Oakley, CA
It turns out that the school next door's fields are also the landing pad for East East County Medi-Vac. So today, during the middle of school, they ushered all the PE kids to the side and landed the helicopter. My father used to say there was nothing like the sound of a huey. If they sounded anything like this copter I understand now a little bit of what he meant.
Because hueys have a unique top (two blade) and rear (two blade) rotor design, they have a very distinctive sound. The distinctive sound of a huey made my first visit to the Vietnam memorial very strange and eerie. It was near sunset and the Vietnam memorial area was very quiet and suddenly a huey flew out of the setting sun, up the Potomac river towards downtown Washington DC. I could hear it coming long before I saw it. It was deja vu all over again, that is, it invoked the memories of Vietnam so vividly.
ReplyDeleteSince the picture of the Medevac bird is head on, it is hard for me to tell who is operating it and what model it is. Since the color scheme and landing gear configuration do not appear to match either CALSTAR or Stanford, I suspect that it may be from UC Davis and is a Agusta 109 Power.
My buddy Nick (who flies for Contra Costa County Sheriff) says that it is a REACH helicopter. (REACH 3 in Concord provides helicopter service to the following counties: Contra Costa, Alameda and Solano).
ReplyDeleteREACH operates Agusta A109 helios in northern CA and Eurocopter EC135 helios in southern CA. Both are very nice medevac aircraft.
ReplyDeleteNot the
not the what?
ReplyDelete