"We just hit a down draft, and it was a severe down draft, pretty severe. And it just pulled the nose of the airplane almost straight down."
…I can think of times when I've had bad experiences. I don't think we were going to die, but I think… One time, flying air attack on a fire down on the Grahams, down in Southeast Arizona, the Graham Mountains, those mountains, they rise up over 11,000 feet right off the desert, and so there's all this hot air coming up. And we were flying a large fire, there were a lot of aircraft working, and I was an air attack, coordinating the aircraft. And it was requiring me to—I had a pilot, I'm not flying the aircraft—I'm with a pilot, but we were in a Beechcraft Bear, a light twin-engine aircraft. And as we were circling that fire, we would have to go on the windward side of the mountain, and then on the leeward side of the mountain. And then the windward, and then the leeward.
And so what would happen is we'd kind of gain altitude as we were going into the wind, and then when we'd come around the other side, it bottoms out. So we were kind of in this constant, not real drastic, but as we were coming around the leeward side about one in the afternoon, we just hit a down draft, and it was a severe down draft, pretty severe. And it just pulled the nose of the airplane almost straight down. Everything, anything that was loose in that airplane—there were some flight charts and manuals in the seat pocket behind me; we had a little thing of water in the back—anything in the back came to the front. We were strapped in: you have on a shoulder harness and a seat belt, just as tight as it can go, and still the pilot's wallet ended up on the dash of the aircraft. And it was real loud.
When you fly into that, it pulled the airplane straight down, but almost immediately you're out of it, because the airplane's still flying. And it flies right out of it. But we dropped about a thousand feet, and it just was a "boom—boom." And as soon as we were going straight down, then we were kind of not going straight up, but we were going down, and then immediately popped back up. After that, for a while, every time I would fly, my hands would sweat. And I think it was just—that made me nervous. It made me real nervous, because I'd never hit a down draft that hard before. I'd hit lots of bumps. It's always bumpy flying fires, 'cause you've got all the hot air that tries… But after that, my hands just would start to sweat real bad. So whenever I flew with that pilot, he always brought a towel, and he'd keep it in between us so I could… I think it was just nerves after that. I eventually got over it, and everything was fine. But that was probably, that was definitely one time that scared me. I mean, no doubt it scared me.