Once a familiar face at Bluehour, Saucebox, and Zefiro, Matt
Halperin was feeling service industry burnout when he struck upon his
new career while watching Russell Crowe in Proof of Life. Now
he’s been piloting helicopters for seven years, flying all over the
West Coast with huge loads of logs or water (fire season just ended).
With a two weeks on/two weeks off schedule, Matt’s nesting instinct
kicks into high gear when he’s at home. There you’ll find him plying
the babes with bitchin’ cooking worthy of Bruce Carey: The garden of
his handsome bachelor pad is bursting with fresh herbs and outfitted
with a Japanese Shinto smoking shed and mood lighting, and his vodka
infusions are on par with Saucebox’s.
Why is your flight helmet covered with dents?
The type of flying we do is very physical and beats the crap out of
you. Take a load that weighs as much as the aircraft, attach it to a
200-foot line, then go ripping out of the forest. There’s a lot of
bouncing and jarring and it induces nausea in almost all of the new
pilots. I wanted to throw up for the first year.
Did you?
I threw up once on my birthday. What happens is you get
provisionally hired and then you get “puke-proofed”—they send you
on a job and see if you can keep your lunch down. If you can’t, you
can’t cut it.
Best part of the job?
Flying is a pretty amazing thing. We walk on land; the sky is a
whole other element and it’s exciting to learn how to interact with it.
At its best it’s a beautiful artistic pursuit with no limit as to how
far you can expand your knowledge of it.
Craziest stories?
I had a lot of fun last month in the right seat. The left seat is
all focus and stress and flying really fast; the right seat you record
production and keep an eye on the gauges, but basically it’s your time
to relax. I bought a box of Twinkies and some duct tape and a box of
ChemWipes and I made parachutes for the Twinkies and parachuted them to
the guys on the ground.
Scary stories?
Anytime you almost kill a guy on the ground it’s pretty scary. The
idea is you pick up a bunch of logs and they’re stuck together in one
little unit, and you never fly over persons or property. But of course
what often happens is the unexpected, especially when you’re learning.
You don’t know how 10 logs on different lengths of cable are going to
react to each other. Add to that the fact that we’re often operating at
the extreme limits of the helicopter, so if you make a mistake, you’re
not going to be flying, you’re going to be falling.