Speaker 1: Same thing. Those guys they fill up with fuel and
Speaker 1: they'll fly for an hour and a half two hours
Speaker 1: to the rescue site out in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 1: to do a rescue and then come back. It's there's
Speaker 1: certain parts of the world that are amazing. Guys that
Speaker 1: are going into the North Atlantic, you know, yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean just stuff that's just wicked. We are, you know,
Speaker 1: as crazy as our missions are, all the aerial firefighting, hoisting,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're in a pretty safe area. If
Speaker 1: you have a problem with helicopter, you can almost land anywhere.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 1: We train our we call them precautionary landings, but we
Speaker 1: train our guys to put her put it down in
Speaker 1: a park on a freeway. I don't care land anywhere.
Speaker 1: Don't keep flying to try to go to an airport
Speaker 1: if the helicopters coming apart. But when you're in the
Speaker 1: North Atlantic or when you're in the area, of course
Speaker 1: and you can't land, and yeah, so that there are
Speaker 1: some amazing people out there, mostly military Coast Guard that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Alaska, Canada proof. I mean for Ireland,
Speaker 1: it's you know, I've come across a lot of neat
Speaker 1: people over my career and doing some some really neat
Speaker 1: stuff with helicopters.
Speaker 4: And you said you haven't flown since you retired, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I just retired on Marstory first, but I
Speaker 1: haven't flown, so I don't know. You know, I got
Speaker 1: my Uh, you're.
Speaker 11: Gonna have to get the grease out and start oiling
Speaker 11: up the tin man here, you know, a little stiff,
Speaker 11: always getting.
Speaker 1: A little My girlfriend she's got me out digging holes
Speaker 1: and planting flowers. I am working harder now than I
Speaker 1: ever worked. I told her I got to go back
Speaker 1: to work to get a break.
Speaker 4: You know who I am helicopters.
Speaker 8: Scott Scott Scott, I was. I used to be the
Speaker 8: chief pilot in the L A F T. Now I'm just.
Speaker 1: Exactly that's what it sounds like.
Speaker 9: I have I have that video to the little short
Speaker 9: air drop out of the hoistline rescue and then you
Speaker 9: sent me another one, so I don't know how really
Speaker 9: quick before you go, yeah, I got hand brought my chiru.
Speaker 1: Ohs are right there, bulls are bro bulls eye right.
Speaker 1: So so that's where you that's a great example. You know,
Speaker 1: they got thirty forty mili hour winds, The fire is
Speaker 1: moving fast, it's in light fuels, flashy fuels. That just
Speaker 1: that's what kills firemen. But you know, our our ground
Speaker 1: cruis are trained to anchor, flanking, pinch. They run out
Speaker 1: there with hose, they start running wetline and where we
Speaker 1: can you know, tactically the helicopter comes in and you
Speaker 1: get one opportunity every you know, thirty seconds and if
Speaker 1: you can use the wind to your advantage. And look
Speaker 1: look what he did. He did a lot of great,
Speaker 1: great good with just a little bit of water.
Speaker 9: So the window got there's a cigarette, but I got
Speaker 9: the bitch.
Speaker 8: We'll get it right and you away otherwise out there.
Speaker 9: Now, well, you guys say it was the.
Speaker 1: Nots and months got the look if you uh, if
Speaker 1: you keep it there for a minute gone. So the
Speaker 1: one of the things that we have in la is
Speaker 1: we have about four hundred miles linear miles of flood
Speaker 1: control channels and they are dry all the time. So
Speaker 1: of course the kids and homeless and everybody plays in
Speaker 1: them all year. The homeless live in them, and then
Speaker 1: we get one big rainstorm and boom they fill up,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty mile an hour water. And during the
Speaker 1: course of my entire career, our swift thoughter rescue program
Speaker 1: started back in nineteen ninety because we lost there was
Speaker 1: a young boy that was swept away and the l
Speaker 1: a f D had no way to get him out
Speaker 1: of the river. And I was working that day. I
Speaker 1: was in the West Valley and I was a rookie,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, we had some weird pictures of
Speaker 1: guys that were just you know, mission it us. We
Speaker 1: had a battalion chief who took a rope around his waist,
Speaker 1: tied a knot or anything that he was ready to
Speaker 1: jump in and the boy, the little boy ended up dying. Well,
Speaker 1: his family sued the fire department, but all they asked
Speaker 1: for was training and equipment to be able to affect
Speaker 1: the rescues in this two scenario. So it was amazing.
Speaker 1: His name was Adam Vishoff. I mean to this day,
Speaker 1: thirty five years I later, I remember, so I was
Speaker 1: again fortunate enough in that time I joined. One of
Speaker 1: the guys at my station was joining and we joined
Speaker 1: the Soapwater Rescue team. We went out and got the
Speaker 1: training for land based rescue. When I got to air operations,
Speaker 1: you know, we started and before I even got there,
Speaker 1: they started, you know, doing affecting rescues with the helicopter
Speaker 1: and over the years we've perfected. And what you just
Speaker 1: saw was we took you know, a helicopter with a
Speaker 1: rescuer that was just waiting above the water, and as
Speaker 1: soon as the victim came down the river at fifteen
Speaker 1: miles an hour, they dropped the rescuer and the helicopter
Speaker 1: takes off and paces the same speed as the water.
Speaker 1: The post operators haunting the pilot so he's conning him
Speaker 1: to stay with the scree to the liver while the
Speaker 1: rescuer is making a quick capture. It all happens in seconds,
Speaker 1: just like he saw.
Speaker 11: Because if you stay there and you drop him he
Speaker 11: guy's going to go past him, you know, if he
Speaker 11: doesn't grab him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So swift water rescues are a big deal. LA
Speaker 1: County Fire Department, doesn't We do quite a bit. We
Speaker 1: probably do. We affect several swift fotter rescues every year.
Speaker 1: You know, the guys just make it look easy, but
Speaker 1: it is extreme.
Speaker 11: How are you how are you coordinating that? Obviously as
Speaker 11: a pilot, you can't. You're facing the wrong way obviously,
Speaker 11: and you can't see anything. Are you listening to the
Speaker 11: guy who's peeking out the window?
Speaker 8: Is that what's happening?
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. You have a crew chief that's running
Speaker 1: the hoist cable and then you've got a safety member
Speaker 1: next to him in the door, and then the rescuers
Speaker 1: out on the hook. So the pilot is putting the
Speaker 1: crew in position downstream waiting for the victims. So they've
Speaker 1: already identified the victim, they know the victim's coming. They'll
Speaker 1: set up downstream a couple hundred yards quickly lower a rescuer,
Speaker 1: and the pilot is in position and waiting for the
Speaker 1: command from the hoist operator to start his movement. So
Speaker 1: we have discipline, six different commands and as soon as
Speaker 1: the rescuer is dropped in the water, the hoystoperator says,
Speaker 1: start your pace, Increase your pace, increase your pace. Pace
Speaker 1: is good, Hold your pace. He's making the capture. He's
Speaker 1: giving me the okay sign. Pace is good. I'm taking
Speaker 1: on weight and that's it. He brings him out of
Speaker 1: the water. As soon as out of the water, slow
Speaker 1: your pace to a stop. The pilot comes to a
Speaker 1: stop and then they bring him up into the cabin
Speaker 1: and it's a two minute ride to a trauma center.
Speaker 1: So we've had a lot of great success with the
Speaker 1: swift water rescue stuff, and.
Speaker 5: I got a brake storm for a new TV series
Speaker 5: problem this guy could star and the Brad.
Speaker 9: Looking like.
Speaker 8: There's no way that guy doesn't look.
Speaker 1: Like You guys are doing great for my ego.
Speaker 9: I love it. Yes, damn, that's Russell crow To. But you.
Speaker 4: Chat, who does you look like? Russell crawl?
Speaker 8: Come on now, come on.
Speaker 4: The little Asian guy thought it was Brad Bitt want.
Speaker 1: I would have come on your show earlier if I
Speaker 1: knew it was gonna go like this.
Speaker 9: You guys are doing great. Keep it in. What's the
Speaker 9: contingency if that this victim gets past you, you have
Speaker 9: a ground swift water unit ready to go or is
Speaker 9: it all based on you guys?
Speaker 1: Yeah, great question, man, You get me fired up. So
Speaker 1: we when we launched on a swift Wotter rescue, we
Speaker 1: launched two swift Wotter rescue helicopters in a command and
Speaker 1: control aircraft. The primary aircraft goes to the rescue site,
Speaker 1: which is what you just saw. The secondary hoist aircraft
Speaker 1: goes downstream and sets up. We have a second rescue
Speaker 1: or downstream ready to go. So that second helicopter if
Speaker 1: the first helicopter fails, the second helicopter is two three
Speaker 1: hundred yards downstream ready to affect the backup rescue or
Speaker 1: if something goes wrong with the first helicopter, they're there
Speaker 1: to affect a rescue of that first helicopter. So we
Speaker 1: have that redundant leap frog capability with those two rescue helicopters.
Speaker 1: On swift water days, we staff up so we have
Speaker 1: to rescue swift water helicopters ready to go. They run
Speaker 1: in tandem every dispatch. They go together, they don't go
Speaker 1: out by themselves. And then they have a command and
Speaker 1: control aircraft that works with the incident commander takes a
Speaker 1: lot of the radio chatter off, right because you guys,
Speaker 1: know you've been to an incident. Sometimes it's just it's
Speaker 1: too much. You're overwhelmed by all the ridiculous chatter. We
Speaker 1: don't want the hoist pilot or the Hoyst crew to
Speaker 1: hear all that stuff. So the command pilot, the helicopter
Speaker 1: command and the different aircraft, he's managing all the radio
Speaker 1: traffic with the incident commander. That way, the search and rescue,
Speaker 1: that Hoyst aircraft has a very clean environment to operative.
Speaker 1: They don't hear a whole bunch of screaming and yelling
Speaker 1: and you know, tactics and strategy stuff they don't need
Speaker 1: to use. So that's where we you know, we start
Speaker 1: minimizing risk and liability. We have redundancy with the second
Speaker 1: poised aircraft ready to go, and then we have a
Speaker 1: command and control aircraft that's you know, relieving them of
Speaker 1: all the radio traffic.
Speaker 4: Jat said Sean Connery.
Speaker 11: Sean, Yeah, couple of Russell crows in that. Yeah, there's
Speaker 11: a couple of Russell crows in that. Do you feel
Speaker 11: like like when you get the run, like if that
Speaker 11: was a kid in the water, and you guys get
Speaker 11: the call from from sitting at the kitchen table to
Speaker 11: hovering over the you know, if it's close by. So
Speaker 11: let's say, how well, how long are we talking? Are
Speaker 11: we talking ten minutes? We talk at five minutes, we
Speaker 11: talked at twenty minutes, Like what are you thinking?
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 8: Great question.
Speaker 1: So you remember, when our guys get to work, they
Speaker 1: basically do relief. They do all their pre flighting. We
Speaker 1: call it leaving the aircraft in a precock position, so
Speaker 1: the pilot will go through all of his safety checks
Speaker 1: or run fuel, says some checks, hydraulic checks, so he'll
Speaker 1: spend an hour with the aircraft pre flighting in but
Speaker 1: he leaves everything in a precock position, meaning all he's
Speaker 1: got to do is flip the switch and hit the button,
Speaker 1: so that aircraft is now ready alert. We call it
Speaker 1: alert ready. When the alarm goes off, it takes and
Speaker 1: all of our aircraft are hangared. So as soon as
Speaker 1: alarm goes off, everybody comes out. Ground crew come out
Speaker 1: to the tug. They start towing the aircraft out on
Speaker 1: the line. The crew starts suiting up the rescuers, putting
Speaker 1: on his dry suit. The pilot's getting all the briefing,
Speaker 1: mission briefing on where the incident is. It takes from
Speaker 1: the time of alarm to the time the aircraft is
Speaker 1: airborne seven minutes, and of that seven minutes, it takes
Speaker 1: about four minutes to start both engines and get up
Speaker 1: to one hundred percent get our clearance from air traffic control,
Speaker 1: So about seven minutes were airborne in the valley, which
Speaker 1: is the north part of the city. It's only a
Speaker 1: four minute flight to any part of the city. So
Speaker 1: what that rescue you just saw that channel was in
Speaker 1: the north northeast corner of the valley. It would have
Speaker 1: been around the eleven to twelve minute mark that they
Speaker 1: were on station ready to go, and that's probably six
Speaker 1: miles from air operations. The farthest reaches of the city.
Speaker 1: It's probably eleven minute flight. Our aircraft do about one
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy miles an hour, so they bugy once
Speaker 1: they get up and they move pretty fast, so we
Speaker 1: can get around the city. But one of our tactical
Speaker 1: advantages is that quick deployment, you know, having everything the
Speaker 1: risk assessment's done, the aircraft pre flight and precock ready
Speaker 1: to go, all systems checks done. All the crew has
Speaker 1: to do is get in, start it and go. It
Speaker 1: goes very quick. To put in perspective, to put it
Speaker 1: in perspective, the Coast Guard Coast Guartation l A, and
Speaker 1: they're they're very professional. They do all the off water
Speaker 1: stuff and off water ocean stuff. Scares me. That's you know,
Speaker 1: that's some some really brave stuff. But the Coast Guard,
Speaker 1: they're alert aircraft. It takes thirty minutes to launch out
Speaker 1: of face in LA. So they're just you know, the military,
Speaker 1: so they're just not set up for that alert, you know,
Speaker 1: that fire department alert. You know, moments mattered. Thirty minutes
Speaker 1: later that the rescue's over, the victims either drowned or right,
Speaker 1: you know, he's downstream in the ocean somewhere. Yeah, minutes,
Speaker 1: minutes matter, So we try to try to condense that
Speaker 1: time and yet still be as safe as possible so
Speaker 1: that we're you know, we're we're we're not reckless.
Speaker 8: What was your least favorite run?
Speaker 1: Oh man, that's a good question.
Speaker 8: My least favorite run was man well man on man
Speaker 8: under a train or man. So I hated manholes. Yeah,
Speaker 8: because you don't have to check all the you know,
Speaker 8: apartments and everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the worst for me, And still to
Speaker 1: this day, it's the kids. It's anything to do with
Speaker 1: the kids. You know, in the valley, the summer's out
Speaker 1: there of the pools, drownings and traffic acts and ship
Speaker 1: I've got. I got so many nightmare stories and you know,
Speaker 1: like you guys know, thirty five years later and I
Speaker 1: can still feel that day I held a baby and
Speaker 1: the blood was going down my arm. It's just that
Speaker 1: ship just stays with you. And and sometimes, you know,
Speaker 1: I work with my girlfriend on this a lot because
Speaker 1: I as a fireman, you conmpartmentalize that stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: you just feel like it's another day of work. And
Speaker 1: you don't even realize how we lose empathy, you know,
Speaker 1: we we just lose ourselves. We're just we're soulless, emotionless creatures.
Speaker 1: And mostly because of everything that we've seen and and
Speaker 1: you know what human can go through that ship and
Speaker 1: see that, you know, body parts and burned and that,
Speaker 1: and it's not seeing a bird body, it's smelling a
Speaker 1: bird body. My you know, my first experience was the
Speaker 1: smell of a burned body. But the kids to answer question,
Speaker 1: the kid by far as the kids, I've seen a
Speaker 1: lot of bad stuff, but anything to do with those.
Speaker 8: You know, I'm a cold, hot at bastard. I don't
Speaker 8: care about it, I see. I mean, I don't. Even
Speaker 8: My wife's like, what's the matter with you? I'm like,
Speaker 8: I don't know. It just doesn't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the man under a train, especially in the subway.
Speaker 11: In the summer, blood everywhere, all the electric gone humming,
Speaker 11: like right next to your.
Speaker 9: Trash.
Speaker 4: Except for special operations, we're on the track with a
Speaker 4: block of gear.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 8: No, Yeah, you get a guy who just tried to
Speaker 8: kill himself. You know you're trying to save him. You know,
Speaker 8: like you know you're in like this fall, you know,
Speaker 8: like this blood everywhere. You know you're trying to save
Speaker 8: him for a guy who tried to you know, you know,
Speaker 8: you know, I'll tell.
Speaker 1: You a funny story because it just came to when
Speaker 1: you're asking the worst story. I was young, I was
Speaker 1: probably four or five years on it. I was on
Speaker 1: the rescue. We all rotate truck, rescue engine, and we
Speaker 1: went to I was working a part of Hollywood, and uh,
Speaker 1: we went on this whole guy was a and he
Speaker 1: was in his bathroom and he tried to stab himself.
Speaker 1: He'd had a couple of years old, he's probably eighty five,
Speaker 1: probably terminal cancer. It was kind of sad. But he
Speaker 1: finally he lets us in the bathroom and he's you know,
Speaker 1: he's got a wife, beat her shirt, white shirt on.
Speaker 1: It's all bloody and the blood's kind of coagulated because
Speaker 1: he's been there for a while. And he you know,
Speaker 1: he poked himself enough to bleed, but not enough to
Speaker 1: hit his caroated already, and uh, he just kept sitting
Speaker 1: way no, no, he failed at that right, So, but
Speaker 1: he wanted to die. I want to die, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm finding I'm done. I'm done. And and uh you
Speaker 1: are you guys familiar with Cedars Hospital or you so
Speaker 1: some of our big trauma centers UCLA and uh USC
Speaker 1: we got all these big college hospitals, trauma centers, and
Speaker 1: we have one called Cedars, which is one of the primary,
Speaker 1: you know, leading centers for everything. And but some of
Speaker 1: the people, some of the communities, the cultures didn't like
Speaker 1: Cedars Hospital. So we're you know, we're sitting there with
Speaker 1: him and we finally get in the door. You know,
Speaker 1: he's he's live, he's we're gonna take in the hospital.
Speaker 1: He's not successful. He's poking himself and he's pissed. He's
Speaker 1: kind of fighting us, and and he's like, I want
Speaker 1: to leave me alone. I want to die, you know,
Speaker 1: I just I want to end it. And and then
Speaker 1: I look at my partner and I just confirmed them.
Speaker 1: I go, we're going to Cedars, right, and my partner yeah,
Speaker 1: and the guy, the old man goes.
Speaker 4: Don't take me to Cedars.
Speaker 9: They're gonna kill you there.
Speaker 4: What you wanted anyway?
Speaker 9: Bro, you don't even make this.
Speaker 8: Shut up, dude, yeah, make up? You know, so I
Speaker 8: don't bring me there millions oh million?
Speaker 1: You know, remember thirty five years ago HIV, I mean
Speaker 1: ship you have an exposure of blood. We go through
Speaker 1: the whole post six month exposure and it was so scary.
Speaker 1: There's just yeah, different times.
Speaker 4: But did you get any of those pictures?
Speaker 9: I said, oh yeah, I was. I text you to
Speaker 9: let you know a load. Which one do you want
Speaker 9: to pull up?
Speaker 4: You don't know what's his name? One seventeen sent it
Speaker 4: to me. These are I think FDNY helicopters.
Speaker 9: No, I don't see the picture of the helicopter or
Speaker 9: there's obviously there's only five of them, and they're all
Speaker 9: just is this one. I don't know if they might
Speaker 9: recognize as a beautiful I can't really.
Speaker 4: Take what did he send me? Send me something?
Speaker 8: I don't have a helicopter?
Speaker 4: Got what's his name? From one seventeen? Who is the truck?
Speaker 4: He one seventeen?
Speaker 9: Like a barge explosion in Great Kills BFI a corps
Speaker 9: so from one of you guys from yeah, y, but
Speaker 9: it's from VF. I'm assuming that's what do you call that? BFI?
Speaker 9: Is uh?
Speaker 4: Fire investigation?
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was a Marshall.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, King, Okay, yeah, King, that's so that's that
Speaker 9: must be King there. That was his crew. We got
Speaker 9: a little bit of a oh that's the barge. It's
Speaker 9: like explosion. That's the Bardger Staten.
Speaker 8: Italy or something over there.
Speaker 9: These are great. I mean, I still think that the
Speaker 9: man goes all with these helicopters. It's still it's a
Speaker 9: fan favorite. Doesn't get old.
Speaker 11: I would say the NYPD, Uh, yeah, they're they make
Speaker 11: a lot of grabs with that. Like there's a lot
Speaker 11: of people in the riverage by us, and now they
Speaker 11: don't they don't. I mean, I'm sure they hoist, but
Speaker 11: I've seen the guys jump out grab them and then
Speaker 11: they you know, I don't know what they do after that,
Speaker 11: but that's like their main thing.
Speaker 8: Without being connected, I don't know what they do.
Speaker 11: Most of the time that the Harbor Patrol has boats
Speaker 11: there too, so I think they're just trying to grab
Speaker 11: them to stay afloat, and then they'll have the boats
Speaker 11: and everybody, you know, New York's is harbor patrol everywhere.
Speaker 11: For the most part, FDNY has a lot of boats.
Speaker 8: What do we got.
Speaker 9: I was just waiting for a loaded up another one.
Speaker 9: But when I have to share a screen, it takes
Speaker 9: a second. But if you want to watch, it's only
Speaker 9: a minute. Yeah, there we go.
Speaker 1: I'll give you the background in that. We get a
Speaker 1: lot of hoist rescues in the city.
Speaker 9: It's another Saturday, by the way, it's just another Saturday.
Speaker 9: Crowd watch it.
Speaker 1: And in this case, the it was a construction site.
Speaker 1: The roof had collapsed. They had a cherry picker inside
Speaker 1: the building. The roof collapse. The two guys in the
Speaker 1: cherry picker. The roof collapsed on the cherry picker and
Speaker 1: cut some of the hydraulic lines. So They had been
Speaker 1: in that thing for about thirty minut and the ground
Speaker 1: companies didn't know. They had no way to get them out.
Speaker 1: They couldn't get close to them. They were afraid if
Speaker 1: they start taking the gear off, the hydraulics would have
Speaker 1: failed and they dropped. So yeah, they called in and
Speaker 1: what you saw in the capture is that's exactly what
Speaker 1: we do. The same thing with the swoft on rescue.
Speaker 1: It's a you know, a surgical placement, a quick capture
Speaker 1: strap within seconds and then pull them out. So they
Speaker 1: pulled those two guys out, but we get crane rescues,
Speaker 1: you know. You know maybe in New York same way.
Speaker 1: You know who the crane operators are in LA there
Speaker 1: because it's the highest paying job, the most sent senior
Speaker 1: ten yured guys. The sixty year old guy is a
Speaker 1: crane operator. You know how they get to the top
Speaker 1: of the crane. They got to climb whatever fifty flights
Speaker 1: of stairs a ladder to get up there. And then
Speaker 1: what do they do when they get up there?
Speaker 4: They have a heart attack. So I can't tell you.
Speaker 1: How many we've pulled. I don't know my career, A
Speaker 1: dozen guys really heart attacks hoisted them off the top
Speaker 1: of a crane, because no urban search and rescue in
Speaker 1: the city has got a four hundred foot you know,
Speaker 1: ballet line that they can belay a guy off of cream.
Speaker 1: So tactically there's you know, some it's weird in an
Speaker 1: urban environment, you know, the necessity for the helicopters or
Speaker 1: how we've been able to put them to use.
Speaker 9: So is that rope, sorry, the rope is four hundred feet?
Speaker 9: Is that your backs?
Speaker 1: No, I we don't even have so our guys wouldn't
Speaker 1: even try it. I think our you know, and I
Speaker 1: don't know what our urban search and rescue teams, you know.
Speaker 1: I know that the rigs at one point when I
Speaker 1: was driving a fire engein our our ballet line and
Speaker 1: mainlines were I think one hundred and seventy feet or
Speaker 1: two hundred feet two feet two.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the helicopter you don't have it. What's the length
Speaker 9: of the oh, I'm sorry, hoistline?
Speaker 1: Yeah, our our hoist on the on the helicopters, so
Speaker 1: most of our hoist happened around one hundred feet plus
Speaker 1: or minus ninety to one hundred and fifty feet.
Speaker 9: The full length of the cable is.
Speaker 1: It's eluding you right now. I don't know why I
Speaker 1: can't remember that number. It's over two hundred feet, but
Speaker 1: the uh, rarely do you hoist that high? We really
Speaker 1: like you saw the sot futter of rescue hoist was
Speaker 1: about thirty feet. Our typical hoist in the mountain district
Speaker 1: is about one hundred feet. You get up to a
Speaker 1: certain point and the crew has a difficult time with
Speaker 1: vertical reference and seeing, especially at night, where the rescuer
Speaker 1: is and if they've made the capture. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if you see. We have also radios where the
Speaker 1: guys can just talk without key and the mic, and
Speaker 1: a secondary backup is the head movement, which says I'm okay,
Speaker 1: I'm ready for left.
Speaker 8: So we've got.
Speaker 1: Redundancy in not only physical commands or hand commands, but
Speaker 1: if the radios fail.
Speaker 8: So it has a good question in the chat chief.
Speaker 11: He says, with a crew of five you have or
Speaker 11: four or five, how many extra people can you just
Speaker 11: on the Yeah?
Speaker 1: How many extra people can we put in the what
Speaker 1: on the choppa?
Speaker 9: Like?
Speaker 1: Interesting? So, yeah, our hoist crew is combined. There's three
Speaker 1: a hoist operator, to rescue, paramedics, flight paramedics in the back,
Speaker 1: the three crewmen, and depending on the type of hoist
Speaker 1: or mission, there'll be a single pilot or two pilots,
Speaker 1: so we can have about a five person crew. The
Speaker 1: aircraw have are capable of taking up to twelve passengers
Speaker 1: in the back, but we've got to configure with seats.
Speaker 1: Our typical configuration for air amens and firefighting only has
Speaker 1: five seats in the back. So to answer the question exactly,
Speaker 1: we could technically pay two more take two more people
Speaker 1: in seats with seat belts, plus the patient in the
Speaker 1: litter system. We don't fly around with anybody not builted in.
Speaker 1: Everybody's got to be in a seat belt or in
Speaker 1: a harness that's clipped into a part of the ceiling.
Speaker 1: So and then for hoisting, weight becomes an issue because
Speaker 1: we're hovering out of ground. Effect is taking a ton
Speaker 1: of power. The aircraft's working really hard, so we want
Speaker 1: to stay as light as possible. So everybody is essential
Speaker 1: to the mission. Every single crew has a purpose. We
Speaker 1: don't like to take around extra people.
Speaker 8: If we don't have to.
Speaker 9: So that's that's what If I'm not just saying, oh,
Speaker 9: correct me if I'm wrong that when you guys are
Speaker 9: hovering and you go to do your lift, that's the
Speaker 9: helicopter is operating and max power just about. That's why
Speaker 9: normally I see helicopters take off into the wind because
Speaker 9: people always ask why you have to have that kind
Speaker 9: of a runway if you will, because it's that power
Speaker 9: for the helicopter. It does a direct lift.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's a aerodynamic magic.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 9: Excellent.
Speaker 1: You're exactly right. Hovering out of ground effect is the
Speaker 1: hardest for a helicopter to do. It takes the most
Speaker 1: amount of power. You're in the most danger, you have
Speaker 1: the least amount of escape routes and option the most
Speaker 1: danger the most. We call it translational left. But as
Speaker 1: the helicopter takes off it the more air speed you get,
Speaker 1: the more air is rammed into the top of the
Speaker 1: rotor system and it becomes more efficient. It's translational lift.
Speaker 1: So the aircraft, the helicopter wants to go fast and
Speaker 1: be moving like an airplane. We have a lot of options.
Speaker 1: We can tea, we can do a lot of things,
Speaker 1: but the second you hover out of ground effect, we
Speaker 1: start running out of.
Speaker 11: Quick So when people are when the helicopters are just
Speaker 11: standing still. That's the most dangerous, correct, Yeah, it's the
Speaker 11: most dangerous. You have the least amount of options if
Speaker 11: you lose your engines or you.
Speaker 1: Lose a tail roader, if you're moving, if you're doing
Speaker 1: one hundred knotsor one hundred and fifty miles an hour, you've.
Speaker 11: Got a lot ofis now that you say that, every
Speaker 11: time I ever see a helicopter knock on wood, it's
Speaker 11: usually standing still and then all of a sudden something happens,
Speaker 11: like it looks like it jerks out of the way
Speaker 11: or something like something happens.
Speaker 1: Actually, the only so you'll see the news media, however,
Speaker 1: out of Groz they do it.
Speaker 9: Forever, they do it. I'm like, see them do it.
Speaker 1: Because they're those guys are risking their lives to get
Speaker 1: the shot. You know, they'll they'll set up for the camera,
Speaker 1: that's they're doing everything for the camera shot, and then
Speaker 1: hoist pilots you know, or we call it external load
Speaker 1: or sling pilots, guys that are lifting you know, heavy
Speaker 1: loads underneath the helicopter. That that's where they're at the
Speaker 1: most risk. That's where the helicopter.
Speaker 11: We've had a lot of helicopter crashes in New York,
Speaker 11: even crazy lately in my in my time, I've bet
Speaker 11: the two or three of them.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, we had the one here. I'm just going
Speaker 9: to share your talking about it. If you guys remember
Speaker 9: the Greening video. But our our air rescue down here
Speaker 9: crash last year.
Speaker 4: I went to a into a building, right to a house,
Speaker 4: went to.
Speaker 8: Uh right here, Well he looks like he's smoking there.
Speaker 9: Well, he was on fire. And I think that was
Speaker 9: you know, Scott was talking about earlier. She was talking
Speaker 9: about it earlier. Where they they didn't from what I understood,
Speaker 9: I don't have all the details. They didn't realize that.
Speaker 9: They realized something came on and the alarms came on.
Speaker 9: So they saw that they weren't that far from the airport.
Speaker 9: So get back to the get back to the airport.
Speaker 9: And as you can see in this picture, the tail
Speaker 9: roader snapped at the I guess the fuselage if that's
Speaker 9: my terminology is correct. It just spun and then it
Speaker 9: just dropped here. But you know that this is what
Speaker 9: it looked like obviously, but since then they had too
Speaker 9: But it's just you talk about that, uh, responsibilities of policies.
Speaker 9: They're the problem. You mentioned it earlier about landing right
Speaker 9: away and get down. I don't part of them. What
Speaker 9: I'm understanding is they didn't know that there was an
Speaker 9: actual fire and there which contributed to the weakening of
Speaker 9: the craft and crashing it. I believe, but I want
Speaker 9: to miss it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's tough, you know, it's not normal in helicopter
Speaker 1: community to you know, all pilots are trained go back
Speaker 1: to the airport and go back to you know, big
Speaker 1: safe landing or we specifically train our pilots. Anything goes.
Speaker 1: I don't care what if they feel like something wrong
Speaker 1: land because we can be on the ground in fifteen
Speaker 1: to twenty seconds. We're thirty seconds later. You may have
Speaker 1: something like this where you know, the tail boom components
Speaker 1: caught on fire and then you start losing control of
Speaker 1: the aircraft. But it's not second guessing those guys. But
Speaker 1: for us, you know, our ideology about having an escape
Speaker 1: route and preparing for the eventuality of something bad to happen.
Speaker 1: You've got seconds to get on the ground, and if
Speaker 1: you're over land, there's always somewhere to land a helicopter.
Speaker 1: I mean, we can at rotate and part of our training,
Speaker 1: we spend we have two small helicopters there are Bell
Speaker 1: five oh fives or training helicopters. We spend a very
Speaker 1: large amount of time doing what's called autootative training, which
Speaker 1: is you turn the engine out, you basically roll the
Speaker 1: engine idol and you you descend into a target at
Speaker 1: will and then land without your engine and your engine
Speaker 1: is uncoupled, kind of like a ten speed bike. So
Speaker 1: we practice that that behavior pattern so that we know
Speaker 1: how to get down fast and land so that you know,
Speaker 1: we hopefully avert that type of a disaster where you know,
Speaker 1: you try to fly too long with the aircraft coming apart,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work.
Speaker 9: Out well, so well, fortunately lost. Sorry, good buddy, Not
Speaker 9: good buddy. I was going to say that they were
Speaker 9: saying that this house actually the two guys walked away
Speaker 9: from it and two people parish the captain Terry Jackson
Speaker 9: was the captain from the fire department, and the resident
Speaker 9: inside the house here. But they were saying that this
Speaker 9: house actually helped a little bit cact like a cushion
Speaker 9: when the helicopter landed on almost like an or trampoline
Speaker 9: kind of a thing. Or again that kind of helped,
Speaker 9: that's all. Just going to make a mention of that.
Speaker 9: I got a little side tracked from that.
Speaker 4: So what makes you want to hang it up after
Speaker 4: thirty five years?
Speaker 1: You know, it's so a lot of things. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, one thing I'm acutely aware of as the
Speaker 1: actual aarial study. The longer we stay on the fire department,
Speaker 1: the shorter our lifespan is. You know, we've got the
Speaker 1: first part of my career thirty five years ago breathing
Speaker 1: out brass. We didn't wear them as much as we
Speaker 1: should have. There's a lot of bad stuff that's probably
Speaker 1: floating around in my bloodstream. So you know, part of
Speaker 1: me was if I could get out young and get
Speaker 1: as many good years, you know, hopefully really a long
Speaker 1: time because I literally could be at work and work
Speaker 1: for another thirty years.
Speaker 9: I just loved it.
Speaker 1: I didn't, you know, I left my passion, I left
Speaker 1: what I loved. But I was maxed out on our
Speaker 1: service pension. You know, our service pension out here is
Speaker 1: thirty three years to get your maximum service pension. And
Speaker 1: then I was, you know, I'm young, and I just thought,
Speaker 1: you know, this is it was the hardest decision I've
Speaker 1: ever made, but I still think it was the right one.
Speaker 1: I'm really pleased. Like I said, I went out on top.
Speaker 1: And I also you know, I retired, I lost ten pounds,
Speaker 1: I'm eating better, you know, the stress, the anxiety.
Speaker 8: Sleep better. I just went and flowers, beautiful everything.
Speaker 9: I don't think I knew.
Speaker 8: It's the old lady's chasing you around the house all
Speaker 8: the time.
Speaker 5: Now, so that's just chasing you around. That's what's weight
Speaker 5: bro chasing around the house.
Speaker 9: Because you know he's got all those movie offers.
Speaker 8: You know, I want to say, the vote is in.
Speaker 11: We got seven Russell Crows one, Sean Connery zero, Brad Pitt's.
Speaker 4: The man himself. Who do you think you look like?
Speaker 9: No?
Speaker 1: I listen, you know.
Speaker 4: We can't get any better than this guy. Man, it
Speaker 4: might be the coolest guy even.
Speaker 9: Like no, no, no, wait, let me tell you, Sam,
Speaker 9: you're that's good stuff. Man. It's a good time to
Speaker 9: bring it up anyway.
Speaker 4: Where we are, Okay, I think it might be that time.
Speaker 9: It might be if you give me like three here
Speaker 9: we go. All right, it's tired. Are you ready? Are
Speaker 9: you ready? Scott?
Speaker 1: I'm ready?
Speaker 8: All right, here we go.
Speaker 9: It's time for the old.
Speaker 4: Now we'll say what it really close?
Speaker 9: Oh, here we go, Hey, Brian, how you all right?
Speaker 9: Russell Crowe take it away too, you know, I so
Speaker 9: I did. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, I thought about it when Gonzo mentioned the
Speaker 1: old school tip of the day, and I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm full of a lot of advice and be us
Speaker 1: and I'll talk anybody's ear off on what to do.
Speaker 1: I'm good at that. But I think what I'll leave
Speaker 1: everybody with. It's you know, it's a phrase that I
Speaker 1: heard when I was a young firefighter from kind of
Speaker 1: a legend on the fire Department, and they ended up
Speaker 1: placarding the front of our training center downtown with it.
Speaker 1: So every time you walk in the doors, you see
Speaker 1: it above the doors and it's train as if your
Speaker 1: life depends on it. And for me, it was you know,
Speaker 1: it encompasses everything. It encompasses professionalism, it encompasses preparing for
Speaker 1: that moment when you'll fall back on your training you
Speaker 1: won't rise to the occasion. So for me, that's, you know,
Speaker 1: train as if your life depends on it. For all
Speaker 1: of our brothers and sisters out there in the fire
Speaker 1: service across the country, you know, too many people I
Speaker 1: think get complacent. They get to those slow assignments and
Speaker 1: they you know, they hang it up and cruise. But
Speaker 1: every day, all the way to the end of my
Speaker 1: thirty fifth year, I was out training and practicing emergencies
Speaker 1: and being prepared for that moment that an engine failed.
Speaker 1: I think I'm probably the most highly trained helicopter pilot
Speaker 1: in the world on emergency landings with engine failures, and
Speaker 1: I never experienced an engine failure, so that I'm proud
Speaker 1: to say I left ready for something to go wrong,
Speaker 1: but it never went wrong. So training as if your
Speaker 1: life depends on it, that's gonna be mildki old school ticket.
Speaker 10: I like it, like it.
Speaker 9: I like God. I have a question.
Speaker 4: You could pick another guest, get us another one.
Speaker 9: I have. I have another question, though this is gonna
Speaker 9: be This is a retirement question, now, Scott. We normally asked,
Speaker 9: I'm not there yet, so I haven't had the dream yet,
Speaker 9: But we normally ask have you had the dream yet?
Speaker 9: In your case, it's going to be a I don't
Speaker 9: know what You're dream is going to be like, and
Speaker 9: the dream is do you wake up you can't find
Speaker 9: your gear and your clase. Is it going to come
Speaker 9: out in the helicopter's going to be gone wherever supposed
Speaker 9: to fly. I wonder what your dream is going to be.
Speaker 1: Like, well, Ship, you know it's funny you said, because
Speaker 1: I I had I had several mornings, you know that
Speaker 1: I woke up and I was late to work, or
Speaker 1: the first thing I went to grab is my email, Like,
Speaker 1: oh shit, I got checked my email, and it's taken
Speaker 1: me some time to set my phone down and and
Speaker 1: to not have those I'm like, Ship, I don't have
Speaker 1: to be anywhere, you know, I mean the last racing
Speaker 1: from one meeting to the nest and juggling budgets and
Speaker 1: buying this and convincing city council members, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I don't have to be anywhere. And
Speaker 1: then I can just say that my beautiful partner comes
Speaker 1: in and tells me to start digging holes in the backyard.
Speaker 9: So let's Scott bullshit you he had to have excavated
Speaker 9: out there today, was digging with it was all working controls.
Speaker 8: I got a little just take off, like what's going on?
Speaker 1: You wouldn't believe the things I've run into with that thing.
Speaker 1: You know, you think I would be precision surgical with
Speaker 1: that thing, and I've already knocked over a broken cup.
Speaker 11: I would say it takes about a year before you
Speaker 11: you get comfortable, because it kind of still feels like
Speaker 11: you're on vacation sometimes or whatever. Like it's about a
Speaker 11: year before you start. And and like you said, we
Speaker 11: said in the pre show, like, you know, you got
Speaker 11: to do this stuff while you can. You know, if
Speaker 11: you want to go see the pyramids, you're not doing
Speaker 11: that when you're seventy five. You know, like you can,
Speaker 11: but it's better to do it now. And uh, and
Speaker 11: do that stuff while you can.
Speaker 4: You know, well what's on the bucket list. You got
Speaker 4: some on the bucket list, so.
Speaker 1: You know what we're developing it. We were we were
Speaker 1: talking about going to Africa on Safari and the South
Speaker 1: Korea thing popped up. I never would have gone to
Speaker 1: South Korea or Japan, and we ended up laying over
Speaker 1: for a week in Japan, a week in South Korea,
Speaker 1: and it was amazing. I mean, I never would have
Speaker 1: gone to Asia on my own. I'm just not one
Speaker 1: to leave America. I'm like, I feel safe here. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not leaving.
Speaker 9: Communicate like, yeah, all the kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So I think that my you know, my beautiful partner
Speaker 1: and I are going to spend some time doing you know,
Speaker 1: some adventures like that. Traveling is something I haven't done
Speaker 1: a lot of. You know, it's a typical fireman. It's
Speaker 1: ski boat trips and houseboat trips and you know, snow
Speaker 1: ski trips and all the shorties. But you know, the
Speaker 1: big thing is slowing down and enjoying all the friends
Speaker 1: and family. Because for many years, I like you guys
Speaker 1: may be the same. I missed every I for thirty
Speaker 1: five years. I worked every everything, giving every holiday. You
Speaker 1: know where I was in the fire station, so everybody
Speaker 1: got used to come to the fire station to see
Speaker 1: me on the holidays.
Speaker 9: So you know, it's kind of new.
Speaker 1: Now we're having all the holidays at home with all
Speaker 1: the family. And so I'm excited and I'm I'm really blessed.
Speaker 1: I'm young, I'm healthy, and I had an amazing career
Speaker 1: and you know, just like opportunities like this, you know,
Speaker 1: chance to share my story with some really great people,
Speaker 1: and uh, the community as a whole in the fire
Speaker 1: service is unparalleled. It's you know, I can I could
Speaker 1: show up in New York and you guys have probably
Speaker 1: put me up in a bedroom.
Speaker 9: Hell yeah, same thing.
Speaker 1: You guys show up in Montana next year.
Speaker 8: You're coming on a boat.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we got a boat, right, Yeah, hell yeah, you
Speaker 9: gotta come to the city.
Speaker 11: All all our guests come on a boat. Right, We
Speaker 11: go around the Statue of Liberty, we go on.
Speaker 1: Well, listen, you know Dave Downey took me on Miami
Speaker 1: Dads fireboat around Miami. So you got some work to do.
Speaker 9: To the scene we have.
Speaker 8: You don't have to Brooklyn Bridge and Power and coming.
Speaker 1: Well, it was Miami in the summer, and we went
Speaker 1: down some corridor where every girl is in a bikini.
Speaker 8: All right, so he's got to speak.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's visual. That's a Florida. Actually, we're saying California
Speaker 9: is very similar.
Speaker 8: If you're going to be in New York from the
Speaker 8: water August. Second, we're going on this year. If you
Speaker 8: want to, If you could make it this year, you're welcome.
Speaker 4: Second, you and your lady.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, we'll take you guys up on it.
Speaker 9: Neither was.
Speaker 1: She spent time in Boston, so she's got a little boss.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Wow, Dragon in New York wicked smart.
Speaker 4: Oh, No, Rhode Island we gotta do the oldest full
Speaker 4: health and safety tip.
Speaker 9: Yes, here we go.
Speaker 2: The First Responder Center for Excellence is a not for
Speaker 2: profit organization dedicated to protecting their lives and livelihoods of
Speaker 2: first responders. Their education and research initiatives aimed to bring
Speaker 2: greater awareness and understanding the challenges to the health, safety
Speaker 2: and well being of firefighters, EMS, personnel, and other first
Speaker 2: responders too. They are an affiliate of the National Fallen
Speaker 2: Firefighter Foundation.
Speaker 5: And I'm going to use a tip that our guest
Speaker 5: gave us tonight. Back then, they didn't use mass hardly ever, right,
Speaker 5: and he retired early because why because he wants to
Speaker 5: enjoy his retirement.
Speaker 4: So please the.
Speaker 5: Whole not wearing masks, not washing up, So it's out
Speaker 5: the window now, bro, take care of yourself, take care
Speaker 5: of your lungs, take care of your health so you
Speaker 5: can live a long retirement on a fixed income.
Speaker 4: Beautiful, wonderful. What we got next week, Ruffy.
Speaker 8: We got chief boys next weekend, Chief boys.
Speaker 5: And we also have I will fill you in on
Speaker 5: how Ellie Coobler, eighty six years old started her week career.
Speaker 8: My mother, what can go wrong?
Speaker 4: She dabbled with, we what could go wrong.
Speaker 9: Help you have a video? Should Scott.
Speaker 8: Problem?
Speaker 4: Wonderful job, great Korea, great stories learned.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a lot of stuff.
Speaker 4: I was interested and did. Okay, he can stay another week.
Speaker 9: I'm ready. I can go fly helicopter. No, let's go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, thanks for having guys.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate it and I had a good time.
Speaker 1: It's good. Good to spending some time with you guys.
Speaker 4: And you can go get us another guest now, gonz
Speaker 4: you did such a fun, wonderful job.
Speaker 9: It was fun. We'll talk about after the show. But anyway,
Speaker 9: a couple of shoutouts, you guys have any I just
Speaker 9: have those two firefighters that.
Speaker 4: Go ahead.
Speaker 9: I'm just gonna make mention. I'm gonna screw his name up,
Speaker 9: but from Tawilada forty one was it? Yeah? Forty one? Yes,
Speaker 9: I can't pronounce his name, Matthew the co Geo Cochia.
Speaker 9: Forgive me if I'm pronouncing it wrong. He was killed
Speaker 9: in a motorcycle accident on the FDR just the other day.
Speaker 9: Condolences to his family, and we had a firefight from
Speaker 9: Saint Lucie County. We passed away all the job. His
Speaker 9: name is Saint Lucie County Fire Jarias Hodge. He had
Speaker 9: some illness. I'm not really sure. That's very vague in
Speaker 9: the story. He went home from work now feeling so
Speaker 9: good and ended up passing away. So I believe they're
Speaker 9: gonna they're gonna consider that a lot of duty death
Speaker 9: for him. That's by you, Yeah, Saint Lucie County, just
Speaker 9: about an hour or so in both of me, excuse.
Speaker 10: Me, that's a line of duty. We're gonna give him
Speaker 10: the five belts. Brother too young, too young, my.
Speaker 9: Friend too young, and another shout out, my last shout,
Speaker 9: I'll be the chief Dave Downey for hooking us up
Speaker 9: with Scott, hooking me up, getting him in here. A
Speaker 9: little kudos to Chief. I know he said he was
Speaker 9: watching earlier. I don't know if he caught that Scott. Yeah,
Speaker 9: they thought he was a Chief Downy from FDM. I
Speaker 9: but I'm sure he gets that all the time.
Speaker 4: That guy comes on our show. We're gonna make a
Speaker 4: lot of money because was he's talking to us beyond
Speaker 4: the grave.
Speaker 9: That guy, Oh that guy.
Speaker 4: So yeah, alright, guys, until next week. I was gonna
Speaker 4: I won't even talk about the membership, just go sign
Speaker 4: up for the membership.
Speaker 9: We'll talk about We'll get it out there a little,
Speaker 9: get it on Instagram. We'll get it guys. Yeah, we
Speaker 9: had another new member today, so it's stats.
Speaker 4: What I say, Stay low and go.
Speaker 8: Thanks again, Chief. We'll see it the big one. Everybody
Speaker 8: take care.
Speaker 9: All right, Thanks again, Scott. Remember we're rolling heavy down
Speaker 9: the South Florida. As I like to say, stay salty,
Speaker 9: my friend. Have a good night.