Reserve Air Squadron Brushes Up in Desert

The desert floor is as flat as a pancake here, arid and windy and populated by a few tin trailer homesteads, rusted truck skeletons and dry brush. There is also a 6,000-foot dirt runway on this dusty plot near Victorville in San Bernardino County, and unrestricted airspace for miles.

Moving at 140 m.p.h. about 2,000 feet in the sky, everything below looks like a series of polka dots as pilot Eugene Hoffman and co-pilot Sam Autrey scan the landscape for a downed helicopter.

Within moments, a wah wah wah sound like the moaning of an electronic dog crackles across the receiver of Hoffman’s airplane. It is the signal from the missing helicopter’s emergency locator transmitter, sounding alternately softer or louder depending on the airplane’s distance.

At the helm of his Cessna 182, Hoffman, a Long Beach ophthalmologist, circles nearby El Mirage dry lake where off-road motorcycles weave designs in the sand. Autrey radios another search plane, and they circle lower. The signal comes in stronger still.

Within 16 minutes, the helicopter has been sighted on a dirt road.

“There it is!” cries Autrey, a senior scientist for Hughes Aircraft Co., pointing to a white chopper glinting in the sun. “With miles and miles of nothing around you, it’s not as easy as this looks to find a plane, even with the (emergency transmitter) black box.”

He radios a crew aboard another plane that was videotaping the mission from the air, and both pilots return to the runway.

No survivors were found, for this was a dress rehearsal for disaster: The helicopter was parked there on purpose and its black box transmitter set off intentionally.

Forty pilots had flown in and set up camp last weekend on retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Jack Hansen’s square mile of land, a remote spot just across the Los Angeles County line where this unusual group of volunteers spends three days each year practicing for the real thing.

They are doctors, dentists, restaurant owners, bankers, schoolteachers and commercial pilots who moonlight for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s 39-year-old reserve deputy Aerosquadron Unit. The prerequisite for joining this elite team is BYOP.

“Bring your own plane,” says reserve Capt. Patrick Burke, 56, a general engineering contractor who owns his own company but likes to call himself a “plumber.” Burke has led the reserve pilot squadron for a decade and is its senior member with 28 years in the unit.

“Also,” Burke says deadpan, “you gotta like to fly.”

Elite for Financial Reasons

The civilian band of pilots is elite mainly for financial reasons. Pilots must be able to foot the bill for a $1-million liability insurance policy and either own, or have access to, a small plane or helicopter. For all but lengthy flights, they also provide their own fuel. They also must be interested in law enforcement and be capable of getting their planes in the air within an hour’s notice.

“They must close their business, they must put their patients on hold,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Susan Battit, who acts as liaison between the department and the reserve crew. Only half-joking, she added, “That’s what your doctor’s doing when he leaves you in the waiting room for hours.”

Launched in 1947 with a handful of pilots, the reserve unit has grown along with Orange County’s population and law enforcement needs. It now boasts a diverse cross-section of professionals who bring their individual expertise to the department.

For example, reserve deputy Lt. Bob Kelly, a certified forensic dentist--there are only about 75 in the country, helps the coroner’s office identify the dead. Then there is reserve Lt. Dennis Jerry, an engineer and 23-year member of the squadron, who has an equally important specialty, say his colleagues: On training weekends, he runs the chow line and “hospitality suite” out of his motor home.

‘All Entrepreneurs’

But nobody has to be assigned kitchen police or other duties “because these people are all entrepreneurs; they just do it without being told,” Burke said.

“What fascinates me,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Sim A. Middleton, who oversees the Aerosquadron and other reserve units, “is the level of talent.” Not counting the price of the expensive planes, Middleton said, “I’d estimate it would cost us at least a quarter of a million dollars to do what they do for us free.”

The weekend training exercise was heavy on search and rescue drills, first aid refresher courses and shotgun range practice. But aerosquadron members say they are called upon only occasionally to perform such duties.

During the first weekend after the still unsolved disappearance of Laura Bradbury in the fall of 1984, Aerosquadron pilots were called in to search parts of San Bernardino County for a van that investigators believed the Huntington Beach child, who was 4 at the time, was abducted in.

Most recently, they were dispatched to help find teen-agers believed lost at sea on a return trip from Santa Catalina Island. (The youths were located by Coast Guard search teams.) They also conduct aerial surveillance and photographic missions, and sometimes they even take pictures of traffic flow for the county Environmental Management Agency staff.

Olympics Assignment

“During the Olympics,” said Burke, who owns a Cessna 310 Q Model with Kelly and is co-owner with seven others of a two-seat Piper Super Cub, “we were in the air almost around the clock, watching the opening of the venues and then just conducting routine surveillance for any problems.”

The advantage of using fixed-wing planes for surveillance, says Middleton, is that “people aren’t so immediately suspicious. When you see a helicopter, you automatically think of the police.”

However, most of their volunteer time--a minimum of two hours of flight practice each month and an on-call shift once every 13 weeks--is spent transporting prisoners or detectives working on investigations. They also make what are called “executive transfers”--ferrying Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates and his top deputies to law enforcement meetings around the state.

“I took the sheriff on an executive flight up to a statewide sheriff’s meeting with (then-Gov. Edmund G.) Brown (Jr.),” said reserve Sgt. Ronald Richmond, a chief engineer who designs and tests missiles for Ford Aerospace & Communications Corp. in Newport Beach. He owns a 1965 Piper Comanchee 400 and is the 1987 commander of the Western States Assn. of Sheriff’s Aerosquadrons.

“I remember flying to San Quentin’s Death Row and picking up (William G.) Bonin for trial back in Orange County,” said Richmond, of Corona del Mar, referring to the so-called Freeway Killer who was convicted in 1982 and 1983 of 14 slayings of young men and boys in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “He talked like any other ordinary citizen sitting in the back of my plane, about the weather and things, like he wasn’t in shackles. Sometimes it’s amazing.”

Prospective Members

Of the 40 pilots making hourly launches and landings last weekend at Hansen Ranch, which is flanked by George Air Force Base on the east and Edwards Air Force Base on the west, four were prospective members.

It is usually two years before a prospective pilot is accepted into the squad, said Burke. Candidates must attend monthly meetings, prove their pilot skills and also graduate from the sheriff’s reserve officer academy course.

Plenty of applicants have been rejected, Burke said. Still others who were accepted were later dropped if they failed to maintain their planes or let their insurance lapse or proved to be risky pilots.

Loren Gallagher, 40, an attorney and resort property manager from San Clemente, has been waiting 20 months to be accepted. He had flown his Cessna 310 to the desert, where he parked it alongside 27 other small planes and two privately owned helicopters because “people in this squadron represent the most diverse types of flying I could ever hope to find.”

Gallagher, who says he speaks Chinese, has taught grade school and managed a Boise, Ida., radio station, has been a pilot since 1969 but only recently learned of the aerosquadron from a friend.

“It was an opportunity to provide some service while improving my flying skills . . . and it’s really a neat group of people here,” said Gallagher, who sat among the squad pilots clad in olive reserve officer jump suits in the motor home that serves as training camp headquarters. “Whether I’m in or not, they’re still gonna be my friends, this bunch.”

As the flying fraternity gathered for a lunch of grilled hamburgers and potato chips, various pilots compared purple bruises on their lips from “blowing Annie,” a plastic dummy they use to practice mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, swapped squadron folklore and tried to decide who has the most expensive plane (it was deputy William Calhoon, owner of the Skinny Haven restaurant chain, who owns a $125,000 B55 Baron Twin).

One Woman in Group

Esther Grupenhagen of Anaheim, who has flown with the squadron since 1979 and was a commercial pilot for Imperial Airlines before it folded, is the only woman in the bunch. She is a licensed cardiopulmonary resuscitation instructor who re-certifies squadron members each year.

“She’s a great pilot, just a fantastic pilot and a delightful lady,” said Burke. “I don’t know why she’s the only woman we have, but she’s the only one who’s applied. . . . She’s a CFI, a certified flight instructor . . . and she has quite a collection of hats.”

“I’m old enough to vote and too young for Social Security,” said Grupenhagen, who was monitoring radio transmissions at the edge of the runway while wearing a battered bush hat.

Sometimes the squadron’s efforts really pay off.

“We were all thrilled when Ernie found (Frank) Tallman at the side of the mountain a few years ago. Nobody, not even the Air Force, could find it (the plane wreckage),” said Dr. David Cook, a Los Alamitos orthopedic surgeon and ham radio operator.

Cook, who is producing the squadron’s first videotape of last weekend’s training activities, was referring to squadron pilot Ernie Fritcher, a dentist who on April 16, 1979, discovered the wreckage of the plane of perhaps the nation’s best-known stunt pilot near Santiago Peak.

“The ELT (emergency locator transmitter) in Tallman’s plane was still running and beeping when he got there. That was something, all right.”

The conversation always seems to touch on one of the more colorful squadron retirees, Gilbert W. Riddle, 86, a retired dentist who piloted planes with the group for 21 years and flew until he was 84.

They swear he once pulled a tooth at more than 2,000 feet. Now that he is no longer an active pilot, they say he drives a high-powered motorcycle.

“He just puts his wife on the back and they ride to the tip of Baja California or cross-country to Wisconsin,” said Don Chapton, 58, a dentist in Tustin and two-decade squadron member.

“They’re all a bit eccentric,” Sheriff’s Lt. Middleton said affectionately of his reserves. “But then, I think you have to be eccentric to be a pilot in the first place.”