FORMER helicopter pilot Jerry Grayson has done things most people only dream about.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
By the time he was 25, he was the most decorated peacetime naval pilot in history. He flew over the burning oilfields of Kuwait with German film director Werner Herzog. He helped film the Olympic Games, an IMAX movie, the James Bond movie A View To A Kill, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, and a Rolling Stones concert.
It’s all part of a remarkable career, which is detailed in his two books Rescue Pilot and Film Pilot, with the latter about to be launched at the Avalon Airshow this weekend.
The English-born Grayson hasn’t flown a chopper since the 2012 Korean Grand Prix and his work now focuses on flying drones. He was in the south-west this week exploring ways to use drones to help farmers, but said he doesn’t miss flying.
“I have a slight sense of ‘I wonder if I’ve rolled the dice a few too many times’,” Grayson said.
His decorated work as a Royal Navy search and rescue pilot took him to plenty of hairy situations, including flying into hurricane-strength winds to rescue sailors during the 1979 Fastnet yacht race off the English coast, in which five yachts sank, 18 sailors died, and 125 yachtsmen had to be rescued.
“When you’re doing that stuff, you haven’t got time to be afraid,” he said.
“You’ve trained for it. Yes, it’s at the extreme of what you do for your job, but you’re comfortable doing it.”
Grayson said he had “spent most of my flying career in less than ideal conditions” but the closest he came to death was following a day of shooting in the Scottish mountains. On the journey home, the tail rotor on his chopper shut down at 5000 feet.
“It’s the one thing helicopter pilots fear the most because you can’t practice it,” he said.
“There was a sudden big bang … (and) we were flying along pretty much on our side. You have two options – one is to send it to the ground and rapidly and stay in control as much as you can. The second choice is to keep it flying and experiment with how this new flying machine behaves. Because I had height and the nearest airport was 25 minutes away, I used the time and distance to experiment.”
Grayson brought the chopper – and the cameraman and producer on board with him – down safely, but you can understand his sense of contentment about hanging up the headphones.
“I lost a lot of mates along the way, and it always seemed to be the best aviators that lucked out,” he said.
Grayson’s first big gig as a film pilot came from a cameraman he worked with on the Sarajevo Winter Olympics in 1984.
“He said ‘I’ve got a little movie I’m going to work on, want to come along?’,” Grayson said.
That little movie was A View To A Kill, Roger Moore’s final outing as James Bond. Grayson flew choppers alongside the villain’s airship and soon found himself in demand as a film pilot.
He helped Herzog film Lessons Of Darkness, flying the filmmaker over the burning desert of Kuwait in the wake of the Gulf War. Grayson also worked on the films Wild Justice and Mindhunters, before scoring his last big credit, piloting for Ridley Scott in war drama Black Hawk Down.
Since then he has filmed Olympics, Commonwealth Games, and World Cups from the air, as well as Hurricane Katrina and the Black Saturday bushfires. His IMAX movie The Earth Wins saw him take an environment focus – “sitting next to boiling oil (in the Kuwaiti desert) can easily turn you into a lifelong environmentalist”, he writes in Film Pilot – and he’s also made ride films for theme parks and a museum installation about the International Space Station.
These days he keeps both feet on the ground, mostly at his home near Bendigo, and teaches about the very thing that has effectively negated the occupation of film pilot – drones.
“Once you embrace the disruption, you have a clean piece of paper,” he said.