Film pilot sampler

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Also by Jerry Grayson, AFC

‘Interesting to read a different viewpoint of that tragic Fastnet Race. Grayson’s recollection is moving: it reads like a roll-call of terror.’

Sailing Today ‘A grippingly clear insight into sea rescues. Fascinating.’

Yachting Monthly ‘You will be disappointed to finish.’

Australian Flying ‘There can be no more gripping an account of the highs and lows of life as a helicapter rescue pilot.’

Pilot Magazine ‘Thoroughly recommended.’

Fleet Air Arm Officer’s Association

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FROM JAMES BOND TO HURRICANE KATRINA

JERRY GRAYSON, AFC

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Adlard Coles Nautical An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com www.adlardcoles.com ADLARD COLES, ADLARD COLES NAUTICAL and the Buoy logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Š Jerry Grayson, 2017 Jerry Grayson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-4729-4107-7 ePDF: 978-1-4729-4104-6 ePub: 978-1-4729-4106-0 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset in Haarlemmer MT by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press Bloomsbury Publishing Plc makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in the manufacture of our books are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. Our manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com.

Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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To Sara Louise; the love of my life, for making it all possible.

And to Sam and Tips for making it all worth doing.

www.JerryG.co Many of the stories in this book relate to sections of films that have made it on to the internet. Visit Jerry Grayson’s website for links, more pictures and other bonus material.

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21 KATRINA AROUND THE TIME WE FINISHED IN Athens I was beginning to wonder whether to hang up my flying gloves. I’d reached the age of fifty without damaging myself; many old friends and contemporaries had not been so lucky. I’d had a good run at some very special jobs, been blessed with capturing every conceivable lighting effect the heavens could offer, and flown lower and closer than most pilots ever achieve in a career. I was also beginning to feel that I might have rolled the dice often enough, and that if I blindly carried on I might not stay so lucky. Then along came the Cineflex in 2005.

The Cineflex camera system is enclosed in a neat weatherproof ball, carries the very latest cameras and is stabilised to an extent that I never thought I would see within my lifetime. I’d always shied away from owning the big gyro-stabilised systems such as the Wescam and the FLIR because their reliability was suspect. Imagine spending half a million dollars on a car and finding that it only 229

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worked half the time, provided there was an engineer accompanying it on every occasion. But the Cineflex was new-generation, had an outstanding reputation for reliability and enclosed a beautiful Sony HDC 1500 camera that recorded in the brand new high-definition tape format. Of course Moore’s law, which observes that the processing power of an integrated circuit has doubled every year since they were invented, has since resulted in cameras with eight times the number of pixels recorded to solid state hard drives, but in 2005 the Cineflex left the competition for dead.

We took the plunge, borrowed an eye-watering amount of money and set off to Los Angeles to learn about, play with and ultimately take delivery of our brand new baby, #21 off the production line. Gyro-stabilisation is a black art whereby a tiny electronic box senses the movement of the helicopter and imparts an equal and opposite movement into the camera. In this way the lens remains firmly fixed on the subject even in the face of enormous air turbulence or, more likely, pilot incompetence. This has been the holy grail of aerial filming for a very long time but the stumbling block was always the delay between the gyro sensing the movement and correcting for it. John Coyle, the designer of the Cineflex, had somehow overcome this problem and produced, quite literally in his garage, a wondrous system. From 12,000 feet up and 12 miles away, a Cineflex can hold a person in centre frame and record exactly what they are doing, even if the helicopter is being thrown around the sky.

I have since heard some very experienced film pilots claim that the advantage lies in how much easier it makes their job, but to me that misses the point. With stability of that magnitude, the creative possibilities offered to the aerial team become almost endless.

Mick had flown in from the UK and Warwick had accompanied Sara and me from Australia. We started by lashing the system to the rear tray of a pick-up truck and equipping the ‘cockpit’ of 230

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the truck with all the monitors, recorders and power supplies we would eventually be using in a helicopter. In this way we could experiment, learn and gain experience without the pressure of cost that a chopper implies. We whooped with joy at the imagery we were creating. Unfortunately we did get a little carried away. As we left the Hollywood area, we began experimenting with how tight we could zoom in to the airliners coming and going from LAX. The police cruiser that pulled us over was accompanied by around six other similar vehicles, all lit up like Christmas trees. Mick and I exited our front seats and stood against a wall, as instructed, to receive a stern lecture about pointing things at aeroplanes at an airport. Meanwhile Warwick was so totally surrounded by equipment that he couldn’t evacuate the vehicle and was lucky not to get his head blown off by the police officer he surprised by eventually emerging with his hands on his head.

With that little misunderstanding laid to rest, we moved on to the helicopter work and I confirmed to myself that I was now back in the game for the foreseeable future. The huge zoom capability meant that we could achieve relative movements of the foreground and background beyond our wildest dreams. We could look in towards the centre of downtown Los Angeles and fill the frame with the reflective windows of one skyscraper while making the windows of another pass in front. It was a process of realisation, exploration and joy.

As Mick wrestled with new technical challenges, Warwick found new sensitivities in the fine fingertip controls and I expanded the 3D map in my head to encompass foreground and background subjects that were often separated by many miles, Hurricane Katrina relentlessly bore down on New Orleans. The rolling CNN news coverage gave us a feel for the strength of the storm as we watched reporter Anderson Cooper being blown off his feet right in the middle of the wonderful town where we’d partied during 231

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previous visits. But the one thing not being conveyed at all was a sense of scale and context.

With stock shots in mind, plus an opportunity to learn how to use the Cineflex in the field, we decided we had to be there. This was the mindset at the start, but how different our emotional involvement would turn out to be by the end.

A helicopter was despatched. Sara sought and achieved permission for us to be one of only two helicopters allowed into the restricted zone, but failed to find accommodation anywhere in the southern states, while Warwick, Mick and I packed our brand new Cineflex into the thirteen bespoke flight cases we’d had manufactured locally. Sara additionally confirmed with Getty Images that, yes, they would most certainly support our endeavours while she continuously rang every vehicle hire company she could find. The only vehicle available to us across the whole of the southern United States was in San Diego, just 100 miles south. In a take-it-or-leave-it deal, it was going to cost us $10,000 per week for a very high-tech expanding truck with all the mod-cons. Sara grabbed it with open arms and by dusk that evening we were in San Diego collecting the keys to our Star Trek spaceship. So began a road trip of over 2,000 miles towards the devastation that was once New Orleans.

While one of us drove the other two were able to sleep, navigate and explore what would become our home for the next two weeks.

The first exploration revealed that we didn’t have any bedding and Sara’s indignant call to the hire company was received with, ‘Your boys are going to New Orleans. Everything will get stolen so we’ve taken whatever we can out of the truck.’

By the time we joined a long line of military vehicles queuing to cross the Mississippi in Baton Rouge, Sara had taken the redeye to Getty’s offices in New York from where she would shuttle backwards and forwards with tapes under her arm over the coming 232

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shoot period. We found a deserted schoolyard in Slidell, just across Lake Pontchartrain from the equally deserted New Orleans, and whistled up the helicopter to join us.

Our experiences in Louisiana and Mississippi post-Katrina were legion, but the principal highlights that are seared into my soul are these: • An entire, vital, modern American city lying under water.

• The complete absence of people, like something from a postapocalyptic movie.

• Calls over the radio from rescue helicopters who were seeing human bodies being consumed by alligators.

• The day that George W. Bush came to town for a photo call and all relief helicopters were grounded for 24 hours in the interest of his safety.

• The smell permeating our chopper, even from 1,500 feet, of oil mixed with sea water, rotting vegetation, sewage and human remains.

• Long freight trains that had been picked up by the wind and tossed into a forest.

• The depot of a freight-forwarding company wherein every single shipping container had been thrown on top of one another, then topped off with the trucks that used to move them.

• More than a hundred school buses parked in neat rows, unused and underwater.

• Aeroplanes blown upside down and parked on top of each other.

• Mud, mud and more layers of toxic mud covering everything. . . . and so on and so on and so on. In most of the film work I’ve undertaken we have been able to remain detached and professional, centring our attention on the lens and the framing. In New Orleans we found ourselves often pausing in our work to simply stare out 233

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of the helicopter window and try to wrap our heads around the enormity of the human catastrophe we were witnessing, all brought about by Man’s belief that he can ignore and master Nature. I concluded that this particular fallacy had surely been laid to rest forever – but of course it hasn’t.

When witnessing and trying to record a disaster on this scale it sometimes takes a small thing at a personal level to bring it home.

That moment came for me at Baton Rouge airport one day when I left Warwick supervising the refuel while I sought out a small corner of the public car park to smoke a cigarette. At the other end of the bench from me sat a large black lady whose entire being could be summed up in the word ‘Mama’. She was dressed in her Sunday best and could so easily have been sitting in her church.

With her flowery hat and her hands folded neatly in the lap of her long and pretty dress, she politely engaged me in conversation. I answered her questions about what an English boy was doing in her neighbourhood and she thanked me – thanked me, for heaven’s sake – for doing all I could to make the world aware of what had happened there.

My new friend introduced me to her meek and confused husband, her proud and upright teenage son and her disabled young daughter, each of whom were about to be evacuated to California by the wonderful Angel Flight organisation, through whom corporate jets are donated to humanitarian causes. She had heard of California but had no idea when, or if, her family would come back. She was staying; she just knew that her calling was to rebuild the family home so they had somewhere to come back to. She laughingly asked if she could come on my next flight (‘I’m only little, you’ll hardly notice me’), just to see if her home was still there.

She had already told me that she came from the ninth ward area of the city. Therefore I already knew that her home wasn’t there any 234

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longer. Nor were the shops where she used to get her groceries, nor the church for which she had dressed. In the face of such enormous optimism and human resilience, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her those things.

More than ten years later I still haven’t fully got over that encounter with the human face of a disaster of such magnitude, nor was it helped by another face, this time a white one, when we landed back at Slidell for the night. A single café had managed to stay open using gas cookers – there was no electricity. Our otherwise charming middle-aged hostess related to us the story of how her elderly parents had taken to their sailing boat on the night of Katrina, had drifted for ten days and of course she was hugely relieved that they had just been found alive and well. Her parting shot to us that night was, ‘Of course it’s been terrible for the city but in the end it might not be a bad thing . . . you know . . . with the cleansing an’ all.’

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