“You can get out now,” the pilot said

The  whop whop whop of the helicopter blades grew in the distance. We’d been slumped, resting on the packed boxes, waiting for that familiar sound, and now we leapt into action as the red machine curved into view around the low hills. I stood arms skyward, back to the wind, directing the pilot to a clear landing spot on the low scrub near our packed-down field camp. As as the helicopter descended slowly toward me, blades screaming, holding my breath in the blasting cold air, I crounched where I had stood and waited for the pilot to land and shut down. Only once the blades whirred down to a halt did I look up and see the nose of the helicopter literally right in front my of my face.

Helicopters are the only way to reach the inland areas in most parts of Greenland. Most field geologists in Greenland, like me, have plenty of experience in being ferried around in them. And I’ve had enough briefings, and heard enough terrible stories, to have a great respect for them. There are rules for behaviour around helicopters that are now ingrained. One, for example, is stay still, low, and in sight of the pilot when the helicopter is landing. So that’s why I sat crouched there, as the chopper landed almost on top of me.

Only once has this rule failed me, when the place I was crouching was exactly where the pilot wanted to land, in what was a fairly tight spot. It was in Fiordland, New Zealand, so unlike Greenland the pilot had to find a space between the trees. The four of us with our packed-down camp, sat silently in the ceaseless drizzle that had already soaked us through. Grey mist hung low in the valleys. There was no way the chopper would come in this weather, we thought. But this was our scheduled pick up day, so we had to be ready, just in case. Then we heard the whop whop whop approaching through the mist. When he was only perhaps fifty metres away, the tearing sound of the blades filling the air, the chopper appeared from the mist. We thought we had a good place for him, but he moved off to one side, edging closer and closer to where I crouched. There was no way I was going to move, even with the screaming chopper hovering just inches away. I knew the rules. After the pilot realised this, he hovered the chopper just a foot or so from where I was crouched, arms over my head, and literally shoved me out of the way with one of the skids, and dropped the helicopter down where I had been sitting. On the flight back, there was no visibility. The pilot had removed the doors and by leaning out the side of the helicopter, watching the level of the canopy just below, he returned slowly down the valley by hovering just above the trees. Once we reached the cliffed end to the glacier-cut valley we had been descending, he dropped through the clouds and emerged above the dark blue fjord below.

Helicopters are great and can take you to amazing places. But sometimes you don’t necessarily want to get where you think you want to get to.

Fiordland is a tough place to do field work. It’s an area that averages seven metres of rain per year on terrain marked by thousand metre cliffs dropping straight into the sea. But we were lucky to experience some rare clear weather for almost a week. And maybe we got a little cocky. My boss had been eyeing a stunning ridge where there was a rock he wanted to sample. At the end of a day in the field, four of us packed into the helicopter side-by-side, he instructed the pilot to drop him on the ridge without shutting down. He would collect the sample and then the pilot would come back in to pick him up. No problem.

As we approached the ridge, we all had a growing realisation of how steeply this knife-edge dropped away on each side, swiftly plunging toward vertical walls below. The pilot was unfazed.

“I can’t land. I’ll just rest one skid on the ground and you can get out,” he said over the cracking radio.

I saw my boss’ eyes widen as we approached. We felt the soft bump as the skid hit the rocky slab, the other skid hanging in space over the abyss laid out below in the brilliant sunshine. I was glad, that day, to be sitting in the middle passenger seat in the back, hemmed in by a protective layer of geologists on either side.

“You can get out now,” I heard the pilot say, and I smiled to myself as I felt my boss leaning back into the helicopter as he forced his legs to climb out of the door and onto the skid below.

Back in Greenland, almost all of my helicopter-supported fieldwork has been in Air Greenland AS350s, a powerful, comfortable helicopter that can land in most places. But once, I was collected from a field camp in a much larger helicopter that can take 24 passengers – the Sikorsky S61. I had been in the field for while, and was used to rotors-running pickups (so the pilot doesn’t lose time with shutting down and starting up again). So when I was told I’d be picked up in the Sikorsky, which was on route to another field camp with about 20 geologists, I was packed down and ready to go, just me and my rucksack, which I could easily carry on board without a shut down…I thought.

As the helicopter approached, I was amazed at its size, a long red and white beast, far louder than the AS350. I could see a row of people peering out the porthole windows. As it descended to the ground, the sheer force of blasting air left me unable to breath. But I got up from my crouched position and started moving, reluctantly, leaning into the wind, toward the helicopter. I paused as I noticed that there was no way of actually getting into the helicopter, the door being so high off the ground. Hand held protectively over my eyes in the hurricane of sound and wind that held me back, I saw between my fingers that someone in the cockpit was waving their arms at me in a ‘Get down!’ kind of a way. So I assumed my previous crouching position and waited. Slowly, the rotors wound down from a screech to a whine to a slow whomp whomp whomp, and then they were still and the world was startlingly quiet. I stood, examining my options. Then the door opened into a stairway that descended to the ground and a flight attendant in her nicely pressed Air Greenland uniform appeared at the top of the stairs and ushered me over. Windblown, carrying my field rucksack, wearing unwashed field clothes and hiking boots, I climbed the stairs into the cabin and stared bewildered at the people sitting two-by-two down the isle. After the chopper had taken off again, the flight attendant returned down the isle offering passengers sweets from a bowl. And I felt a world away from the field camp I had just left.