By JILL KING GREENWOOD, The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA - Hillsborough sheriff’s Deputy Lester Hathcox had about 25 seconds to figure out how to keep the helicopter he was piloting from slamming into the trees and earth 450 feet below him. So, Hathcox called upon his 13 years of experience flying aircraft and switched to autopilot, so to speak.
“It takes a lot of training, and it has to become instinct to the pilot because you don’t have time to think,” Hathcox said Tuesday.
Hathcox talked to the media Tuesday about the crash that he and a passenger, Deputy Robert Walden, walked away from Sunday after the craft landed in mangrove trees near Ruskin.
Hathcox said he won’t let the near disaster keep him from flying. He plans to go back to work today and put in a 12-hour shift.
“It’s my job,” he said.
Also Tuesday, sheriff’s officials and the state Division of Forestry used a crane to hoist the downed helicopter and a rear tail that broke off from the mangroves.
They were taken to the sheriff’s aviation unit at Vandenburg Airport in Tampa, where investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration will examine the wreckage and try to determine what caused the crash.
Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Rod Reder said the chopper probably can’t be flown again.
Reder on Tuesday credited Hathcox’s quick thinking with the successful landing.
“It takes a special talent to put a chopper down in that kind of area,” Reder said. “We can replace choppers. We can’t replace lives.”
Hathcox, who has worked for the sheriff’s office for nearly 20 years, said he was responding to a call about a suspicious person who dispatchers said ran into a marshy area off Shellpoint Road on Sunday afternoon when he felt the 1972 Bell Jet Ranger helicopter losing power.
When the engine failed, Hathcox said, he went into an “auto rotation,” a maneuver that spins the aircraft so the flow of air through the helicopter’s blades is reversed and the chopper is propelled to the ground at a slower speed.
At the same time, he was looking for a safe place to land.
“I knew it was going to be a hard landing, so I started looking for somewhere to put it down where we wouldn’t get too hurt and where I could save as much of the copter as possible,” Hathcox said. He spotted the mangroves and knew they could break the copter’s fall.
When the helicopter crashed into the trees, a stump pushed up through the two seats in the cockpit. Hathcox’s shoulder was hurt by the rough landing but not seriously. Walden was not hurt.
Hathcox’s wife, Virginia, was at the couple’s Tampa home when she heard chatter on the police scanner about a helicopter crash. Her phone rang, and it was the sheriff’s office calling to tell her about the accident.
“Once they told me he walked away, I knew everything would be all right,” said Virginia Hathcox, who has been married to her husband for 16 years. “I was relieved.”