Stunt Pilot Swoops In for NASA Role

Hovering 4,000 feet above brown salt flats in Utah, Hollywood stunt pilot Cliff Fleming and a cabin full of NASA contractors scanned for any sparkle in the sky.

The payload master pointed to the top of the helicopter’s windshield.

“Tallyho! Tallyho!” Fleming hollered.

Fleming makes his living as a movie pilot. He has swooped after sky surfers in the action movie “XXX” and towed actor Pierce Brosnan through the air in “Dante’s Peak.”

But at this April exercise, at a military training range 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, the 54-year old ex-Marine pilot was preparing for a different star event -- snagging a space probe full of solar ions as it returns to Earth.

On Sept. 8, Fleming aims to hook in midair a 450-pound reentry capsule from NASA’s Genesis probe. Aboard the capsule are 0.4 milligrams of oxygen, nitrogen and other particles blown by the solar winds. Studying the samples will help researchers learn how the objects in our solar system formed billions of years ago.

So sensitive are the delicate instruments and plates used to collect the particles that scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena decided they could not risk a bumpy landing on Earth. Instead, they are relying on Fleming’s skill to grab the package with a 20-foot-long hook from his helicopter.

When he first heard the idea six years ago, Fleming said, all he could think was: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Now, he has completed dozens of practice runs in preparation for Genesis’ return. Catching a capsule in midair will never be a routine maneuver, but Fleming now deems the stunt “feasible.”

*

Catching stardust is a tricky operation whether in Earth’s atmosphere or in space.

The $260-million Genesis probe is NASA’s first effort to bring chunks of space back to Earth since the 1970s, when U.S. Apollo flights and Soviet Luna spacecraft brought back moon rocks.

Launched in 2001, the craft spent 28 months collecting solar particles about 91 million miles from the sun.

Oxygen, nitrogen and 60 other elements, heated to about 180,000 degrees, bombarded five collector plates and a separate collector designed to funnel the particles into a concentrated sample. The particles embedded themselves into lattices of ultra-pure silicon, sapphire and other materials.

This April, a cover closed over the collectors, and Genesis turned back for Earth.

Now -- the really tricky part.

Early on Sept. 8, Genesis’ reentry capsule will hit Earth’s atmosphere at 24,700 mph.

About 6 1/2 minutes into its descent, a rectangular parachute, or parafoil, will pop out, slowing the craft to about 25 mph. NASA engineers will aim for an ellipse about 16 miles by 26 miles above Utah.

An Air Force dispatcher will bring helicopters within about seven miles of the returning capsule. Fleming is the primary catcher, with a second helicopter, piloted by Dan Rudert, following as a backup.

Once Fleming spots the canister, he will close in behind it as his payload master lowers a pole fixed with a hook at the end. Fleming’s goal is to hit the parafoil just off-center.

If he misses, he and Rudert can keep trying until the canister drops to 1,500 feet above the ground. Then, the capsule will have to float down on its own.

After catching the probe, he will carefully lower the canister to the ground at the Utah Testing and Training Range, avoiding possible unexploded bombs that litter parts of the area. A crew from a second helicopter will snip off the parafoil, then Fleming will take the load aloft again and fly it about 30 miles to a clean room at Michael Army Airfield in Utah.

Fleming, a chummy teddy bear type who takes on the glare of a gunfighter when piloting his helicopter, said the maneuver rates “an 8 or a 9” out of 10 in difficulty.

“My part is simple,” said Fleming, whose company is being paid $500,000 for its part in the six-year mission. “It’s NASA that has to get the capsule to me. It’s like I’m waiting for a pop fly.”

*

Fleming is squeezing the midair capture of Genesis in between filming for “Batman 5,” starring Christian Bale, and the second “XXX” movie, starring Ice Cube, due out in 2005.

He figures he has worked on about 100 movies, 25 television episodes and hundreds of commercials. He has chauffeured cameramen filming Billy Crystal on horseback in “City Slickers” and helped Meryl Streep navigate whitewater rapids with lines attached to a raft in “The River Wild.”

Catching things in the air is not in his usual repertoire.

The technique was perfected by the military, which has been catching things midair with planes and later helicopters since World War II.

In the 1960s, the Air Force used midair retrievals to recover reconnaissance data. But the military lost interest in the maneuver by the mid-1980s as surveillance drones became more sophisticated and satellites gained the ability to digitally transmit their images.

As a result, by the time NASA began planning Genesis’ return in the late 1990s, there were few military pilots left with the necessary experience. There was no way to guarantee that those who were around would still be based in the Southwest by the time Genesis returned, said Roy Haggard, who designed the system NASA will use to retrieve Genesis.

When Haggard, chief executive of Vertigo Inc., an aerospace research company based in Lake Elsinore, Calif., began looking for pilots who could pull off the maneuver, he realized that stunt pilots had the right stuff. “These helicopter pilots fly down a curvy road down the back of a convertible, carrying a camera and staying close to a car. That’s not that different from midair retrieval,” he said.

Haggard asked directors and stuntmen for recommendations. They kept pointing to Fleming.

Standing inside South Coast Helicopters’ hangar at John Wayne Airport, Fleming explained that there were a few key differences between flying movie stars and snagging space capsules.

First, there is the altitude issue. Most helicopter pilots fly about 500 feet above the ground, but this mission would require flying at about 4,000 feet, where pilots have trouble spotting landmarks that help determine altitude and speed.

Second, he has to fly much slower than the typical helicopter speed of 85 mph. At some points, the helicopter would slow its forward motion to a wobbly 25 mph.

Haggard and the helicopter pilots have practiced hitting the parafoil with just the pole 60 times and hooking the parachute 11 times. Only once did they encounter problems catching it: The parafoil came close to hitting the rear rotor of Rudert’s helicopter the first time he tried to hook the practice capsule.

“I won’t miss,” Fleming said.

*

If all goes as planned, Caltech geochemist Donald Burnett, the principal scientific investigator on the Genesis project, will open the capsule to reveal traces of what could be the material that gave birth to all the objects in our solar system.

The solar system was created about 4.6 billion years ago out of a homogenous cloud of interstellar gas, dust and ice known as the solar nebula. Over time, these materials came together and formed the planets, moons, asteroids and comets.

But what exactly was the makeup of this interstellar material?

“Every moon and every asteroid we know is different,” Burnett said. “But diversity started from an environment where everything was homogeneous. What Genesis tells us is the starting composition. It is the basis of theories about how the solar system got to where it is today.”

Burnett has been working on this project for 21 years, and now, everything rides on the reliability of the capsule’s parachute system and the skill of the helicopter pilots.

Fleming admitted he is a little nervous about the high-stakes mission. “That’s a pretty pricey piece of merchandise,” he said.

Fleming has seen snippets of himself in movies. He is usually faking a fiery crash into a skyscraper or spinning his helicopter in an inevitably tragic spiral.

But with the Genesis retrieval -- every second of which will be filmed by a chase helicopter -- he is hoping for no Hollywood drama.

“A lot of people will be watching us,” he said. “You can either be a hero or a schmo.”