Maui Magazine / Maui Magazine November/December 2008 / To the Rescue

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To the Rescue

Call him courageous. Call him crazy. He's the man they call when there's danger between the devil and deep blue sea.

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Photography by Bob Bangerter  |  Ron Dahlquist

By 1992, Hawai‘i Island’s ever-shifting Kilauea eruption had concentrated itself again inside fiery Pu‘u ‘O‘o—a raw pit filled with noxious gasses rising from a boiling orange pond of lava. In November of that year, a charter helicopter hovered over the caldera as a videocam-wielding passenger marveled every time the strong East Hawai‘i winds pushed the toxic whiteness aside to expose the blazing cauldron below. Then the worst thing possible happened. The chopper lost power and fell.

Instead of dropping into the lava pond to be flash-fried, the flying machine hooked onto the inner wall of the caldera. There the passengers waited for certain death—either roasted by a lava fountain or gassed by sulfuric acid or just abandoned by the world, because no one in his right mind would ever come into Pu‘u ‘Oo caldera to rescue them.

No one, that is, but Don Shearer.

“Before that happened, I thought I could do anything,” says Don, the owner and hero-in-charge of Windward Aviation. His company’s major assets—beyond balls, brains, and nonstop aerial performance—currently consist of four Hughes 500D helicopters that are painted a billiard-ball-brilliant shade of yellow. “That yellow is the brightest color I could find that wouldn’t fade,” Don told me. “My biggest fear is a mid-air collision.”

If you live on Maui, you have probably seen these gleaming yellow “flying eggs” against the rich blue daytime sky. Maybe you saw them dropping 120-gallon buckets of water (dipped out of swimming pools) against the forefront of a recent Kïhei scrub fire. Or lifting injured hikers out of remote canyons. Or hovering over the otherwise-inaccessible native forest, hitting invasive species with pinpoint-accurate blasts of herbicide. Or zooming over the monster waves of Jaws, shooting surf footage with hand-held cameras or with gyrostabilized Cineflex camera mounted above the skids. Or whisking bikini models to remote locations for fashion shoots, or delivering roof trusses to remote construction sites.

 
For Steven Spielberg, Don and crew sling-loaded into the boonies enough material to construct a village; when the filmmaker changed his mind, they sling-loaded the materials back out. Sometimes they drop flowers over funerals or graduations.

Windward Aviation operates out of three hangars tucked up close to the control tower of Kahului Airport. According to Don, his outfit is responsible for 85 percent or more of the utility-helicopter services in the State of Hawai‘i. He and his pilots are certified not only for all FAA-regulated functions (including crop-spraying and hauling hazardous materials), but also for the “more hardcore” standards of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Department of Defense, and the Drug Enforcement Agency—in other words, for everything. Don says that it costs the company up to $30,000 just to get a pilot completely certified.

Needless to say, the job requires not only nerve, but also extraordinary skills and experience.

Don Shearer himself is one of those rare people who just was not going to be happy unless he escaped the force of gravity. As a high school sophomore in Redondo Beach, California, he talked his way early into his school’s aeroscience program.

His side job at Kentucky Fried Chicken didn’t pay enough for him to afford flying lessons, so at age eighteen he traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to get trained as an FAA-certified mechanic. Shortly thereafter he landed a job with a start-up company called Robinson Helicopter, which is today the world’s leading producer of civil helicopters. From there, Don proceeded to get “every license you can get.”

He came to Maui in 1986. “When I moved here, I was a broke-[bleep] flight instructor,” he says. “I had nothing. I owed the IRS a bunch of money and I had holes in my underwear. Today I have the best friends anyone could ever have, and I still have holes in my underwear, but I don’t owe the IRS anything.” He created Windward Aviation in 1990, intending to offer tour-flying services. No bank would loan him money, so he leased his first helicopter, using funds borrowed from private parties at hair-raising interest rates.