By Any Joi O’Donoghue
Deseret Morning News
HEBER CITY, Utah — A teenage boy partially thrown Saturday from a helicopter crash and pinned under the aircraft was pulled to safety after numerous bystanders lifted the wreckage off his body.
The teen suffered serious internal injuries in the 12:15 p.m. accident, along with his mother and the pilot, who managed to maneuver the helicopter into a vacant lot in an upscale subdivision. Brian Rowser, a former Wasatch County Sheriff’s deputy, joined others in the neighborhood and rushed to the crash site, where he saw the boy on the ground.
“I could see the kid was alive,” he said. “The boy was groaning, he couldn’t breathe. He kept saying ‘Get it off me.’” For Rowser - now a professional pilot - it was a surreal situation because he’d been up in the same helicopter just a day earlier and is well acquainted with the pilot.
“It performed fine yesterday. There didn’t seem to be any problem with it whatsoever. It was a very unfortunate situation.”
Wasatch County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Jared Rigby said the crash happened near the end of a helicopter tour. Suzanne Tanner of Heber City and her 15-year-old son went on a 12-minute chopper flight offered at an air show being staged at the Heber City Municipal Airport.
The helicopter began experiencing engine trouble during the flight. Rigby said the pilot cut power to the engine, attempting to land via autorotation by using the wind to power the rotor system.
In the crash landing at 1500 S. 4800 East, the force of the moving rotor blades turned the craft on its side, partially ejecting the boy on the ground. The chopper then tipped on him, Rigby said.
Rowser said he was returning home from the same air show when his wife ran up to him in the driveway and told him about the crash. “The boy was fading in and out of consciousness,” he said. “It took close to 10 people lifting it up and rolling it and then we were able to slide him out.”
The rescuers removed pilot Ken Heidorn, whom Rowser described as an experienced pilot with an instructor rating in fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Rowser flies both as well, trading in his badge in 2005 for an aviation career that has always tugged at him. He said he could see that as a result of the impact from the crash, the helicopter was leaking a lot of fuel.
“We had to get them out quickly,” he said. “I shut down the electrical power. It is a wonder that it did not catch fire.” Rowser said the engine easily would have been heated to 1,600 degrees at that time. That, combined with dripping fuel and any spark of electricity, could have led to a huge fireball.
All three victims were rushed to various hospitals. The teenager, whose name was not released, is in the intensive care unit at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City, while his mother is at Utah Valley hospital with a severely broken leg.
Heidorn, of Midway, suffered multiple broken bones and was admitted to University Hospital. Rowser is hoping for a quieter weekend the next two days and doesn’t question the irony of being in a functionally fine helicopter one day and seeing its wreckage the next.
“There are so many things that can go sort of wrong...flying is inherently very safe, but when it goes bad, it goes really really bad,” he said, adding that merging onto I-15 is one of the more scarier things he does.
Rowser, too, like many pilots has his own personal creed that he follows when it comes to flying: “In God we trust; check everything else. It is in the first page of my very first log book.”
Copyright 2011 The Deseret News Publishing Co.