Railroad Park and Regions field as seen from above. Photo by Cody Owens.
When I was young, probably 8 or 9, I remember squadrons of helicopters used to buzz over our farm in Myersville, Maryland. Just over the Appalachians, not far from that old farm, is the presidential retreat known as Camp David. I would sit out in the cornfield and wait for hours just to steal a glimpse as Marine One and the other helicopters cut their way through the sky a few hundred feet above our house. I swear I saw President Clinton wave once.
I remember thinking then, as I do now, that it’s such a beautifully unnatural thing for man to fly through the air like that. In fact, I’m still not really sure how it’s possible. And perhaps I like it that way.
When the opportunity presented itself last week for me to hop in a helicopter and take a tour of Birmingham, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I’d seen the city skyline from above many times, but always through a small window in an airplane that I’d have to lean over someone to look through. I hate the window seats on planes. I’ve held my bladder for way too many hours at 30,000 feet because I was trapped by two sleeping strangers not to know the prime real estate is on the aisle. Plus, I fly coach, so every inch of legroom counts.
As I walk up to the terminal located on the back end of the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, Brian Coshatt, the captain and CEO of Express Helicopters, is out front waiting on me. He’s wearing some aviator sunglasses and a black leather bomber jacket which, he says, “has all the panache without the commitment.” The way he’s got his black hair slicked back he resembles Nicolas Cage, if he had been cast in Top Gun and given the call sign Slick Nick. Like most pilots, Coshatt just wakes up cool.
I’ve flown plenty of times, but it’s been more than a decade since I’ve been in a helicopter. I’m never nervous about flying, especially in big commercial jets, which doesn’t even really seem like you’re flying except when your ears pop and your body knows something is up with the sudden change in altitude. Other than that, if you close your eyes, it just seems like a bus ride through the sky.
Smaller planes are a different story, though. While they don’t make me nervous, I respect them a little more than I do the big birds. Several years ago, my buddy Woodson took me up in a single engine Cessna while he was doing some touch-and-go landings and working on some airborne maneuvers.
The wind that day was particularly unruly, but Woodson is a damn fine pilot, so I didn’t think much of it. After a few landings (which later he would tell me had him a little nervous because of the vicious crosswinds ripping across the runway) he took us up for a controlled stall.
I’m not sure exactly how he did it, but the plane felt as if it were floating, like a seagull flapping its wings furiously, only to be standing still in the salty sea breeze. I remember looking down and thinking, “Jesus…we’re just standing still up here.” For some reason I felt panicked. Out of nowhere I puked. It happened so quickly the only thing I could think to do was grab my jacket and use it as a makeshift barf-bag.
Woodson laughed. “That’s the only time I’ve ever had someone puke in my plane,” he said, gleaming with a weird sense of pride. To this day it’s the only time I’ve ever puked in the air.
Captain Coshatt also laughed when I told him about that. “You know, it’s funny,” he says. “People think if something goes wrong or the engine sputters, helicopters will just fall out of the air like fiery bricks. But really they can glide to a landing just like an airplane.” He says something about rotary speed and air-lift and I nod casually, but really I have no idea what he’s talking about. The engine roars to life.
“This baby’s got a six-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine. It’s air-cooled, kind of like a Porsche,” Coshatt says into his headset. “Porsche freaks are all about the air-cooled engines.” He spouts off some aviator jargon in a cheesy radio DJ voice to the air traffic controller. He gets a kick out of that, he says. Liftoff.
It’s a weird thing seeing familiar places from an angle you haven’t ever seen them before. I always feel like I’m being lifted out of my body when a helicopter eases off the earth. I ask Coshatt if he gets that too. He says yes. Even after all these years — he’s been flying around Birmingham since 1975 — he still never gets tired of getting off the ground.
We’re flying over Sloss now. “Birmingham’s river is the railroad,” Coshatt says. “You can see all the old buildings that popped up along the route,” he says as we fly 110 mph over the old furnaces. It doesn’t look any more haunted than anything else from up here.
“I really get my kicks out of doing the marriage proposals,” Coshatt says. “So far I’d say I’ve done about 20 or so. I have a 100 percent success rate…well, I mean they always say yes, I don’t know if it always works out after that,” he says with a cheeky grin.
Coshatt tells me he has two kids. He used to fly the big commercial jets for a long time before they were born. “That’s some hard work, I’ll tell you. Being gone for a week or so at a time. It’s all right being in Seattle or wherever, but it’s not home. And that’s really where people want to be,” he says. “I love being able to fly around and then be home for dinner.” We buzz over his house. His kids must love that
Brian Coshatt says the Magic City skyline is underappreciated. “I’ve seen a lot of cities, and I think people don’t realize just how pretty Birmingham is,” he says. Photo by Cody Owens.
.
We circle back around and I see the spine of Red Mountain running off into the distance like a long, ironed out seam down a pair of green slacks.
I’ve got to say, from up here, Mountain Brook sure does look a lot like Irondale or Cahaba Heights, or any other suburb over the seam for that matter. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say it’s impossible to say where one ends and another begins. It gets me thinking about all the arbitrary boundaries down there, how this cluster of houses costs five times as much as that cluster of houses simply because of some silly ZIP codes and a little pretension.
I ask Coshatt if the landscape has changed a lot since he started floating around up here 40 years ago. “The biggest change has definitely been in the south,” he says. “Hoover used to be woods, and I used to think I was halfway to Florida when I passed Alabaster.”
I look out the window as we pass over the zoo and catch a glimpse of a couple of elephants lumbering about in their pen. It’s strange to think I live so close to elephants. That’s not to say I didn’t know Birmingham had a zoo. It’s just weird to look at an elephant and in the same moment look at my house.
I’ve lived in Birmingham for five years now. I always tell people that my favorite part about living here is being in a city that I feel is growing with me. Up here it’s hard not to reflect on that sort of thing. Up here, people down there being so bent out of shape about gay marriage or immigration or who the president is seems so trite. Everyone looks the same from 1,000 feet in the air.
I ask Coshatt if he does a lot of thinking up here. He nods. Of course he thinks up here. I’d be worried if he didn’t.
As we’re flying over the city, Coshatt tells me how he loves the view of the city from here. “It really is a good-looking skyline,” he says. “I’ll tell you, though, my office has the best view around.” I have to agree with him.
Coming back down to earth, Coshatt asks me if I would mind giving him a ride to pick up a rental car, because he’s going to be flying some people who are coming in from New Zealand to Atlanta in the morning. His buddy is going to drive their luggage over there in the rental car and hop a ride back with him since the New Zealanders have a lot of luggage and the helicopter can’t handle that kind of load — 2,500 pounds, max. When he’s not taking folks on a tour of the city, he does private gigs like this. He’s even flown the elder President Bush when he came to town for a speaking engagement after Clinton was elected. But what he really loves is being able to show people around the city he’s lived in his whole life.
I think he may know more about Birmingham than anyone alive today, like an oracle who hovers over the city just watching it all unfold. Take a ride with him and you’ll see what I mean.
We get in my car and I notice I’m low on gas. I drive an ‘84 Volvo, so the fuel injection system can be kind of finicky, and given the recent death-defying stunt I had to pull on the 24th Street bridge after I ran out of gas, I’m not going to risk that with Captain Coshatt on board.
He insists on giving me some gas money. I refuse. That’s the kind of guy he is. He flies me around in his helicopter for a half-hour and then insists on tossing me some cash for giving him a lift on my way back to the office.
After I drop off the captain, my mind wanders back to the elephants. We put a fence around the elephants and we put a fence around our neighborhoods. It’s a purely human trait to have — creating unnatural barriers — especially here in Alabama, where we insist on fencing ourselves in with backwoods bureaucracy and ideologically minded legislation. When and how can it change? How far have we really come since the 1960s? Who is happier: the elephants who can clearly see the barriers keeping them in, or the humans who can’t see what’s holding them back? I don’t know the answers. Maybe I’ll take another ride with the captain and think on it some more.
For more information on booking with Express Helicopters, or to find out about their upcoming Valentine’s Day specials, visit expresshelicopters.com.
