So There I Was

Farewell Sticks is the hardest episode we’ve ever had to record. On August 20th, we lost our friend, producer, and co-host John “Sticks” Hall in a small plane crash near Bristol, Maine. His son Tyler was flying with him and survived with minor injuries.

We’re not speculating on cause. Actually, we’re not speculating on anything about that day. What we can tell you: it was a Diamond DA20, Sticks bought it last spring, and that’s where the facts stop for now.

Farewell Sticks: The Man Behind the Mic

Sticks was a true unrestricted aviator, qualified in both fixed wing and rotary wing. Furthermore, when the Coast Guard tried to send him fixed wing in flight school, he threatened to drop on request unless they let him fly helicopters instead.

That stubbornness paid off. He spent his career as a Coast Guard rescue pilot, flying a hundred feet off the water, a hundred miles out, at night, in weather nobody sane would choose. Consequently, he pulled people off sinking ships when it mattered most.

Sticks was also a nurse practitioner who prided himself on being an outstanding diagnostician. He didn’t clock out when he left the office, either. Friends of the show can tell you he talked them through injuries and health scares more than once.

He met RePete years ago as his son’s Boy Scout troop leader. All three of his sons, Noah, Jack, and Tyler, became Eagle Scouts under his mentorship.

Sticks first joined the show in Episode 30, “Are You Sure It’s Mine,” discussing 9/11. He came back most recently to co-host Episode 223, “Coasties in Space.” However, his fingerprints are on this show in quieter ways too. He designed the logo, hiding a goat at a 120-degree angle of bank for anyone who looks closely enough.

He recruited guests, hauled gear from New Hampshire to North Carolina for the Harrier sundown, and finally met the whole crew in person this past June. His son Tyler appeared on Episode 176, “Don’t Be Afraid to Use the E-Word,” and is heading into his senior year at Embry-Riddle.

We’re praying for Sticks and his entire family. Semper Paratus, Sticks. Always ready, right to the end.

Here’s a link to the news report of the mishap.

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Retired C-141 pilot and author Chill-Rob McD joins Fig and RePete for a night of Starlifter chaos: a Dutch roll at 35,000 feet, a mid-air fight with a runaway yaw damper, and a landing that ends in blown tires and a fifty-foot wall of flame. Add a gunpoint landing fee off the coast of Africa, a loadmaster who nearly ate an elevator cable, and the story behind his book Flight Path: An Irreverent Aviation Tale — this one earns the title He Who Dies with the Most Laugh Wrinkles Wins.

Race to the Shear Switch is exactly what it sounds like. You either cut the cable, or the cable decides your night for you. On Episode 224, retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot Larry Hall makes that call for real.

Actually, this episode opens rough. Co-host Fig joins fresh off a highway wreck, rear-ended by a Peterbilt into another rig. However, he’s already cracking jokes about mistaking himself for Captain Kirk on the anesthesia.

Furthermore, guest Larry Hall isn’t new to chaos. The retired Coast Guard aviator flew H-52s off cutters, once herding a boat home with rotor wash. He calls it the Border Collie technique, and it’s exactly as wild as it sounds.

Race to the Shear Switch: Inside Episode 224

Consequently, the real drama shows up at 2 a.m. Larry is flying a night check ride with a young JG named Charlie Ray. They’re trying to pump out a sinking trawler offshore. The hoist cable snags on the boat’s outrigger, and it turns into a straight-up race to the shear switch.

Both pilots reach for it at once. Once you shear the cable, the helicopter turns back into a slow, sad observation platform that can’t do much. Luckily, a Coast Guard boat crew from Station Tybee reaches the trawler first, and everyone gets to go home.

Years later, Larry runs into Charlie again, only now Charlie’s a four-star admiral who remembers every second of that night, calling it the only shear of his entire career. Not a bad story to swap with the Vice Commandant.

Larry also digs into Coast Guard history between stories. He’s a volunteer at the service’s historian’s office, and he name-drops everything from the Cuban boat lift to Douglas Munro’s Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal. It’s a deep well, and he knows exactly where the good stuff is buried.

And that race to the shear switch from decades ago still comes up whenever these two cross paths.

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This week’s Coast Guard aviation stories come courtesy of a special guest co-host: Deuce, a newly retired Coast Guard aviator (and, briefly, the service’s senior space attorney). Sticks and Bago hold down the fort while Deuce walks through the Coast Guard’s oddball, everything-service mission set — including how commercial space launches are about to become a Coast Guard headache.

From there it’s classic So There I Was territory: sleeping inside a helicopter to escape a snoring ops officer, a Katrina-era rescue that saved six sailors drifting toward Morocco, and the almost-unbelievable ditching of a Pan Am Clipper next to the Cutter Pontchartrain. Deuce also breaks down why the Coast Guard is quietly building out a drone rating for search and rescue.

Big thanks to DC Artworks for sponsoring the show — go check out dcartworks.net for genuinely one-of-a-kind aviation art.

An update on Fig's serious crash and injuries and an AMAZING story of heroism under fire in Vietnam!