He Might Not Look It, But Baby-Faced Pilot is Old Pro in a Helicopter

Douglas S. Daigle was on the rooftop flight deck of his helicopter company in Costa Mesa talking about his youthful looks.

“At 18 I looked like I was 9 and could get into the movie theater for the under-12 price,” he said. Now 37, he can still pass for a high school senior.

But when he became a helicopter pilot, his youthful looks caused problems.

He remembers in 1971, when he was 19, “I was cleaning the helicopter while waiting for a passenger and this guy walks up and asks where the pilot was. I told him I was the pilot and he said, ‘I’m not the passenger’ and walked off.”

But his skills as a helicopter instructor and now as president and owner of Tridair Helicopters Inc. in Costa Mesa have made his looks less of a liability.

It seems incongruous, but he made headlines recently by flying the oldest production model helicopter in the world to a new record by staying aloft for 50 hours and 50 seconds.

The Guinness Book of World Records accepted the record.

Daigle said he would eventually donate the helicopter to the Smithsonian Institution for display.

During his turn as one of four pilots attempting to set the new hovering record, Daigle said he did a lot of praying.

“It wasn’t because I was worried about myself,” he said. “I wanted us to set the record and raise money for the Lestonnac Free Medical Clinic in Orange.”

He said the flight raised $250,000 from corporate pledges and the event “was absolutely the most fun I ever had in my life.”

Daigle, who has recorded 14,000 hours of helicopter air time, said he has always had a strong faith and found “I was having a great emotional and religious experience” during the hovering event.

He figured if the helicopter was able to hover for 50 hours it would be God’s will.

“If we had to set down, it would also be God’s will,” he acknowledged. “God has never let me down, and while I have let Him down, I wanted to try my best not to let Him down this time.”

He also noted it was appropriate that the record-breaking flight took place in Anaheim Stadium, home of the Angels.

Daigle, with eight other helicopter pilots, form a club called the Rotor Heads, said he knew at an early age he would be a helicopter pilot.

“When I was 3 or 4 years old I would look at airplanes and helicopters and wonder how they flew and more than anything I wondered about the copter,” he said. His first job was washing airplanes and helicopters at John Wayne Airport.

When his friends came to his home to play army, “if I wasn’t the copter pilot I wouldn’t bring my toys out,” he said.

Finishing his interview on the flight deck, Daigle remembers the incident in 1971 when the passenger walked away.

“I picked up this passenger recently and during the flight we kept looking at each other. He was the guy who had walked away. We just smiled at each other.”

It took a while, but former Army sergeant E.A. (Mac) McCullock, a Garden Grove resident and Elks Lodge member, was awarded a medal for his actions in France during World War II.

McCullock said he still doesn’t know why he was suddenly honored. He received notice of the medal in a letter from the French government.

McCullock received the Rhin et Danube medal and certificate for his actions in helping clear a French road of land mines and building a pontoon bridge across the Kayserberg River in 1945.

Every member of his squad, except himself, was killed.

McCullock’s combat engineer regiment, in which 317 were killed, 1,410 wounded and 323 were declared missing in action, was awarded the French Croix de Guerre medal.

The medal was presented to McCullock at a recent meeting of the Garden Grove Elks Lodge on behalf of the French government by Ed Lindberg, the lodge’s Americanism chairman.