..........Enter the helicopter.............

Five of the passengers in the speedboat watched impassively as the helicopter clattered towards them across Weymouth Bay. Alan Green, the sixth passenger, assessed its line of approach with the eye of an experienced helicopter pilot and waited for the Westland S51 to take up its position, 500 feet above the speedboat's wake. He was well aware that his whole future in flying would depend on what happened in the next few minutes, four miles out to sea. Alan Bristow sat at the controls of the helicopter and reflected that the future of a whole industry could depend on the sure aim of the man sprawled full length on the floor of the cockpit. Lt.-Col. L. V. Stewart Blacker, once of the 3rd Turkestan Rifles, squinted through his monocle along the sights of the modified anti-tank gun, protruding from the open doorway of the cockpit, and took aim at the forty gallon oil drum being towed behind the speedboat on a twenty-foot float. Blacker had helped to make the gun himself, one of many inventions during a colourful military career in which he worked on the development of the 3.5 inch infantry mortar, introduced firing through the propeller arc to the Royal Flying Corps, and produced the P.I.A.T. anti-tank gun in the most desperate days of World War II. At 67, he now travelled in a helicopter across Weymouth Bay with the total confidence of the man who took part in the first flight over Mount Everest, back in 1933.

The gun in his arms was a variation of the famous P.I.A.T. which he had created in the garden shed of the stately home in Hampshire where he was living in retirement. Green heard a muffled explosion from the helicopter when Blacker opened fire, then came a clanging impact from behind the speedboat as a missile tore a hole in the oil drum. There was an immediate tightening of interest from Green's five companions in the boat. They watched closely while the helicopter hovered in position for Blacker to fire nine more missiles. Three narrowly missed the drum as it rolled wildly on its float in the wake of the speedboat. The other six were resounding direct hits, the last knocking the drum from its mounting and into the sea.

Green sat discreetly apart from the other passengers while they discussed the demonstration with thinly disguised enthusiasm on the way back to shore, and during the drive to a disused naval air station at Henstridge in Somerset. There they were greeted by an obviously excited Bristow. " Gentlemen," he announced " if that oil drum had been a whale you would have been £2,000 richer after Colonel Blacker's first shot with six more whales killed in the next ten minutes. All that from two men and one helicopter. Think of the results you would get from sending a whole fleet of helicopters into the Antarctic all using guns like this. They would kill more whales than all the whaling ships of the world put together." The five men who accompanied Green in the motor boat were the representatives of a Dutch whaling company. But Bristow knew the Scottish, Norwegian and Dutch whaling interests were so closely linked that he was talking to a cross section of the entire industry. He explained how a missile fired from an airborne whaler's gun would electrocute the whale on impact, the harpoon being linked by cable to a powerful generator on board the helicopter. Death would be instantaneous and virtually painless compared with the traditional method of " playing " a harpooned whale like a ninety-ton salmon on the end of half-a-mile of cable from the catcher-boat's foredeck, a hazardous procedure taking anything from a few minutes to two hours. Whales killed from the air would be automatically inflated by a cartridge of compressed gas contained within the body of the missile, and left floating on the surface to be collected by tow-boats and brought to the factory ship at its convenience. " Obviously there are many snags that still need sorting out," said Bristow. "That's why I asked you to come down and see the show. We need your financial backing to go ahead and perfect this idea. But I do believe we have shown you enough today to prove beyond all doubt that it could be something like ten times more productive to kill whales from a helicopter. If we can hit an oil drum seven times out of ten at a range of 100 yards we can fire our missile into the stomach of an eighty-foot whale every time."

The Dutchmen came to Weymouth with the stoic reserve of sailors whose every voyage lasts six months. They went home, carrying Bristow's burning eagerness between them. And long after they had gone, he stood by the helicopter, assuring Green and Blacker that the incident out in the bay would revolutionise an industry which had not come up with anything as dramatic since the Norwegian Svend Foyn invented the heavy calibre harpoon gun in 1865. Listening to Bristow's salesmanship, Green was reminded of the first time he met the man who was now his employer. Sub.-Lieut. A. G. Green of the Fleet Air Arm, a reluctant transfer to helicopters from the fighter-bombers which he considered the " real hot stuff," was posted to a detachment of 771 Squadron at Portland in 1945 and told to report to Sub.-Lieut. Bristow. In front of an old seaplane hangar, housing the Sikorsky R4 helicopters mounted on floats, he was received by an aggressive, prematurely bald young man with the words: "Take this brush and sweep the seaweed from this slipway." Bristow had little regard for the niceties of naval discipline where his helicopters were concerned. He gave his fellow officer the task of driving a fifteen-cwt. Bedford truck which towed the helicopters out of the water, up the slipway and into the hangar. Green, an inexperienced driver, was once so absorbed with the ponderous behaviour of the truck that he began to tow the helicopter into the hangar before Bristow, the pilot, had time to switch off the engine and stop the rotor blades. According to Green, the Wrens at Chatham afterwards complained about the language which rang out from the cockpit.

Bristow's concern for his precious machine gave no hint that he, too, was an unwilling convert from fixed wing aircraft. In 1944 he was switched from fighters to become one of the Fleet Air Arm's first helicopter pilots. He served with the Merchant Navy earlier in the war and had been torpedoed four times. That seemed to his superiors an excellent qualification for this rather eccentric form of flying machine which they then envisaged as a secret weapon for combating the U-boat menace in the Atlantic. Bristow flew a helicopter for the first time and embraced its possibilities with a passion which Igor Sikorsky himself could scarcely have matched on September 14, 1939, when he finally established the helicopter as a legitimate form of air transport instead of a flying freak of no real purpose.

Seven years after Sikorsky's historic flight, Lieut. Bristow stood on the slipway at Portland, waved the glossy brochure he had received from the manufacturers for America's very latest helicopter, the Sikorsky S51, and assured Green : " These things are going places. Another six years and they will have created a whole new world of aviation." The prophecy proved as optimistic as Bristow's efforts to force sports-car performance from the fifteen-cwt. Bedford truck he used to drive between the naval station and his home at Osmington Mills. But with the same enthusiasm he did his personal best to make the prophecy come true. On leaving the Fleet Air Arm, he joined Westland Aircraft as a helicopter test pilot. Four engine failures in one day could not even faintly crumple his evangelical faith in helicopters. Between testing flights, he organised training courses for foreign pilots, and demonstrated to British Army units the use of helicopters in building Bailey bridges from the air.

On September 30, 1948, he landed a Sikorsky S51 in the Place des Invalides, Paris, to complete a journey of forty-six minutes twenty-nine seconds from St. Paul's Cathedral, in London. A Bristol 171 helicopter had carried special mail to Biggin Hill where a Meteor jet went on to Orly airport and the waiting Bristow. This London-Paris record stood until the Daily Mail air race of 1959 when it took all the massively elaborate efforts of the Royal Air Force, using more advanced aircraft, to bring the time down to forty minutes forty-four seconds. Seven months before his triumphal landing in Paris, Bristow went to the rescue of three keepers isolated for twenty-six days in Wolf Rock lighthouse, eight miles off Land's End. He flew from Culdrose aerodrome in the face of a forty m.p.h. gale and in spite of Trinity House reluctance to risk his machine in such conditions. Finally exasperated after forty-eight hours of standing in readiness, he set off on his own initiative at 6 a.m., on the morning of February 7, 1948. At his request, the local lifeboat put to sea to stand by in support of the operation. Bristow thought it simpler not to explain his flight was unauthorised. Arriving at Wolf Rock and meeting the full blast of the gale, he hovered over the top of the lighthouse and began to lower sacks of food on a steel cable. One of the keepers instinctively fastened the end of the cable to the rail of the tower. The helicopter immediately lost all freedom of movement and Bristow sat helplessly at the controls while his machine swung on the end of the line, banging its wheels against the lantern house when caught by sixty m.p.h. gusts. The situation was saved by Bristow's mechanic, Les Swain, who had insisted on joining the flight. He produced a pair of wire cutters, opened the cockpit door, and hung far over the edge of the doorway to reach and cut the cable. Released from its anchorage, the helicopter shot clear of the lighthouse like a cork from a champagne bottle and, with 200 lbs of food already delivered to the keepers, Bristow returned to Culdrose in the mood to celebrate such a merciful ending to his errand of mercy.

The official reaction at the airfield was distinctly chilly but Bristow was to receive the Royal Acro Club Medal for the mission made in defiance of all normal procedure. Later that year, one of Westlands' senior executives received a punch on the nose when he tried to challenge Bristow's uncompromising attitude to flying. The blow cost Bristow his job and with it all prospect of helicopter work in Britain. Proud to suffer for his cause, he crossed the Channel to become chief pilot and manager of a French helicopter company. Now there were fresh audiences to impress, new customers to win. As chief pilot, he flew a helicopter under the Eiffel Tower, towed water-skiers down the Seine, went crop-spraying, trailed advertising banners, took aerial photographs, did film stunt work, and danced an aerial quadrille in Serge Lifar's " Ballet for Helicopters," performed before 500,000 people at Orly Airport.

As manager, he travelled to Indo-China and sold thirteen helicopters to the French Army, helping to set up its very first helicopter unit. Then, a pilot again, he accepted a temporary commission as a Special Service Officer in the French Foreign Legion and led those same helicopters on desperate missions at the height of France's colonial war in IndoChina. Flying with a bandolier of grenades strapped around his waist and with a tommy-gun under his seat he operated in direct support of the most forward troops and even landed behind the enemy lines to rendezvous with secret agents. Demonstrating that helicopters could be used by night in the most difficult terrain, he put down in a jungle clearing to rescue four wounded survivors of an ambushed patrol. Two of them travelled back to safety outside the cockpit, lashed in stretchers secured to the helicopter skids. The other two were strapped into their seats with Bristow sitting in the middle and praying that his overloaded machine would manage to claw sufficient lift from the unhelpful tropical atmosphere to rise clear of the treetops. The passenger on his left had a bullet lodged in his brain and was spared all the flickering tensions of the flight to a front line hospital where a Frenchwoman surgeon performed the operation which saved his life. Awarded the Croix de Guerre for such exploits, Bristow faced each fresh challenge of the helicopter's versatility with the glee of a preacher about to confound a doubting congregation.

Green proved a zealous if less aggressive disciple of the cause. The one-time invoice clerk at the L.M.S. railway station in Manchester, flew helicopters throughout Europe and Africa as a crop-sprayer for the first five years after leaving the Fleet Air Arm in 1947. Then, in the autumn of 1952 he headed for the Antarctic on board a Norwegian whaling ship. His job was to use a helicopter as a spotter aircraft for the factory ship's attendant fleet of whale catchers. Walrus flying boats had been tried for this role but their use was restricted by bad weather for they could only alight on the water. Green was one of the first pilots to fly a helicopter in the Antarctic. But not the first-as he realised when he received a letter from Bristow, explaining that he had been down there the previous year. The hero of Indo-China had returned to France in 1950 and met a demand that he should take out naturalisation papers if he wished to remain as manager of a French company. Bristow preferred to walk out instead, and went looking for work as a freelance pilot. That was how he came to join the crew of a whaling ship owned by Onassis, the Greek shipping millionaire, and took part in the first successful trials of the helicopter as a whalespotter. His letter to Green at the start of the following season contained useful advice on flying helicopters in Antarctic conditions and also carried the warning that Bristow would be returning to the scene this year with a rival Norwegian whaling ship. The two ex-Fleet Air Arm colleagues were not to meet in the Antarctic but Green was called from bed at six o'clock one morning in the first half of the long voyage to the whaling grounds and taken to the radio cabin to hear Bristow's voice boom across several thousand miles of ocean: " Where are you, Green? I've put in three hours flying already this morning. You can't move around here for dead whales."

When Green's ship moved further south into the latitude of days without night he was soon making the same kind of early start as a matter of routine. A 3a.m. briefing by the whaling manager would summarise the whereabouts of the catcher-boats and choose the fresh area to be surveyed from the air before Green climbed into his helicopter as it sat on its landing platform, firmly lashed down against the heavy Antarctic swell. The machine remained secured while the rotor built up to maximum revs. Then, at the moment when the ship reached the highest point of its see-saw motion, the helicopter engineer released the picketing device and Green rose sharply above the cluttered, industrial outline of the 23,000-ton factory ship. She bristled with derricks, cranes, winches, masts and aerials like a slab of dockyard accidentally put to sea. The slipway to receive the dead whales was slashed through the stern with the blunt precision of a railway cutting. In front of the twin funnels was the so-called Hell's Gate, dominating the main deck where a 100-ton whale could be completely dismembered in the space of half-an-hour. Green knew that the same deck would be swilling with blood by the time he returned from his flight.

The helicopter turned away to the south-east, flying at 500 feet above a Mediterranean-blue sea. Whaling takes place during the Antarctic summer and the temperature is normally little lower than freezing point. On this December morning the sun was so bright three or four hours before it would be dawn in Britain that Green had to pull down the dark visor of his flying helmet. He flew over the green and blue cathedrals of icebergs, some up to 200 feet high and half-a-mile long. Penguins shuffled to the edge of the icebergs as he went past and their flippers flickered with excitement.

It was easy to imagine the penguins as the dapper little people that their appearance suggested. They were the only hint of native humanity in all this bleak, barren continent. Green had touched down in the middle of the Arabian desert and found a crowd of inquisitive Arabs around his helicopter within ten minutes. He had force landed in the African jungle and had been greeted by the local missionary out for a walk. But now he flew into the terrible loneliness of Antarctica, feeling as apart from the rest of the world as a spaceman in orbit round some frozen planet. " The time to worry," Green thought, " is when you find yourself waving back to the penguins."

He came across the first of the whales near the edge of the ice-pack, where it stretched with a dazzling glitter into the white blur of a far horizon. The whale was blowing its vapour twenty-five to thirty feet into the air so that steam seemed to be leaking from beneath the sea. Then Green drew overhead and looked down upon the most graceful monster known to creation. This was also the largest monster in creation-the blue whale, as big as twenty-five elephants, its 100 to 120 tons making it twice the size of the more northerly sperm whale which inspired the fanciful legends of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Green admired, as always, the perfect streamlining of the blue whale's body, the dark, blue-grey colouring shown to the sky. Then the huge creature leapt clear out of the water with the exuberance of a young salmon and displayed the delicate pink and white of its stomach before returning to the sea with the clean plunge of an Olympic high diver. A few seconds later the point of its entry smoothed into a circle of oily calm water which lingered as the whale swam on. This was the " slick," what the hunters knew as whales' footprints. A flick of the whale's tail caused this same effect each time it submerged after surfacing to blow and betrayed its course as obviously as if it grew legs and tried to scuttle to safety across the Antarctic snows.

Blue whales do not usually swim in large groups and the helicopter continued to the east in search of more numerous targets. A horseshoe-shaped bay in the ice provided what Green was looking for-ten fin whales, each about seventy five feet in length, swimming within their Antarctic lagoon in a blissful school. He called up the factory ship and began to recite a sequence of numbers from his code for the day. Radio communication was on an open frequency and great care was observed to prevent rival whalers from intercepting messages from the helicopter. Even negative reports were helpful to the opposition in sparing them the trouble of investigating an empty area. News of sighting a whole school of fin whales, the second largest variety, would be accepted as an open invitation to join the chase.

" Nine, three, five . . ." Green began in the day's sequence for " I am among whales." Then he caught sight of another larger school and something of his excitement must have shown in his voice. " Forget the code," called the factory manager. "If there are that many whales just give us a bearing to steer and the catchers will get there as soon as they can."

Green began to circle above the whales and let down his trailing aerial to transmit his homing signal. Within an hour the first of a dozen catchers came steaming into sight at about fifteen knots. These were trim little vessels of 700 tons with a railed-in catwalk between the bridge and the harpoon gun in the bow. The catcher's captain is also its gunner, almost always a Norwegian and an acknowledged celebrity of the industry.

The whales were unaware of the helicopter's presence overhead. Green had once accidentally dropped a smoke float and hit a whale on the nose but it swam on undisturbed. Now, as the catchers closed in, the whales sensed the propeller vibrations in the water and began to swim faster and faster in all directions. The faster they swam, the more often they had to surface to breathe, the more streams of vapour attracted the catchers, the more slicks trod across the water
to give away their escape routes. Green looked down on the slaughter which followed with the hopeful revulsion of a man instinctively on the side of the whales, always hoping they would learn not to run away but submerge and stay still until the catchers went away. Instead, the 1 1/2-cwt. harpoons plunged deep in the whales' bodies at a range of 50 yards and tore great wounds when a grenade exploded three great barbs into the flesh. Killer harpoons finished off each dying whale before it was winched to the side of the catcher. The body was then inflated with compressed air and left to be collected later, a little red flag planted on each whale to identify its owners by right of killing. A dozen whales had been killed by the time Green began his return flight to the factory ship and the little red flags were flying from so many grey and bleeding mounds that he felt he was passing over a flooded golf course. He tried to remember where he had read something about " if whales could only scream we'd never shoot another whale."

Before his first Antarctic expedition was over Green had grown to admire the high skill and business efficiency of whaling even if his sympathies remained with the creatures who ended up in the vast cooking pots beneath Hell's Gate with the stench of a million fish and chip shops frying on bad oil. He never complained about the stench. Like other helicopter pilots he experienced the sensation of utter blindness in one of the Antarctic's sudden thick fogs and had his calculations of the factory ship's position confirmed by the distinct smell of bubbling whale oil which reached him at a range of twelve miles.

The blank vastness of the Antarctic tested a pilot's confidence in his instruments. Flying one of the small Hiller helicopters with an endurance of no more than 4h 30m even carrying extra fuel tanks, Green was always conscious that a navigational error could mean a forced landing in the sea with the nearest catcher perhaps several hours away. He wore a rubberised immersion suit, sealed at the wrists, ankles and neck, but knew he would not survive for long in Antarctic water. The alternative was landing on an iceberg, but the danger here was the overwhelming sheer whiteness of an iceberg as the pilot made his approach. He could lose all sense of position and direction in a sudden white-out. Bristow once had to put down on an iceberg and reported the sensation of being lowered into a bowl of milk. While he sat in his machine and waited for help to come he heard the creaking of the iceberg as it prepared to split in two. All he could do was wait to see if his half would roll over when the break occurred, plunging the helicopter to the bottom of the sea. When the iceberg finally cracked apart, his portion stayed firmly upright and he watched the other half turn a majestic somersault.

Green remembered Bristow's experience the day he came to the end of a patrol along the edge of the icepack and his Automatic Direction Finder indicated that he should head into the ice to reach the factory ship. His own sense of direction suggested this must be wrong even though the glaring loneliness of the ice could have led him on to completely the opposite course, even though the ADF needle pointed firmly the way he should go. Green had to decide between his instincts and the basic rule of flying that a pilot should always have trust in his instruments. It was not a narrow choice. The needle and his mind were pointing in totally opposite directions. If he chose wrongly he would be flying 150 miles over the edge of the world of survival. Green had an idea that he might have lost his ADF aerial which would mean the direction of the instrument's needle bore no relation to the homing signal transmitted from the factory ship. The only way to check the aerial would be to put down on the ice and see if it was still there. Green was reluctant to do this. He always thought of the icepack as the backyard of Hell, tempting in its beauty but cruel and destructive. Bristow's tale of the white-out effect indicated a strong risk of misjudging any landing on the ice and wrecking the helicopter, radio and all. The catcher boats would never find him then. On the other hand, he could fly on without checking the aerial and if he went the wrong way he would be forced down when he finally ran out of fuel.

Making a glum study of the icebergs below to see if one conveniently resembled the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, Green noticed an iceberg near the far horizon which carried two tall glistening spires of ice. " Why that's the one like Cologne Cathedral," he thought. " I flew over that on the way out so home must be that way, at least." Once over and beyond Cologne Cathedral, Green looked ahead and picked out a long, thin, lop-sided iceberg he also remembered from the outward flight. From there he caught a distant glimpse of an iceberg whose wedding cake silhouette was also familiar. In this way he made his way safely back to the factory ship in complete contradiction of his ADF instrument, which was afterwards found to have lost its aerial as he suspected. Green could fly home from memory because the helicopter pilots were expected to look for icebergs of distinctive shape to use as landmarks for catchers being called to a sighting of whales. An iceberg was rarely of the same shape or in the same place for more than a day but this was enough to help whalers closing in on a pack of whales. In Green's case, the Antarctic's spectacular ice formations saved him from the most hazardous dilemma he faced in two seasons of whaling.

Between seasons, Green met Bristow back in England and first heard his revolutionary idea for shooting whales from helicopters. A company, called Air Whaling Ltd., was formed in 1954. Bristow was the managing director, Alan Green the chief and only pilot. George Russell Fry came as financial manager, and Jack Woolley, Bristow's engineer in the Antarctic, joined as technical director. Andre de Geiter, a young Frenchman, who had been Green's mechanic, parted company to become a helicopter pilot himself-and a spectacular flying career was to be cut short most ironically when he died in his bed during the Agadir earthquake. Fry and Woolley specialised in the unspectacular earthbound aspects of the helicopter business although their contributions were to prove every bit as dramatic as those of the fliers. Fry, quiet and precise, went back to his City desk after the war as a partner in an old-established firm of accountants with a very special gold watch to keep him punctual for appointments, including the one which brought him Alan Bristow as a client. The watch was one of six sent to Bomber Command by an anonymous South American admirer to be presented to the pilots who made the most raids on Berlin. Squadron Leader Fry of 103 Squadron qualified easily for the watch. As an accountant, he faced only difficulties in helping Bristow found his company. Bristow had no money, no assets, no contracts. Bankers regarded helicopters with the gravest suspicion and insurance companies were openly horrified. " His plans excited all my old flying enthusiasms," said Fry. " But the economics of the thing scared me stiff." By City standards, Fry's early missions to raise credit for Bristow were as hazardous as his wartime visits to Berlin. But he recorded the same stubborn sequence of success and, once actively in business, the company was never to know another financial crisis. For Fry, however, there was one casualty in the course of his self-styled " bank-raids." He lost his Berlin gold watch somewhere along the way.

Jack Woolley started his working life as an aircraft draughtsman and became a helicopter engineer to see the world. He worked for Pest Control on crop spraying operations in France, Switzerland, the Sudan and South Africa before joining Bristow in 1952 to go to the Antarctic. Air Whaling's first contract sent him back to the Antarctic the next season. He went with Green, supervising newly-trained two-man crews of four Westland S55 helicopters bought by a Scottish whaling company. It proved a disappointing winter and there were no sensational results even with four long range machines out looking for whales. Woolley returned to find Bristow more convinced than ever that the aircraft should have harpoon guns of their own instead of merely spotting. Using his drawing office experience, and improvising experiments in ballistics, Woolley prepared a variety of plans for an aerial weapon. One idea was for a gun firing a harpoon loaded with curare, the deadly poison used by the blow-pipe natives of South America. Calculations based on the amount of curare needed to kill a twelve-stone man sought to establish the quantity required to dispatch a ninety-ton whale. Then a close analysis of the whale's blood system showed the vast creature's circulation to be so leisurely that it would have time to submerge and swim a distance of several miles before succumbing to the poison.

Research switched to a harpoon which killed instantly by electrocution. Here the snag was developing a generator light enough for the helicopter and powerful enough to kill the whale. Even Fry could not raise money for this scale of development without proof that the whaling industry would accept the new method. Bristow, impatient to obtain some reaction, decided to go ahead with a rudimentary form of gun and at least demonstrate the principle of harpooning from the air.

He interested Col. Blacker in the project and the man who invented his first mortar as a device for firing croquet balls eagerly modified his P.I.A.T. gun to kill dummy whales instead of tanks. The first trials were carried out with a fixed target on Bristow's airfield at Henstridge. Then came the highly successful demonstration in Weymouth Bay, in July 1955, leaving Bristow, Green, Fry and Woolley to wait for the official verdict of the Dutch observers with the nervous impatience of men on the brink of great things. Charter operators of fixed-wing aircraft were finding it increasingly difficult to stay in business in their traditional markets, and here were helicopters - so often dismissed by their critics as expensive toys - all set to move into a £20,000,000-a-year industry. If a whaling gunner could earn nearly £5,000 in three months using the relatively primitive method of a harpoon gun mounted on a boat capable of fifteen knots and needing a crew of twelve, how much more would a two-man helicopter crew earn using a gun which went looking for whales at 8o m.p.h.?

The whalers' verdict, when it came, was bitter and crushing. The industry, they explained, had been unable to expand in recent years and was facing signs of a recession. They just could not afford the large capital needed to develop the principle of a helicopter harpoon into a commercial proposition. In any case, they would be producing something which could mean that the world's whaling fleets would be rendered obsolete; there would be mass unemployment of whaling crews, and the national economy of Norway in particular might well suffer a severe blow. Bristow tried hard to show how the old whaling methods would be replaced by a more efficient, more prosperous new industry. When that argument failed he went from one whaling company to another, hoping to find someone prepared to lead the way. Fry furnished him with detailed figures indicating an increased profit margin of at least forty per cent. But the whalers of Europe are a tightly bound, conservative fraternity with a strong sense of loyalty. They all agreed the helicopter harpoon seemed a splendid idea but nobody was prepared to fire upon the established pattern of whaling.

Finally, the International Whaling Commission announced that helicopters being used for killing whales would be classified as catchers and companies employing these helicopters would have to reduce their fleet of catcher-boats accordingly. None of the whaling companies, it was clear, would ever agree to committing themselves to this untried method from the skies at the risk of surrendering numerical superiority to their traditional rivals on the sea.

Even Bristow, a salesman with the professional high-pressure optimism of a boxing promoter, finally had to admit defeat. He could not go ahead without the support of the whalers.

Green began to think Wilbur Wright was not far wrong when he wrote to a friend in 1906: " Like all novices we began with the helicopter but soon saw it had no future use and dropped it. The helicopter does with great labour only what the balloon does without labour and is no more fitted than the balloon for rapid horizontal flight."

In the summer of 1955 Green was left wondering just what sort of thing the helicopter was fitted for. Ten years after the war the charter aeroplane was having to settle down to the respectability of long-term contract work and building up its own scheduled services. The helicopter desperately needed to find some real significance and purpose of its own.

At one conference, Bristow sat across an empty desk from Fry and said: "We have a company, we have an organisation, we have ideas. All we need is some business." An uncertain future was resolved when an oil company offered a contract for maintaining and operating two helicopters which they had based in the Arabian Gulf. The machines were to ferry drilling crews and equipment between the Sheikhdom of Qatar and an off-shore drilling rig forty-five miles out to sea. Bristow accepted the contract and Green went out to the Middle East as chief pilot of the operation. Helicopters were not new to this kind of work in America, but they were being tried for the first time in the Middle East.

Green and his team quickly built up to a daily timetable of flights and demonstrated the reliability of helicopters as a permanent link between the shore and rig. They carried in men, tools, spares, and food. They brought out sick and injured workmen - a tremendous boost to morale in a hazardous operation with hospital now only a half-hour flight away instead of a five-hour trip by launch, weather permitting. The helicopters were turned back by weather only once in the first six months. During one period of four weeks, boats reached the rig on only two occasions. A helicopter was on board the night the rig began to break up in a sudden storm, in December, 1955. The helicopter took off for the shore with eight of the technicians packed in the cabin. Before it could return for more survivors the super-structure of the rig was swept into the sea, with the loss of twenty-two lives.

That meant the suspension of the Qatar contract but the oil company was well impressed by the work of the helicopters and transferred them to a seismic survey being under taken in the mountains of Iran. Helicopters had always been considered suspect in high altitude operations at high temperatures. Green cheerfully disproved another fallacy.

In 1957 Bristow Helicopters, as the company was now known, won a contract to carry out a helicopter service for off-shore drilling at Das Island in the Arabian Gulf. This time Bristow had to provide the machines and he bought the first two helicopters to be owned by his company, Westland Widgeons. These were a development of the old Sikorsky S51, once again the very model which had inspired his ambitions as a young naval officer on the slipway at Portland. Within a few months he had bought more helicopters, two small Italian-built Bells with a third to follow. Two South American oil companies were prospecting for oil in Bolivia in the eastern foothills of the Andes, and had chosen helicopters as the best way of getting in and out of territory which was largely left blank on the map and labelled " Unexplored."

During the first week in August, Green was flying over the empty deserts of the Middle East. Before the middle of September he was in action in the dense jungles of South America. He left to take charge of the new operation with confident words from Bristow: " This is it. Now we really are going places. Two years ago nobody wanted to know us. Another two years at this rate and we'll be operating all over the world. There's a whole new field of charter flying opening up and the helicopter is making it all possible."

Green went out with Bill Petrie, the company's chief overseas engineer, and John Robinson, another engineer. They set up base in the village of San Borja, in the Beni province of Bolivia and assembled the Bell helicopters as they arrived in crates, delivered by DC-3 to an air strip which served the local abattoir. As the helicopteros worked on their machines, Bolivian gauchos rode past with herds of cattle which were slaughtered at the far end of the airstrip. The carcasses waited for the next flight out to the capital, La Paz. For Green the scene was uncomfortably familiar. It was as if his old whaling ship had followed him into the jungle.

The first stage of the oil prospecting involved a far flung sequence of geological exploration. A group of geologists would be taken by helicopter to a suitable site for an area camp. Each morning the geologists were lifted out of the camp and dropped one by one in the jungle with their little hammers and bags. Very often they were landed in river beds where a selection of rocks was conveniently exposed for collection. Each evening the helicopters returned to pick up the geologists with their rock samples and take them back to camp. Every ten days the whole area camp would be moved on to another site by a sequence of shuttle flights. The expedition's most fragile freight, ten hens to provide fresh eggs, was carried in a net slung beneath the helicopter. Green's log for such a mission in March,1958, records: " Gained two eggs in flight-lost one bird."

Sometimes Green faced the problem of geologists needing to be put down in jungle so solid that he had to turn away in search of the nearest village and drop them there to organise local transport to their objective. On one occasion the nearest village for many miles was half a dozen huts cramped into a clearing too small for the helicopter to land. Green came down to within a few feet of the surface of a river running alongside the village and hovered above the water while Eddie Frankl, the Swiss geologist in charge of the survey, climbed down from the cockpit and splashed his way ashore to meet the villagers.

The noise of the helicopter had frightened the women of the village but native etiquette seemed to force their menfolk into a show of boldness. Wearing little more than sack-cloth, they stepped forward to receive the young man who was dressed more for a suburban weekend than the role of a great white explorer, complete with trilby hat instead of the pith helmet the setting suggested.

Frankl could speak eleven languages, five fluently, although none of them was of any use with natives who spoke an obscure tongue in an even more obscure dialect. But his sign language carried all the confidence of a multi-linguist. In return for ten sheath knives, the jungle's most acceptable currency, he arranged to hire a dug-out canoe to reach his objective along a network of streams which tunnelled through the dense jungle. Frankl was already choosing his dug-out as Green rose from the village and the jungle closed in over his friend. The helicopter returned before dark and the geologist was waiting at the side of the river, holding a lively conversation with the natives by way of phrases he had learned from two villagers who paddled the canoe for him during the day.

Frankl climbed up into the cockpit with nothing more than the usual bag of rock samples to show for his day in the jungle. Green flew to pick up a survey party from a jungle clearing some weeks later and was asked to take on board two man-sized gorillas shot by a pair of natives employed to cut paths through the undergrowth or pica. He had once carried a live monkey when a geologist was being moved between two camps and insisted on taking his jungle pet with him. But dead gorillas were something different. " You can't get things of that size in a helicopter," he said. " They'll have to be left behind." The natives, standing proudly over their hunting trophies, were bitterly upset at this suggestion and the geologist was equally concerned. He pointed out the danger of labour troubles in the area if the pica-cutters' friends felt they had been denied a feast of gorilla meat and all the ceremony that went with it.

Green agreed to change his mind for the sake of public relations. He left the pica-cutters to mount guard over the gorillas and took the geologist back to camp where he collected the freight sling. Then the helicopter returned to the jungle clearing and carried the pica-cutters off to a heroes' reception at their own camp with the gorillas riding underneath in the position usually reserved for the expedition's precious hens.

Another form of wild life was jaguar, known locally as el tigre. A survey party landing on the banks of a river which was not marked on existing maps named it the Rio Tigre after finding jaguar footprints in the sand. This was beyond the Frankl Gap, a break in the mountains found by Eddie Frankl, and south of the Rio Verdi, a river located by Green. A young Dutch geologist was the first white man to set foot on the banks of yet another uncharted river in the same area. He called Green out of his cockpit to look at large paw marks between the skids of the helicopter. " What are these?" he asked. " Oh, those," said Green. " I would say jaguar at a guess." " But I've got to stay out here on my own for the next ten days," said the Dutchman with the genuine alarm of a geologist on his very first foreign assignment. Green helped to unload the tent, food, rifle, machete, and survey equipment on to the sand alongside the paw marks. " Don't worry about those," he said. " You'll probably never see the thing that left them. One of us will be back to pick you up a week on Thursday. Be seeing you, sport." For all his cheeriness, Green sympathised with the young Dutchman facing ten days alone in that wilderness. Another pilot returned to collect him and found a thoughtful figure sitting on the river bank, contemplating fresh traces of paw marks. " I heard those jaguars every night," he said, "but the funny thing is I never caught sight of anything."

The ten-day stay in the jungle was necessary to carry out a topographical survey, the second stage of the quest for oil. Otherwise the geologists returned to camp the same day and were not equipped for a night in the jungle. That was the prospect which faced John Robinson, one of the helicopter engineers, when he offered to join a geologist, Tom Winkelmolen, in a search for rock samples along a fast flowing river.

Robinson, once a member of an R.A.F. mountain rescue team, saw the expedition as an interesting tropical ramble. Four exhausting hours after being put down by Green they had covered only two of the six miles to the clearing where he had arranged to collect them. At this rate they could not hope to reach there before darkness and the helicopter would have no clue to where they were. One solution was to return to the place where they landed but it had taken well over an hour to climb down the face of a fierce waterfall and there seemed little hope of climbing it from the opposite direction against the full force of the river. Winkelmolen announced that they must continue downstream until they found a gap in the vegetation which bridged the river for as far as they could see. Robinson found the going even more difficult for the next mile. The third member of the party, an Indian carrying the rucksack full of collected rocks, was physically distressed by the time they came to a spot where the treetops finally parted above the river. Robinson estimated that the gap was less than fifty feet wide. The rotor blades on a Bell helicopter described a circle thirty-five feet in diameter. "It will be a close squeeze but we can be picked up from that rock in the middle of the river," he said.

Getting to the rock was another problem. They were standing on a ledge thirty feet above the surface of the river. The overhang meant they could not climb down from the ledge without ropes and there was no indication that the bank became any lower downstream.

" There's only one thing," said Winkelmolen, and dived fully clothed into the river below. The Indian shrank from the edge and indicated he could not swim. "Come on brother," said Robinson. " In you go." The Indian went down into the water still wearing his rucksack and floundered to the rock in wild desperation. Robinson followed with more style but little less urgency. South America's dreaded flesh-eating piranha fish were normally found much farther down the Amazon basin, in more placid waters, but few Europeans cared to linger in any stretch of jungle river
.
The three men huddled on the rock in midstream and hoped to hear the approach of Green's helicopter before the abrupt arrival of tropical night. Green found them with less than half-an-hour to spare, setting off up-river when they failed to reach the agreed rendezvous. From his cockpit there seemed only inches between the rotor blades and the trees as he eased the helicopter down to a position where one skid was resting on the rock. Robinson was the last to squelch into the cockpit, using the skid as the rung of a ladder. He watched the rock fall away beneath them until it sank from sight in this inland sea of inscrutable greenery. It had been a tropical ramble he would not choose to repeat.

The helicopteros worked in Bolivia for nearly five years, through mountain landslides and floods - when they lifted survivors out of devastated villages; through banditry and revolution - when as many as twenty bodies were seen hanging from public scaffolds in Santa Cruz.

In 1962, the oil companies finally ended the survey. Except for tantalising glimpses from the occasional wildcat well they had not found the oil they came looking for and the operation was wound up. Green and the rest of his team shared the oil men's personal disappointment but had the huge consolation of the helicopters' technical success in terrain where no other form of aircraft could have operated. For Bristow, a regular visitor to the jungle camps to put in a spell as a working pilot, the Bolivian adventure meant the end of his impatient years as a helicopter prophet and the coming of the great things he was hailing as a lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm. The two helicopters he bought to begin work in Bolivia increased to a fleet of six within a year. Operations also expanded in the Middle East and the fleet grew even bigger.

The mergers establishing the British United Airways group, in 1960, brought Bristow Helicopters together with Airwork Helicopters, pioneers of crop-spraying operations, and produced a combined fleet of fifty-four helicopters compared with a total of fifty fixed wing aircraft in the rest of B.U.A. There are now more than seventy helicopters, the largest fleet in the world, and still increasing in size.

While B.U.A.'s fixed wing aircraft work to an increasingly sophisticated routine of scheduled services and long-term contracts for trooping and holiday tours, helicopters still pursue unusual, hazardous charters in some of the most primitive areas of the world. " We are about the only bush pilots left in the business," Bristow will declare through the cigar haze of his chauffeur-driven Bentley on its way from a board meeting to his Mayfair manicurist. But he recites the company's far flung activities with a familiarity which comes from visiting each operation and flying every job. His helicopters can certainly claim to be the real sky tramps of today.

There are helicopters spraying bananas in the Dominican Republic, cotton in Rhodesia, rubber and jute in India. One helicopter ferries engineers and equipment between radio stations in remote parts of South Africa. More helicopters are helping to search for oil in the West African jungles and servicing off-shore rigs along the coast of Nigeria and throughout the Arabian Gulf region. Many of the company's most experienced staff are assembled in the North Sea area to take part in the great international hunt for offshore oil and natural gas deposits. These men have shared and matched Green's flying exploits in five continents. Now, with Alistair Gordon as North Sea area manager, Johnny Johnson conducts operations from Germany, Spencer Allen is in charge of flying from Holland, and Clive Wright operates from England. Another long-serving expert, Bryan Shaw, leads a group of pilots based at Middle Wallop in Hampshire where Bristow Helicopters conducts the basic training course for the British Army's helicopter aircrews. And still Alan Bristow travels the capitals of the world in search of more and greater challenges for his flying machines.

"I love the challenge and intrigue of the charter business," he once confessed in the middle of a three cornered telephone conversation with customers in Teheran Rome and New York. He was sitting at an empty desk in his otherwise empty office in a London skyscraper and between calls the telephones were returned to the floor to keep the desk-top clear as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. " To stay on top in this business you need to know oil presidents and kings, cabinet ministers and rebels who might become cabinet ministers, civil servants who weave all the red tape and lawyers who think they know how to cut it. You've got to know the helicopter backwards and show your crews you can fly it backwards, if necessary. You must be prepared to go anywhere on this earth at any time of the day and night to take on anything that's worth doing. Then when you get the job in the middle of nowhere the secret is not to employ men who go native. I'd fire a pilot on the spot if I discovered he touched a glass of beer during a working day - even though his helicopter was sitting in the middle of the jungle, a hundred miles from anywhere. We may be bush pilots but we are professional pilots first, last and always. If there's any bush around it's just part of the scenery.

For Green - now too often confined to the company base at Redhill as operations director, with George Russell Fry and Jack Woolley completing the old Air Whaling team in adjoining offices - the scenery he found in the Antarctic, the desert and jungle served to dramatise his escape by helicopter from the life he might have led at his Manchester railway station. Towards the end of his spell in South America, he landed in an uninhabited stretch of jungle and joined one of the geologists on his search for rock samples, knowing it was safe to leave the helicopter unguarded. When they returned two hours later the machine had changed its colour to a deep violet and appeared to be quivering gently although the engine had been switched off and the rotor was not turning. The two men stood and stared for several moments of sheer fantasy. Then they went forward to investigate.

Fragments of the new colour began to break away and rise into the sky at their approach. The shimmering movement became stronger in some parts of the machine than others. "Do you see what it is?" said the geologist and he could not keep a childish excitement from his voice. " Butterflies! There must be a million of them. They've covered every inch of metal. The whole helicopter is buried in butterflies."

Butterflies flurried from beneath Green's feet as he climbed into the cockpit through the open doorway. Butterflies had to be dusted from his seat before he could sit down. Clouds of butterflies sprayed from the rotor blades when he started the engine. Trickles of butterflies fell from the cockpit canopy in protest against the sudden noise and vibrations. The rest fluttered away when the helicopter rose sharply into the sky with Green and the geologist looking back at what seemed a wake of violet sequins. Alan Green never found an explanation for this jungle phenomenon. But if he had to explain what converted an invoice clerk to the restless life of a sky tramp he would suggest it was all part of the same chemistry which can turn a helicopter into a million butterflies.

End

The book The Sky Tramps was written by Peter Jackson and published by Souvenir Press Ltd.