COPS IN THE SKY : They Form a Close-Knit Fraternity and Love Their Jobs Despite Danger

When Ron Burgess and his partner, Paul Lane, learned that two police helicopters had collided, they knew--even before hearing the names--that the men who died were their friends.

Burgess and Lane, both 38-year-old officers in the Huntington Beach Police Aerobureau, also are members of a small, close-knit fraternity of Orange County police helicopter pilots.

They are the cops in the sky who watch out for the residents of their cities and for their colleagues on the ground. To a man, they say they love the work, despite its danger.

Eventually, Burgess and Lane learned Tuesday’s fiery crash had killed Costa Mesa Police Officers John William (Mike) Libolt, 39, and James David Ketchum, 39. Jeffrey A. Pollard, 27 of Tustin, a civilian observer aboard the Costa Mesa chopper, also died.

“Mike and Dave were friends, guys you like,” Burgess said Saturday. “It really hit home.”

There was a moment, Burgess and Lane conceded Saturday, when they both considered changing their line of work.

“It crossed my mind Tuesday night,” Lane said.

Burgess said he thought: “Is it time to go back to patrol?”

“It’s the same thing that happens when a partner in patrol goes down in a shooting,” Lane said. “But it passes.”

In a windowless, wood-paneled room beside a hangar at John Wayne Airport, another group of police pilots Saturday concurred that despite the hazards, and the loss of their colleagues, there is no job like theirs.

“No guts, no glory” proclaims a sign in the room that serves as the office for the Costa Mesa Police Department’s helicopter pilots, where Nick Dryzmala, 37, and Randy Nutt, 42, were taking a break from patrolling.

They are a special breed of cop, so unusual that often “when we land at the station, people going by stop and watch,” Dryzmala said. And when they go out to dinner, wearing badges and handguns over their brown flight suits, people often stare and ask them what they do, Nutt said.

The helicopter cops are also special because they are so few. In Orange County, only five police agencies--Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Anaheim and the Sheriff’s Department--use helicopters and about 30 officer-pilots to patrol their turf.

“I don’t want to say we’re unique, but they’re not exactly flooding the world with helicopter pilots,” said Dryzmala, who waited four years for an opening in Costa Mesa’s six-member unit.

Size and Style

The helicopter unit’s size and style also breeds a strong camaraderie, “a closeness,” Nutt said, “because everyone up here loves to fly. You got hired because of it.”

Nor are they willing to give it up--even for a promotion. In the last few years, everyone in Costa Mesa’s helicopter unit has refused to take sergeant’s exam, Nutt said, because advancement would mean an assignment on the ground.

“Where else can you fly and get paid for it?” Dryzmala said. And where else, Nutt said, can you fly and still do police work, “the cops-and-robbers stuff of trying to get the bad guys?”

They just do it from a different perspective, they said. “When there’s an alarm call, and an officer’s sent to check doors and windows, the ground units may take 15 minutes to get there,” Dryzmala said. “But we’re there.”

“There’s no question about it,” Huntington Beach’s Burgess said. “We can do so much from up there. We might be two miles away and we can see the (disturbance) while a (patrol) unit might be right around the corner and can’t see what’s going on.”

Huntington Beach police helicopter crews have saved swimmers in distress during rough seas by tossing them flotation devices and even lowering a lifeguard into the water. Once a uniformed police helicopter crewman leaped into the water to save a swimmer.

Saved 7 or 8 People

“In one day,” Lane recalled, a Huntington Beach crew “saved seven or eight people.”

Burgess and Lane were almost apologetic about the “fun” and “excitement” of their work.

“We had one pursuit,” an animated Burgess recalled, “that went all the way up to LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and back again. It started off as a traffic stop. He had cocaine in the car. It ended up in Westminster. As far as pursuits go, it was fun.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say fun,” Burgess said. “But I enjoy the job.”

“A lot of us get into this job because of the excitement,” Lane added. “Some days can be rather dull and mundane and you feel like you’re doing field work for an insurance adjuster. But it’s so satisfying to be in the helicopter. We oftentimes can be totally responsible for catching the crooks.

“It is very satisfying to know that without us, they might have gotten away.”

Burgess was involved in one nighttime pursuit that began when robbers shot and killed a Westminster jewelry store owner.

Burgess tracked the suspects, who were firing shots at pursuing police ground units, onto the Riverside Freeway into the Gypsum Canyon area. There, helicopters from Anaheim, San Bernardino County and Huntington Beach converged on the rugged, pitch-dark canyon area.

Took All Three

“It took all three of us to work that thing,” Burgess recalled.

The San Bernardino unit used its infrared spotlight to find the suspects hiding in bushes. Then one of the San Bernardino crewmen held a rifle on the suspects from above while the Huntington Beach crew illuminated the area with its spotlights and the Anaheim chopper lowered SWAT officers into the rugged terrain to make the arrests.

“It was something I enjoyed being involved with and they got some real bad guys,” Burgess said. “And it worked fine.”

After times like that, the Huntington Beach police helicopter crewmen believe they earn the $370 a month they receive above the standard officer’s salary.

“They call it specialty pay,” Burgess said, “but when you start citing the factors . . . , the bottom line is that it’s hazard pay.”

Another time was the night a helicopter that Burgess and another officer were flying lost power.

“When the engine quit, it got real quiet,” Burgess recalled.

But his pilot was able to skillfully set the craft down in a pea field and both men walked away.

Burgess and Lane agreed that Tuesday’s fatal collision was a freakish event rather than an inevitability.

Had Near-Misses

Neither Burgess, a pilot who has flown helicopters since 1978, nor Lane, a pilot in training, have ever had close calls with another helicopter. But they have had near-misses with small airplanes.

“We fly at 700 to 800 feet and airplanes are supposed to be at least 1,000 feet in populated areas,” Burgess said. “Every now and then some yo-yo comes along at 600 feet and he’s in your area.”

Still, Burgess said, he would not change the see-and-be-seen system, nor advocate written rules of the road for helicopter pilots.

“Safety is always . . . paramount. You’re always talking safety. I don’t think setting up guidelines would handle it any better.”

Lane suggested that imposing rigid controls on fast-breaking situations might be disastrous in itself, perhaps resulting in pilots “hung up on following strict guidelines under circumstances that could change before your eyes.”

Burgess said that in Tuesday’s crash, “obviously there was a mistake made.”

But he has no suggestions for improving the system.

“I don’t know what else you can do,” he said.