The first time Scott Kotronis tried to fly a helicopter, he was with a seasoned pilot.
“He goes, ‘Hey Scott, you want to fly?’ and I go, ‘Sure,’ because I liked to fly anything at that time and I didn’t know anything and he goes, ‘Okay, we’ll start real easy,’” Kotronis said.
Kotronis had been flying airplanes for more than a decade. He figured, how hard could it be?
“So he transfers the controls to me and I get in the controls,” Kotronis explained. “Next thing I know I’m doing a pendulum in three different dimensions- right, left, up, down, and it’s going crazy on me.”
‘A BALANCING ACT’
The pilot was messing with Kotronis. Hovering a helicopter in place is one of the hardest skills to master. Still, Kotronis was hooked. He liked how difficult and dynamic helicopters are, but that also means they’re more dangerous.
“Helicopters don’t want to fly. The joke is that they want to kill you,” said Kotronis. “You can have everything right, you let go of the controls and they’ll try flopping over. It’s a balancing act.”
Kotronis has mastered that balancing act over his 30 career flying with the New York State Police. Over the decades, Kotronis has flown some of the most dangerous search and rescue missions in the Adirondack High Peaks and is now retiring from the job.
Kotronis has spent most of his life as a pilot. He fell in love with airplanes in high school in Saratoga County and paid his way through flight lessons. The hope was to become a pilot for the military, but he wore glasses at the time, which disqualified him.
Instead, Kotronis skipped college and went to flight school. He was in his 30s when he finally got into helicopters.
“When I first started taking actual helicopter lessons and trying to learn to hover, I would take up two football fields trying to keep it in one space,” explained Kotronis. “I’d be going all over and finally, it was like boom, and I was like ‘Woah, okay I think I have this now.’”
A ‘SMALL OFFICE’
Kotronis landed a job with the New York State Police in the late 1990s. He worked out of Albany for a few years before transferring up to the Adirondacks.
At a hanger in Lake Clear earlier this summer, Kotronis slid open the door of a helicopter. “This is my small office which is the one I enjoy best and has a really good view,” he said, with a laugh.
His actual office is in the building next door. Pilots come to work in Lake Clear every day. The first thing they do is check the weather, then they check the helicopter.
Sometimes pilots will have scheduled flight assignments, like resupplying a DEC outpost or restocking fish in a lake. There’s always the chance of getting called up for a medevac or a rescue in the mountains.
“You may be hearing some stuff on the scanner, something is going on, possible rescue or overdue person or injury or whatever,” said Kotronis.
While he explained the dozens of controls surrounding the pilot’s seat, a Forest Ranger cut in on the radio scanner. “We’ve got a separated party, people are missing one in the Phelps/Tabletop area,” the voice on the radio said.
Forest Rangers respond to search and rescue incidents all the time. If and when a helicopter is needed, pilots run through a quick checklist- they look at the weather again, they make a flight plan and often they will strip down the helicopter.
“The lighter the aircraft, the more power you have, which is a higher safety margin,” Kotronis explained.
Again, a balancing act. Kotronis always makes a backup plan if something goes wrong, like if the winds pick up or if the cloud cover drops.
“If this happens, we’re going to do this, if this happens, we’re going to do this,” said Kotronis, “and the idea that I learned very early on from one of my mentors is that you should always have a bunch of outs. Don’t ever have just one, because that one can disappear really quickly.”
FACING DANGER
One of the most dangerous places to fly in the Adirondacks is around Gothics Mountain. There are downdrafts around that peak, pulling the air down the side of the mountain. If the wind is strong enough, it can take a helicopter down with it.
In the winter of 1996, two hikers were injured on Gothics, one seriously. Kotronis said conditions were really bad.
“It’s 25 below and that’s without windchill. Up in that area you’re [there are] 20-30 knot winds and there was just an ice storm a couple of days before with freezing rain, so everything’s covered in ice.”
A dozen rangers and rescuers spent the night with the injured hikers. Kotronis flew in at first light and the turbulence was terrible.
“It was bouncing us so bad that at one stage, one of the handles broke in the cabin and I looked back to see the ranger diving for it to grab it before it goes out the door.”
NONSTOP RISK ASSESSMENT
Eventually, they hoisted the hiker up into the helicopter. Kotronis flew two more trips, picking up dozens of rescuers in the field. Forest Ranger Andrew Lewis has flown with Kotronis for years. Especially on the more dangerous trips, Lewis said it’s a relief knowing Kotronis is at the controls.
“With aviation missions, it’s nonstop risk assessment,” said Lewis. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? With Scott, he’s done this a thousand times so I know his risk assessment is highly calibrated.”
Kotronis has flown in every kind of condition all over the park and around the state. He’s played a key part in firefighting missions, he flew during the 2006 Bucky Phillps manhunt and the 2015 Dannemora prison escape. Kotronis has saved hundreds of lives and impacted thousands more over his 30-year career.
“I mean, think of the number of people who have either been med-evaced to safety via Life Flight in the helicopter or rescued out of the woods,” said Ranger Lewis, “[as well as] search operations where the helicopter was used to locate people from the air, and [rangers] depend on it so many times for just moving personnel into the woods for big incidents — the impact of that is massive.”
In a video shot on Cascade, Kotronis’s helicopter is hovering almost perfectly in place. There were two rescues on the mountain that day. In the one from the video, a ranger on the ground clips the injured hiker in, and they’re lifted up toward the helicopter.
Kotronis is 65 years old now. It’s safe to say he knows how to do his job and do it really well. But he says his perspective of the work and his own future has shifted.
“The big eye-opener was a couple of years ago,” said Kotronis. “Some coworkers and friends were killed, guys I respect, good pilots. and it’s like, you know when things go bad, they go bad.”
Kotronis has a young daughter at home, a family he wants to spend more time with. Still, he said he’ll miss the work and miss flying in the Adirondacks.
“Maybe that’s what makes it special,” said Kotronis. “For all the beauty, there is a little bit of risk to it.”
While Kotronis has mastered the balancing act of flying helicopters, the risks are now starting to outweigh the rewards.