People of Polish Aviation - Henryk Florkowski

series People of Polish Aviation

The highest level of mental stress - flying in TOPR

*The interview conducted in 2018 comes from - JB Investments archives - all rights reserved.

He is a pilot for special tasks - almost all of his aviation life is related to rescue. Henryk Florkowski previously flew over the Baltic Sea, participated in actions near oil rigs, today - in the Tatra Mountains he rescues tourists. He is also responsible for training TOPR pilots. He is not a highlander by blood and bones, but it was in Zakopane that he found his home.

Agata Król: Do you have nerves of steel? Flying a TOPR helicopter is incomparable to flying an ordinary helicopter.

Here flying is really very specific and not everyone is suitable for this work. I mean, first of all, mental resilience, but also uncommon skills... in short, talent. There are a handful of pilots who can fly here in the Tatra Mountains, but I know many who would never in their lives choose to fly in the mountains, especially here, in such conditions. This specificity of flying scares them.

You were not frightened, nor were your colleagues at the base where we meet.

Here come trained people who can fly very well. Here there are no novices. There is no place for a nursery here. All TOPR pilots know the procedures, know how to behave, are aware that they are dealing with a hostile environment, and it does not forgive mistakes.

When you talk about the specifics of flying in the mountains, do you mean the danger of terrain obstacles and weather conditions?

That matters - both weather conditions and terrain. But more important, in my opinion, are mental toughness and precision. To work here you need to have a lot of experience piloting a helicopter, especially in difficult conditions.

What do you pay special attention to during helicopter training, what skills or procedures do you train?

The aforementioned precision and observation skills - that's first and foremost. Recently, I have been paying more attention to pilots' concentration combined with the ability to observe precisely. You need to be able to find reference points for yourself, feel the helicopter, fly in such a way as not to disturb it, so that the helicopter flies on its own. All this must be coordinated. Teamwork is important, of course. I pay attention to cooperation with rescuers. It looks like the rescuers learn cooperation from us, and we from them. This needs to be trained so that during an action we understand each other almost without words. And that's how it is with us. Everyone knows what to do.

What tips would you give to a person who dreams of flying in TOPR?

Dreams are not everything yet. Let him come to me, I'll fly with him and tell him whether he should keep dreaming or give it a rest. Dreams alone are not enough to reach this level of flying, it takes a lot of learning, a lot of work. We all work hard here, because expectations are raised as high as possible. Not everyone can withstand this pressure. Imagine the mental strain combined with concentration - hovering for a few, sometimes a dozen, minutes, gaze directed at one point, a rock, a crevice, a patch of grass... and according to this you keep the helicopter hovering, motionless. And down there, the rescuers, working, rescuing... already in the eyes are trolling, you can not blink, just to keep from moving. This is really a huge effort. A person is so concentrated, like a marble, he can't see anything, he can't even move his head, because if he changes his reference point, he can make the helicopter move half a meter to one side or the other. The machine will move a centimeter, then for the people on the ropes, it will be a meter below. This is a deadly danger for them.

When a TOPR helicopter takes off it means that something serious is happening in the mountains, that someone needs help. Accidents often happen in difficult weather conditions. How much are you willing to risk to save people's lives?

This is not talked about, because you have to fly in conditions that do not threaten the safety of the crew... but sometimes you have to bend a little, because a person can't stand it. If someone out there in the mountains needs help, there is, let's say, a loss of consciousness, you need to quickly get such a person to the hospital, then if we didn't fly, it would gnaw at our conscience that we didn't give help to someone who really needed it. If the clouds are low, if the mountains are covered, we won't fly for sure, because we need to see something. Without visibility, flight is impossible. However, there are sometimes difficult conditions caused by the wind. These blow horizontally, vertically, sometimes from all sides. These turbulence can be such that it is difficult to hold the helicopter. Well, and then we combine in various possible ways - we try to reach the place of the accident, but unfortunately, many times it is so that we fly only under the regal and return, because the wind strokes, especially in the Halal, are so strong that they threaten to damage the helicopter.

It is on your head that this decision rests, you are the commanders of the crew.

The captain, the crew commander of this helicopter is responsible for everything, he decides. If he says he can't make it, no one will question his decision, he just goes back and that's it. You can't get carried away by emotions. We wait for the weather to improve, and the rescuers go with the boot, traditionally.

Are these decisions so obvious, or do you put the injured party on one side and the crew on the other?

We actually are on such a cutting edge, you have to lean to one side or the other sometimes... well, and act.

To act, you need to be well connected. This radio is your eyes and ears?

Well, yes, without a radio it would be difficult to communicate. It's noisy in the helicopter, well, and we don't actually have eye contact. However, it seems to me that if the crew is well-coordinated and everyone knows what to do, then even if the communication fails we can still manage. Based on experience - I know what the rescuers are doing, and they can predict what I will do - that's how a well-coordinated team works.

Can flying in TOPR be compared to sanitary aviation?

This is incomparable. In paramedic aviation, you fly from point A to point B, there is somewhere to land, the airstrip is secured by the fire department, the police. Rescuers pack up the injured in an accident, or in some other incidents, and transport them to the hospital. Our operation is more complicated. We, first of all, have to find this injured person in the mountains, reach him, pull him out of there, pack him into the helicopter and transport him to the hospital. Mostly we operate from a hover, above the scene of the incident, there are few places where we can touch down.

There is no typical action, because every action is different, but what is your response like from the moment you receive a request, what happens next, how much time do you have to take off?

We have as much time as we need. We try to take off as quickly as possible, but we need to know exactly where the injured person is, what happened - the more data we have, the easier and faster we can get to the injured person. It depends on where the person is and what happened to him, whether we need to select more people from headquarters to help, or whether our crew is sufficient. We can pre-plan the course of action, for example, what technique we will use, we assess the degree of difficulty. After making such decisions, we take off. As a rule, after about 5 minutes we are in the air. We don't have some exorbitant standards, like in the army - 2 or 3 minutes to take off - we just try to prepare as well as possible and thus shorten the time to reach the injured.

How is it with the degree of difficulty and the techniques you use?

We have an elevator up to 40 meters, but if someone is at 45 meters or lower, we have to use a long rope. We look for a place to touch down, prepare a rope, say those 60 meters or 100 meters, depending on the situation. Then the rescuers hook up to its end. We take off vertically upwards, the rescuers hang on to the end of the rope, we carry them to the injured person's location and leave them there. When they have given first aid and prepared the patient for transport, then we go back for them, give them the rope again and carry them to a place where they can land. Everyone packs into the machine and then we can fly to the hospital. All of this is extremely difficult, because one wrong ill-considered movement of the controls, an unexpected gust of wind, can expose the people attached to the rope to serious injury or death. This is where experience, precision... generally speaking, piloting technique comes into play.

You are not only pilots, but basically rescuers. I mean that sense and knowledge of how to react to help the rescuers in their operation, not just piloting.

The crew is like one organism. We have to understand each other. I, sitting at the helm, can't see what's going on below, but I know from radio commands what they're doing and that they're trying to do it as quickly, as safely as possible. The helicopter's time in hover should be reduced to a minimum. This is the so-called danger zone. The idea is to keep the time of this hovering, and therefore this action, as short as possible, to stay in this danger zone as short as possible.

Do you have selected extremely dangerous areas in the Tatra Mountains, ones you don't like to fly into?

In the Tatra Mountains they are all dangerous. It is enough that one engine hesitates and power drops... this is not an airport, we have nowhere to land. We are aware of the risk, it is calculated into our activity. And if, on top of that, we have people on the line below us, it makes your hair stand on end. There's no room for error here because we'll knock them against the wall, kill them. We can't save only ourselves, we have a whole team, we are all one.

Where and when did aviation appear in your mind?

It was pure coincidence.

Really?

I was before the fifth year of technical school... it was summer vacation. I had nothing to do with myself, so I signed up for a glider course. It turned out that somehow flying was working out for me.

You took to the air and something clicked?

I didn't know where I was at all, what to do. The instructor told me, look here is the horizon, the natural horizon. And where is this horizon? In the first flight I couldn't find myself, I didn't know where I was. And later it was fine.

And the first solo flight?

I was tearing up, singing ... no one heard me after all. It is such a strange feeling when no one is there, a person is alone. I felt great satisfaction. I watched the views, admired, because everything was nicely visible. The course lasted a month and I returned to reality. After finishing school, I had to report to WKU, and it was the commission that basically persuaded me to take off for Deblin. I passed the examinations, and after Deblin I already became a master pilot.

In Deblin - a helicopter, although it would seem that after the glider course, an airplane would be closer to you?

Yes, but helicopter pilots were needed at the time. The beginning was not so easy, at first they gave us a hard time, as in the army, and then there was a lot of learning and training. I was the first of the group to fly independently. I had something in there. Later I was in Leczyca, in a military unit, and flew on large Mi-8 helicopters. Then I moved to Darlowo, because I wanted to fly in marine rescue. The situation worked out so that I left the army, but I stayed by the sea. There was an air service company in Gdansk that dealt with sea rescue and oil rig service. I flew there for six years.

What did this work consist of?

It was a civilian marine rescue service. We stood on duty 24 hours a day, and sometimes we transported people or cargo to an oil rig. There used to be an exploration platform, a Polish-German-Russian one, that traveled in the Baltic Sea. When I left that company, I was offered to return to the military. In the Navy in Gdynia, I was also a marine lifeguard and on duty. Among other things, I introduced new rope techniques, which are still successfully used today. I can even boast that I was twice pilot of the year in the army, which supposedly did not happen.

Pilot of the year is pride, what have you done for yourself?

I was an instructor there, I had the highest airfare with minimal atmospheric conditions, difficult atmospheric conditions. I did flights with VIPs, I flew a lot on training grounds, with anti-terrorist groups, special units such as GROM, Formosa, etc.

Your image is drawn to me as a pilot for special tasks.

It was a bit like that, because in the meantime, I was still doing high-altitude work by helicopter - towers, GSM stations, markets, ski lifts, chimneys, some installations, we also put up a cross on a church in Wloclawek. In these flights I gained a lot of experience in precision flying. My next job was not an easy one either. I was employed by White Eagle Aviation and carried mail. Those were just extreme flights! We flew only at night. The route: from Olsztyn, via Białystok, to Okęcie in Warsaw. We started work at 9 p.m., returning 3 a.m.

Have you had extreme situations in your flying that you already thought it was over?

I think there were two, maybe three... for a split second my whole life flew before my eyes. I got out of the predicament because I was lucky and made the right decisions. It is known that in the Masuria region there are always fogs and changeable weather, so we flew in thunderstorms, in clouds, in fog... we caught birds in the clouds, the engine went out, our windshield was broken, the bang was terrible. The worst was that landing in the fog, actually I shouldn't admit it, you couldn't see anything. These were really stressful flights. After that company, I started applying for a job with TOPR. I've been there for 12 years now, since 2004.

A new workplace, but tasks similar and equally dangerous.

There is a nice climate in TOPR - there are great people, professionals themselves, well-trained, well-prepared to work, to act as a rescuer. I have blended into this environment here. Before, I used to come here only as a tourist for skiing. Now I live in Koscielisko, walk in the mountains, delight in them. And yes, a person sometimes wonders if it's not enough, if maybe it's time to stop flying... but the reward for the effort is great - it's immense satisfaction.

Text: Agata Król.
Archive of JB Investments Sp. z o.o. (all rights reserved)
Photos: Magda Starowieyska