The first thing Maryland State Trooper John Peach does when asked about the dangers of flying medical helicopters is to take out his cell phone with a picture of his wife, Kate, and 2-year-old daughter Elizabeth. He held up the image for me as he prepared his 38-foot Dauphin craft for his next call while parked in a hangar at Martin State Airport this week.
He readily acknowledges that after the crash last September that killed two of his friends, pilot Stephen H. Bunker and Trooper Mickey C. Lippy, along with a volunteer emergency medical technician and a patient, in heavy fog in Prince George's County, he's a bit more wary of going out. "It was a little difficult at first," he told me.
Peach told me that his daughter, even at such a young age, points to the sky every time a helicopter soars overhead. She's seen where her daddy works, but she certainly doesn't yet understand the dangers.
Still, he trusts his abilities and the choppers he flies: "If I didn't think it was safe, I wouldn't be here."
Rain and wind on this Wednesday morning had everyone in the aviation office thinking back to the day Trooper 2 went down. The crash sparked a political debate over whether the medevac fleet should be privatized and whether pilots had been transporting too many patients who didn't suffer life-threatening injuries.
I visited with troopers, pilots and maintenance workers at the aviation unit's headquarters ahead of Friday's Fallen Heroes Day ceremony at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium to honor law enforcement officials from around the state who have been killed in the line of duty.
Lt. Walter A. Kerr is scheduled to fly a helicopter over the cemetery to honor the lives lost, and he and others took turns telling stories of lives they've saved.
They recalled pilots who a number of years ago hovered over a burning Baltimore high-rise to hoist stranded residents to safety, and performing a similar maneuver over a 1,000-foot tall burning smokestack in West Virginia. They don't land at airports with lighted runways but on highway overpasses and yards surrounded by power lines and trees.
David Rosenberger fixes the choppers, but he's also friends with the troopers and pilots who he watches head out in the copters he's repaired.
He knew the pilot and trooper who died in last year's crash, and he went to the scene to retrieve pieces of the wreckage for investigators.
What he most remembers: "The smell of the jet fuel."
