The Terrifying Ride of Copter 17

It was already dark when Copter 17 got an urgent call to head to Eaton Canyon. A fire had been reported at 6:18 p.m.

Mike Sagely, one of the most experienced pilots with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, peered through night-vision goggles as he raced the helicopter across the San Fernando Valley.

“There’s the glow,” he told Chris Siok, the battalion chief sitting next to him. Mr. Siok was on an iPad, poring over maps of Altadena, the community nearest to the growing fire.

It was the early evening of Tuesday, Jan. 7. Thousands of homes in Altadena and neighboring Pasadena, Calif., that would soon be incinerated were still intact. Sixteen residents who were eventually killed were still alive. Fire pilots like Mr. Sagely still had a chance to make a dent in what would become the second-most destructive wildfire in California history, by dropping thousands of gallons of water before the blaze became unmanageable.

But at 6:36 p.m. — 18 minutes after the first report of the fire — their plan fell apart.

As they approached the inferno, Copter 17 dropped so violently that the two men were yanked up off their seats, restrained only by their seatbelts. Known for their calm under pressure, they both yelped in shock.

Furious swirling winds were cascading over the mountains and tossing Copter 17 up and down, left and right. Mr. Sagely was fighting for control over the aircraft.

“We knew we were in big fricking trouble,” Mr. Sagely said.

When an extreme gust of wind sent the helicopter plunging around 100 feet, an emergency light on the dashboard flashed a warning that the transmission box was out of oil. It wasn’t — the aircraft plummeted so fast the oil had flown out of the pump to the top of the casing. In his 11,300 hours of flight time over 38 years, including countless combat missions for the Army, Mr. Sagely had never seen that happen.

While battling to stay aloft, they became transfixed by the blinding bright-orange wave of fire beneath them. This account of what it was like inside Copter 17 on the night of Jan. 7 is based on interviews with 10 pilots and crew members, as well as a reporter’s ride in the same aircraft through Eaton Canyon a week later.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department is recognized across the country as a pioneer in using aircraft to fight fires. The department was the first county to adapt the military’s Black Hawk helicopter into a firefighting copter known as the Firehawk, which carries a water tank of 1,000 gallons. The department was also the first in the United States to use night-vision equipment to fight fires in the dark.

Yet the pilots who flew that night speak of weather conditions that humbled them, a ferocity of sustained, 90-mile-an-hour winds that overpowered their equipment and brought them to the edge of an airborne catastrophe. It was a night, they say, that underlined the futility of trying to confront an inferno driven by hurricane-force winds.

“This by far is the worst event I’ve been in, in my career — without a doubt,” said Ken Williams, a pilot for the department with 42 years’ experience and 11,000 flying hours. “Mother Nature was in control that night.”

‘Like Jimi Hendrix Plays the Guitar’

Before he spent much of his life in the air, Mike Sagely was an aspiring Olympian, a Southern California volleyball player who joined the U.S. Olympic team after the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. When he was released from the team, he enlisted in the Army, aced the flight school test and piloted a wide variety of aircraft.

His military career deployed him to Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and on numerous classified missions in his 17 years as a Special Operations pilot. He flew 2,000 hours of combat missions, nearly all of them at night.

When he joined the Los Angeles County Fire Department in 2009, he established himself as one of the best night-flying firefighting pilots the agency has ever seen.

“He flies helicopters like Jimi Hendrix plays the guitar,” said Ed Walker, a firefighter-paramedic in the department who has sat next to Mr. Sagely on countless calls. “It’s like the copter is a part of him. It’s an extension of his being.”

Los Angeles is one of the more challenging parts of the country for flying helicopters. The heat of the Mojave Desert and the altitudes of the county’s mountain ranges can stress a helicopter’s engines. In the valleys and flatlands, pilots navigate busy skies, a tangled network of electrical wires and the vast sprawl of America’s most populous county.

Flying across the county at night is even riskier. Mr. Sagely, who has flown nearly 3,000 hours using night-vision equipment, perhaps more than any other firefighting pilot in the country, likens it to trying to drive a car while looking through cardboard toilet-paper tubes.

The county fire department handles a variety of emergencies: hoisting drivers to safety when cars veer off canyon embankments or ferrying the injured and the critically ill to hospitals. But two-thirds of the department’s operational flying time is spent fighting fires, said Dennis Blumenthal, the chief of maintenance at the Air Operations Section.

Their headquarters is in the gritty industrial and working-class Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacoima, in the San Fernando Valley. Loudspeakers issue alarms to alert pilots and crews to an emergency. A printer spits out the details of the call, and the pilots and crew rip the assignment from the printer and head to the helicopters parked on the tarmac.

January and February are normally the calmest months for the Air Operations Section, a time when winter rains have dampened the risk of fire. But this year, the heavy rains never came and the fire risk remained high.

That disrupted the rhythms of the department’s maintenance schedule, the frequent overhauls the aging helicopters require from the repeated stress of loading and dumping. The water alone in the Firehawk’s 1,000-gallon tank weighs more than 8,000 pounds, the equivalent of lifting two average-sized cars.

“No one in the world flies helicopters as hard as we do,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “We are stressing these machines on a continuous basis.”

At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7, pilots and crew members gathered in the Air Operations conference room for their daily briefing.

They were advised on what the National Weather Service had been saying for days: The winds would be severe. The Weather Service had issued a rare bulletin of a “Particularly Dangerous Situation,” a warning the federal government issues only about two dozen times a year.

Accustomed to flying in the gullies and canyons of Los Angeles County, the pilots understood what this meant. Strong winds interact with the topography in dangerous ways, flowing down into ravines like the rushing waters of a mountain stream after heavy rains. Just like whitewater, winds can swirl like a whirlpool or crash down on top of an aircraft like a waterfall.

When the first major fire broke out on Tuesday on a ridge high above Pacific Palisades, the lead department was the Los Angeles Fire Department — the city’s firefighting agency — which has its own fleet of helicopters. In the confusing patchwork of Los Angeles County jurisdictions, Pacific Palisades is served by the city, not the county, fire department. “It’s not our dirt,” said Mr. Siok, the battalion chief. As part of its mutual-assistance pact, the county sent two helicopters and a “Super Scooper,” a plane that skims the ocean, sucks up water and dumps it on fires.

At around 6 p.m., Mr. Siok and Mr. Sagely received a call that a fire had started in Malibu. They climbed into Copter 17, a 33-year-old Bell 412 that has flown more than 9,500 hours for the department. The Bell 412 is a descendant of the Huey, the helicopter made famous for its ubiquity during the Vietnam War. Mr. Sagely has a fondness for Copter 17, despite its age, and compares it to an old pickup truck.

With Mr. Sagely at the controls, the two men reached Malibu, but the fire had already been put out on the ground.

At 6:23 p.m., the order came to divert to Eaton Canyon, where five minutes earlier a 911 caller had alerted the department to the growing fire. Two other helicopters, a Bell 412 and a Firehawk, both equipped with water tanks, took off from the department’s base to join Copter 17 at the fire.

Typically pilots take off, find a reservoir near the fire, drop the aircraft’s giant snorkel into the water and fill their tanks. The pilot then flies close over the flames and presses a button to dump the water.

But as soon as the three helicopters arrived at the fire, they were tossed around by the violent downdrafts — and equally jarring updrafts. During one stomach-churning plunge, Mr. Williams, who was piloting his Bell 412 behind Mr. Sagely’s Copter 17, peered down to his instrument panel and saw that he was falling at a rate of 1,000 feet per minute. He came within 400 feet of the valley floor.

“I knew right away it was going to be potentially catastrophic, pushing the aircraft to the ground,” Mr. Williams said.

The pilots fought the winds with every limb. With their feet they adjusted the tail rotors. With their left hands, they urgently pulled up the collective, a lever used to change altitude, to compensate for the winds shoving them down. With their right hands, they jostled the cyclic stick, the lever that tilts the rotors, to try to keep the aircraft pointed into the wind.

The instruments were telling Mr. Sagely that the air speed hitting the front of his aircraft was 85 knots, around 98 m.p.h. Another indicator told him he was maintaining a ground speed of 11 knots. But when he looked out the window, he realized he was indeed traveling that speed — but backward, pushed by the winds.

At 6:45 p.m., nine minutes after arriving on the scene, Mr. Sagely and Mr. Siok made the difficult decision to cancel water operations. There was nothing they could save.

“Mike! Get the hell out of there! Now!” Mr. Williams radioed to his fellow pilot in front of him.

Mr. Sagely and Mr. Siok stayed another 39 minutes, relaying the path of the firestorm to commanders on the ground. They were the last firefighting helicopter in the air that night. All other aircraft had been grounded.

Touching down in Pacoima, their fuel nearly depleted, they saw the Air Operations Section in battle mode, already gearing up for the winds to calm down and the next stage to begin. Mr. Blumenthal’s mechanics began rushing a mothballed, decades-old helicopter back into service.

The county air teams flew 170 hours in the seven days after the Eaton fire broke out — more hours in a week than they typically fly in the entire month of January.

Still, Mr. Sagely describes the night of Jan. 7 as a failure.

“You are expected to try and save the day — and sometimes you have to let that go,” he said. “There are times when you cannot do anything. You are watching it play out and you are helpless to change it.”

He takes solace in the work he and other pilots did when the winds died down, the homes they saved in the many fires, big and small, that the department was called in to fight.

On Wednesday, more than a week after the Los Angeles infernos erupted, a sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department, Jeff Rivera, arrived unannounced at the Air Operations office.

The sergeant had been at his home in Arcadia, east of Altadena, a week earlier, when the winds suddenly picked up and a fire raging in the Angeles National Forest began descending down a hillside toward his house. He and other residents were helpless to stop it.

Out of the sky they heard the thumping sound of helicopter rotors and saw a white aircraft with yellow stripes. It was Copter 15, a Firehawk carrying a full load of water. With his phone, Sergeant Rivera shot a video of the aircraft descending onto the edge of the fire, dropping its load of water and extinguishing a wall of flames.

“They literally saved the entire area,” Sergeant Rivera said in the Air Operations office. “I came here to thank them.”