IRVINE : Copter Pilots Will Enter World Contest

Andria Myers maneuvered the small blue and white helicopter about 20 feet off the ground as her co-pilot, Phillip Baudour, dangled a rock-filled coffee can attached to a rope out the left door, nearly scraping the grassy field below.

Myers, a helicopter pilot from Irvine, steadied the two-seat Robinson R-22 against the occasional gusts of wind and steered sideways toward two plastic traffic stanchions set one meter apart. Baudour leaned out to guide the coffee can between the stanchions, issuing course corrections to Myers as the two threaded the can through the makeshift obstacle course.

The recent precision low-altitude flying at Corona Airport wasn’t just for fun. It was serious practice.

Next week, Myers and Baudour head to Swindon, England, to compete in the seventh World Helicopter Championships. The contest, considered the Olympics for helicopter pilots, weeds out the merely excellent pilots to find the best of the best.

The two will join three other two-person teams from the United States to challenge teams from Russia, France, England, Germany, South Africa and Poland. The pressure will be intense because the United States has won the world competition the past three times, said Myers, 29.

Myers and Baudour, 33, work at Hiser Helicopters in Corona and earned the right to represent the United States by winning a national competition last spring in Las Vegas.

Each helicopter team will compete in four events:

* An obstacle course in which the helicopter must pass a bowling pin through a series of gates at precise time intervals.

* A slalom course in which a bucket of water is steered through one-meter-wide gates and then lowered onto a bull’s-eye, losing as little water as possible.

* Flying a search-and-rescue pattern through the English countryside to find marked panels on the ground.

* Steering through a precision flying course laid out on the ground with the helicopter facing forward, sideways, backward and at a 45-degree angle.

“You have to be very precise in what you’re doing in the course,” said Maj. Robert E. Payne, the U.S. Helicopter Team manager and a helicopter pilot with the National Guard in San Antonio.

Judges subtract points from scores each time a helicopter misses an obstacle course gate, spills a centimeter of water from the water bucket, misses a landing target by a fraction of an inch or passes a landmark at the wrong second, he said.

The competition used to be strictly military, with the U.S. government paying about $2 million to send its best pilots, Payne said. But with defense cuts, the U.S. competition is now run by the Helicopter Club of America. Each team needs to raise its own funds to compete.

Myers and Baudour have been scraping together savings and searching for sponsors to help defray their costs. The two held a pancake breakfast and raffle over the weekend at Corona Airport to raise extra money.

Although they have managed to raise about $6,000 so far, Myers said Sunday, that’s about half of what they will spend to compete.

Despite the costs, the two didn’t think twice about going.

“It’s a dream come true,” Baudour said. “We may never, ever get a chance to do this again.”