I Found A Man Frozen Alive | Search and Rescue with Mike Patey

okay guys we're gonna try something different on this video i'm gonna show you the new toy in the shed the helicopter why we have it for our search and rescue i'll even tell you one of the stories about the time we found a guy frozen solid absolutely scared us to death and uh a little bit about the chopper what we're going to use it for i hope you like this it's a little different back to work it's physics math and engineering machine it draft it build it test it break it every time something new gets built the entire world advances laying in bed at night it's designing new parts designing new suspension designing new wings okay guys so this is a little different you know i'm usually building scrappy wild aircraft draco today i'm not doing much building i'm probably throwing a couple of the new um watt lights on this this time but i want to give you a quick tour of the helicopter what i've been doing normally i'm building a plane the last couple weeks i took some time off just to get refreshed on flying the bell 206 i've got most of my time in 44s and 66 helicopters i've been flying for 15 years my fat goo will go back i found an old picture the other day of uh my original first helicopter my son was like this big next to me and uh it's fun he's now taller than me but i've been flying helicopters forever we got this new bell 206 and i had to take a break from building my airplanes so that i could get really tightened up on my auto rotations so uh i'll tell you a little bit about auto rotations and then a little bit about what i use the helicopter for so auto rotations is just practicing for those of you who don't fly helicopters is dropping collective which disconnects the blades from the engine and you take the helicopter down as if you have a complete engine failure the auto rotations i wanted to get fresh on is what's called a fold down auto which means we never re-engage the engine to the blades and we take it all the way down to full touchdown so i'll show a couple of those clips here but what's really fun about it is we can literally even at this high elevation we live at 4 500 foot airport we're able to drop collective disengage the prop and let the the rotor spool up as we descend and we're trading the engine energy and the descent to rotate the blades and as we approach the ground we start pitching the blades pulling collective pitching the blades to arrest that descent now we're now trading rotational energy we collect it on the way down to lifting force by pitching the blades but that rotational energy is dissipating really fast at this elevation we have about three seconds to stop the fall arrest it lower the nose and set it down and so that's what i wanted to practice that's what i've been doing what's really fun and i missed some of the funnest ones we did basic run-on landings where instead of coming to a full stop we slide them on but i really wanted to focus the full down to a full stop we also did some reverse auto rotations where we actually simulate the engine out and then trying to land on a spot behind us so we drop it and then we have to fly backwards grab our spot with no engine and then fly back forward regain our air speed so we can arrest spool the blades up in the flare and set it down it's really awesome you can land a helicopter with no engine at all perfectly safe i don't know how many we did unbelievable over and over and over a couple weeks of flying i feel like i'm ready to do what we bought this helicopter for and that's go out and safely do search and rescue my brother mark and i have been on the search and rescue team for over 15 years we've done call outs all over the place and uh quite frankly it's it's one of the most rewarding things we're able to do to give back we don't have been donating our helicopters the time the expense to do it all this time if you have an opportunity to give back to your community go do it whether it's cleaning a park or whatever it is just give back it it's rewarding to yourself it's been rewarding to us and it helps other people so um i want to tell you a little story about one of these call outs story time is here let's gather round come on everybody gather round uh i did in a helicopter it was in the one i'll show you a picture here but it scared me to death and here's why we go on all kinds of call outs this particular call out it was in the winter someone had gone fishing it was just before the ice froze over the edges were crusted out ice was thick and starting to form but the middle was open and a wife called and her husband hadn't returned had gone fishing alone on a nearby lake and never came back first thing we do is we wonder if there's something else going on marital problems whatever it is and it wasn't we do a little bit of research real fast call around we found his vehicle hooked to a trailer with no boat at the marina so now we know hey this is real it's getting dark it's getting cold he's by himself so this is a real call out so we go on the call out and we start searching still daylight starts to go dark snow flurries start to come in now the guy's been gone since earlier that day and we're moving into a really really cold night and we're searching for the boat and the boat ended up turning up but no one in it adrift on the side of the lake and now we're really worried because the likelihood is he probably fell in and we know that we're approaching if he had fallen in the water earlier in the day the chances are he may likely not have made it but we never want to give up and we push all the way through until whatever it is that causes us to have to shut down for safety reasons and go home well this particular time the night got so late the wave started to pick up it was getting rough forecast to get worse the boats all came off the lake that were doing the search we're still going in the helicopter everyone's pulling off and we decided let's put one more load of fuel in and run late see if we can get one more shot because our basically if we didn't find him that night the likelihood of survivability in the water was certainly he wasn't going to make it outside of the water out of reach of some help after being dunked in the water likelihood is he would not make it probably likely he's already gone so we went out and we went for one last run and just randomly we passed across this island it's uh we call it bird island it's a place sometimes we would go land our bush plains on when the water gets really low it had a long spit and we'd water ski our planes up and landed on this little spit but in the winter as the water comes up the we call it bird island and it's just white whether it's snow or bird crap it's one or the other and it's just a little mound and we're flying over it as we go by we thought well i don't remember that pile of rocks right there because it's usually small cobble and uh so well let's go back and take another look we fly over and there's a snow flurry covering the island and we don't see anything but white snow white ground and this bump that looked abnormally large and we thought oh my gosh that bump's not right i don't think it's anything let's go take another closer look we got down and we hovered on it and we couldn't tell from just a hover so i actually set the helicopter down in the water there wasn't enough room for me to land i mean this is when i say island it's now just a bump sneaking out of the water and there's not not a boat there but um we land and we stick the skids in the water almost took the belly to the to the water the skis are down in the rocks and we send out my friend dave who's with me to go take a look and he goes over there and sure enough it's a frozen solid individual and he we think he's hadn't made it next thing you know the guy opens his eyes and then it scared us to death [Music] because you walk up and you hit somebody who's been dunked in water their clothes is like solid rock it is literally an ice cube covered in a snow blow over and also on the eyes open up so um it was kind of a mad panic rush at that point i quickly got on the radio we called the shore they had already pulled the rescue boats out of the water but the trailers were still right there they backed them right back in raced out brought out blankets revival gear got them on and uh fortunately made a full recovery but um we had all kinds of call outs like that and that one i'll never forget when you're expecting someone to be gone and then they look at you it's enough to make your insides kind of wig out but it's the most rewarding thing to be able to take someone and bring them home to their family i hope that the rest of my life i'll have the ability to to continue doing search and rescue um whether it's in the helicopter or our planes we use this one what we wanted to do different with this to kind of help it be a better rescue chopper than the helicopters i've we've had in our past is we went and specifically looked for a six a a older model bell 206. the really early ones hadn't been adapted for military component add-ons guns and other items and so really early ones were extremely lightweight we live in high and hot area elevations and we wanted to help find a helicopter it was affordable used and lightweight with a good overhauled engine fresh paint and interior and so this is what we found this helicopter only weighs almost uh nearly a flat 1800 pounds and we're pulling more weight out of it new lightweight led lights on it watt sent us out some so thank you a lot for doing that we'll get those installed i'll give you a quick tour inside the avionics is a little bit older right here but we can fix that i think what we need at this point is a new garmin panel for it so i'm going to reach out to garmin and see what they might have for us so we can upgrade the avionics make it a little more conducive to search and rescue maybe put some night vision on it uh the back got more room in the back three seats in the back two up front and a good amount of cargo space this does have one area it's a little bit lacking um and that's the tail rotor this helicopter has options of different motors this one has been upgraded to a much bigger motor so this helps us out with the high altitude the tail rotor is a bit small when the air gets really thin you get some gusty winds on the tops of the pinnacle points that we end up searching a lot for we go there a lot it's high it's hot it's windy and that tail rotor is going to struggle a little up there so we're going to redo that we got the motor for it so i'm going to put a new tail rotor on it make sure that when we get up there we don't run out of our left pedal just even during the training i found on some of the ridge points landing on in the wind up on some snow crests and dropping it in the snow a couple times i'm really i'll clear on that left side of that pedal so we're going to make that upgrade panel upgrade lighting upgrade and uh i think we'll probably put the sheriff search and rescue tag right here haven't decided for sure but anyway this is why we haven't got a lot done on scrappy lately and there's anything that can pull me away from building an airplane it's getting something for search and rescue trying to make sure that i'm staying proficient i'm flying a lot i've got a lot of helicopter time we actually my brother and i and friend partner in our helicopter we bought a helicopter brand new we timed it out completely in our 44 from from zero all the way to after being completely torn down so it took us about 10 years to get there but um anyway this is my newest bird i'm super excited about it i hope you guys enjoy that that little side distraction story about search and rescue some of you have asked me i have done countless rescue call outs some great outcomes some not as great outcomes but either way our goal is always to return a loved one home to their family no matter how that is and so that's what this helicopter's for so i hope it has a lot of good life in her to help us out for the next years to come thank you for following along i appreciate it if you want to see some more search and rescue call outs or some of the call outs we do on this if that interests you aside from building aircraft the planes i like to build and race and compete let me know and maybe i can add some more search and rescue call outs that we do in the future i'm going to turn it in right here thanks for following along you guys know the drill i'm going to get back to work [Music] you

Channel: Mike Patey

Views: 199,395

Rating: 4.9589624 out of 5

Keywords: Air racing, turbulence, Draco, wilga, mike patey, STOL aircraft, Bush Flying, Flying Cowboys, Mark Patey, Mike Patey, Pylon Racing, Patey Twins, Fastest Turbo Prop, Turbine Lancair, Turbine Legacy, Hillside Landing, Crosswind Landings, Water Landings, Water ski airplane, Best tugs, Grip lock ties, Back to work, Carbon Fiber Molds, Carbon fiber layout, how to carbon fiber, custom parts, world record aircraft, experimental, super cub, engineering, how it's made

Id: cmcQKnxuN7s

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021