GSI transferred me out of the far east to Turkey, in the late spring of 1985. From Party Manager on a portable jungle operation to Helicopter Coordinator on a land crew in the mountains of Southeastern Turkey. My boss in Singapore was as pleased to see me go, as was I to see the last of him. I haven't seen him since.

This was my first visit to Turkey, and I was quite surprised at what I found. The image I had was of a backward third-world moslem country. I'd seen pictures and movies of Turkey, which weren't very complimentary, nor accurate. My first stop in Turkey was the capital, Ankara. This is a large modern city that looks about the same as any city in Southern Europe. Pictured here is one of the many statues of "the Father of Modern Turkey , Mustafa Kemel Ataturk. Apart from bringing Turkey into the modern world, he also made the men get rid of their fezs, and encouraged them to wear the cloth caps that the Scots call tams.

Incidentally, the easiest way to tell a policeman or a soldier from a civilian, is that he will have no moustache. The civilians all have moustaches.

The GSI Operation

I was assigned to was Party 1661. When I arrived in May, the start-up crew was working out of the GSI office in Diyarbakir. This was a 12-hour day, seven-day-week crew. The work schedule was 7 weeks on and 3 weeks off. As usual GSI had sent me far too early. There were no helicopters to coordinate and no base camp.

One of the first things I did was to go scouting with Party Manager, and old Far East hand, Olaf Lindae. I knew Olaf from Balikpapan, in Kalimantan. He was a Canadian of German extraction. On the way to the village of Baykan, where we were to look for a campsite we passed through the town of Batman. There isn't anything particularly interesting about Batman, apart from its name.

We picked a spot on a mesa, which someone else may have also used for a campsite long ago. Notice the two bridges, built by the Roman army when they came through here a couple of thousand years ago. They are still in use by local shepherds. They are just wide enough for a chariot.

Although the location was very good, the camp itself was pretty poor. Olaf put a low priority on getting the plumbing set up, and there were a couple of months when we had to find a spot among the bushes. It was pretty disgusting really, what with Ataturk's Revenge and so forth.

There were several small caravans (trailers), which were locally made. The mechanic put his foot through the floor of one of them on the first day. The floors were made of 3-ply plywood. Those not lucky enough for the DeLuxe accommodation, slept in tents, where I slept during my first hitch. They weren't bad, since they were only for sleeping.

In the summer, the midday temperature would reach 120º F, but at night, it would get down to 40ºF. We slept under heavy wool blankets.

At 6000 feet elevation with no light pollution, smog, or clouds; the stars and the Milky Way were spectacular every night. It is perhaps the clearest night skies I've ever seen.

This mosque is very old and, I'm told, famous. Tourists come to visit on a daily basis. It's located in Kosluk Hazo (if I remember right), in the province of Siirt, which was the site of our second base camp. We moved there at the request of the military, who told us it wasn't safe to remain on the mesa any longer due to Kurdish rebels in the area. A Western Geophysical camp was attacked just prior to our move. Nobody was injured, but Western had some equipment burned.

The Helicopter Operation

I was given the Helicopter Coodinator's job because I had worked extensively with them in Indonesia. But in the Far East we used them for moving equipment and supplies. This operation was to be a long-line job, like is used in Colorado and places like that. I'd never seen anything quite like it before, not that it would have made any difference.

The contract arrangements were also strange. We were working for ESSO (Exxon), who picked Viking Helicopters out of Montreal, Quebec, and told us to hire them. We paid Viking, and ESSO paid us. But ESSO told us how and what to do with the helicopters. I suppose it was done this way to shelter them from any potential liability.

My job was to arrange for the fuelling, liaise with the Viking people, schedule the day's flying activities, keep up with the billable flying hours, keep up with the radio logs, and spend all day in the field as Loadmaster. This wasn't a very good deal. Eventually, they got Basil Warr, another ex-Far East hand and a Gravity Party Chief to help me. The only good that came out of it was that Basil and I both lost a lot of excess lard that summer. Of course the poor food helped.

Viking helicopters supplied three machines. They were Lamas, which are good for high altitude work. Two of the machines were shipped from the Sudan. The other was leased from Dollar Helicopters Ltd., in Coventry, England, and flown to Turkey. Viking's two machines were clapped out pieces of junk. The HF radios didn't work and they were constantly in the shop. Dollar's machine was fairly new, with working radios, and an engineer who came with it. He was a Frenchman, married to an English woman, who had lived in England for about ten years. He kept his beautiful red ellicoptre in good shape.

In most charter operations there is a chief pilot and a managing pilot. On this job, the manager was the Viking engineer. He was a slick talking Englishman who spent most of his time in the mess tent drinking tea, making the Frenchman do all the work. There was a lot of playing and not a very professional manner among the Viking guys. The chief pilot was a Canadian who came up from Sudan. He was a hot dog. While practicing using the long line, he banged the 55 gallon drum full of jet fuel into the ground a couple of times on the first day. Just as I began to think it was just one of those things that could happen to anybody, he hit a power line while sightseeing down a river. Fortunately, he didn't do much damage, and was able to fly back to camp.

The other original pilot, Mario, was Portuguese. He also came from Sudan. Viking sent in a third pilot, a Japanese named Tony. He was there a few days, and walked around in his Fruit of the Looms because of the heat. After watching his workmates, he told me that they were dangerous and we had better take heed. Viking's manager ran him off, but he got the word to GSI in Ankara before he left. It's hard to take a guy seriously who walks around in his drawers , but as it turned out, he was right. By then, I'd been there 7 weeks, and headed for Singapore for 3 weeks of well earned R&R.

Getting to Singapore from Turkey was via Frankfort, Germany. From the field it took a full day to get to Ankara, then most of the next day to get to Frankfort. I spent the night at the airport hotel, which was convenient, then left for Singapore the following evening on a JAL 747. The flight went via Zurich, Kuwait, and Karachi, arriving in Singapore on the third day after leaving camp.

While I was enjoying my time off, the first helicopter accident occurred. A new pilot, sent to replace Tony, made a hard landing at a helipad in the mountains, a very hard landing indeed. It was hard enough to destroy the helicopter, though no one was seriously injured--unless you call a broken arm serious. By the time I returned to the crew, the safety brass from ESSO and GSI were there to see what was going on. They mostly bought the BS from Viking's manager and Project Manager, though the ESSO guy gave me a hard time because he didn't like the way Viking was running their operation. With no backup from either GSI or ESSO, I really didn't have much to say about things. I began to see why ESSO had insisted on a GSI Helicopter Coordinator.

Mario came back from leave early to relieve the pilot who crashed. He's pictured here walking away from the white helicopter carrying a plastic bag full of books. His father was a book printer, and the books were printed with every other page joined together. They were printed like an accordian, and Mario would read the books and then slit the paper the paper with his switch blade knife, thus making four pages out of two. That may confuse you, since I haven't really explained it very well. Anyway, Mario's return to the crew was very short.

The second day back, I was ordered by our Party Chief to stay in camp and run the radio, since the radio operator was out sick. About ten in the morning the helicopter was moving cables and geophones from the back of the line to the front. I couldn't get Mario on the radio. Finally a young turk came on and said there was a problem with the helicopter. He said , "helicopter go boom!" Things got pretty hectic after that. We sent some expats and vehicles out to the staging area where the call came from and found the wreckage of the helicopter and Mario dead.

For reasons known only to Mario--there probably weren't any, he flew into a 110kv high tension line which was overhead the pad where he had been flying in and out of all morning. This line was over 100' above the ground, so it was no problem to miss it. He was likely thinking of something else and forgot about the cable until he struck it with his main rotor. He must have been moving forward fairly fast because he snapped the cable, which is quite thick. It in turn, snapped back on both sides, and caused two grass fires. The wreckage hit the ground not far from where it took off. Mario had his head bashed in and was probably killed by the rotor while the helicopter was coming apart. It was a non-survivable crash.

Our GSI Safety officer just happened to be sober that morning, so he went out with several of the guys who normally worked in camp, and picked up the body. It was packed in ice, and sent to Diyarbakir for whatever the authorities wanted to do with it. They shipped it to Portugal, back to his family. The French helicopter engineer was in a state, so we sent him too. Since his helicopter was finished, his job was too.

It wasn't long until ESSO grounded the remaining helicopter, and converted the operation from a helicopter crew to a mule crew. With no need for a mule coordinator, it was time for me to go.