Black Hawk down
Alex James My friend Spud had an Agusta 109. That's the best type of helicopter. They're like super-fancy flying Ferraris, shiny, and all Louis Vuitton and shagpile inside, the closest thing to a magic carpet that you can get. For Spud, the 109 was a skeleton key to everything, as well as a magic carpet to everywhere. People always wanted to borrow it to go to swanky soirees and special occasions in. Those he hardly knew invited him to grands prix, garden parties, Glastonbury, Glyndebourne and for the short amount of time that he owned it he went to absolutely everything. He sold it for a couple of million more than he paid for it, too. It's funny how these things work. Everyone was happy in that invincible bubble. 109s aren't cheap, but it's definitely best to stick with expensive helicopters. A low-priced helicopter isn't something that properly exists. People are always buying it in cheap choppers.
The British army uses a model called a Gazelle. That's a really nice machine, just one jet engine, but pretty safe, as long as no one is shooting at you. The army auctions them off in Bond Street when they've finished with them. It's about the best helicopter deal going, you can pick one up for less than a second-hand Aston Martin, but that's because owning an ex-military flying machine is really complicated. You need a 'permit to fly' from the Civil Aviation Authority every time you want to go anywhere, plus it's best to set up a company to own any kind of aircraft to limit your liability if you crash into anything. The paperwork gets really tedious and it's just much better to know someone with a helicopter than to own one. That's why Spud was so popular.
There's a lot of noise in a helicopter, and even in the really posh ones you have to wear a headset and you can't really read without feeling woozy. Ultimately, it's all very blokey, you're strapping yourself to a huge engine and that's just not as nice for your brain as moving your legs. The first and last hundred feet are miraculous, but no matter how short the flight or how advanced the helicopter there's somehow always time to get bored.
I've spent the past few days flying around the South American jungle in Black Hawks with the Junglas, the Colombian Special Forces. A Black Hawk really develops the idea of invincibility that was suggested by Spud's toy. It's a properly unassailable hammer, the principal instrument of jungle warfare: a flying tank. All the luxury of the 109 stripped away and replaced by far more practical heavily armed commandos. They sit obediently on the floor in files, hugging their guns. It was all so homoerotic, a throbbing speeding macho machine crammed with fit young gladiators, sweating, hearts racing.
'If we do come under fire, it'll just sound like popcorn; but don't worry there's inches of Kevlar in the fuselage and they'll be trying to shoot the gunners anyway, not us,' said someone. The gunners had the advantage of bulletproof vests and helmets. I was wearing a floppy hat from Holland and Holland that I'd been quite pleased with until that point. We were flying along at about 1,500 feet with the doors open, immaculate mountainous rainforest as far as the eye could see. It was like being in a flying open-top car. These taka-takas, as they are known by the locals, are, like all heelos, as they are known by the military, a means to an end and not an end in themselves and I soon found that, despite the danger and the view and the strange accelerations, I was exactly as bored as I would have been on the Northern line around Kennington. There was nothing to do but wait.
Black Hawks patrol in pairs and suddenly the other one had an engine failure. The pilot brought it to the ground successfully but our cameraman, who was on board, was quite shaken, and had cut his head. They were overloaded and we were in the mountains and it could easily have been much, much worse. The mission was cancelled and we were shuttled back to Cali where we got on a scheduled flight to Bogota.
There were heavy thunderstorms all around the airfield and the aeroplane was quite small. That's not a zero-risk situation either, and I felt my stomach knotting again. Soon we'd skipped around the towering anvils and we were cruising through clear skies, out of danger at last. I dozed off. When I woke up, there was quite a kerfuffle. It appeared that a young woman who was sitting down the front had just died. There were, bizarrely, three doctors on the plane. Ambulances met us on the runway, but it didn't look good. Wherever you're going and however you're getting there, when you're going to go, you're going to go.
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