The Knife & Fork
Special Edition
Ride Along With Fire Bird One
2 Nov 2006
by
Recently, I had to opportunity to ride along with the air
unit of the Phoenix Police Department in one of their helicopters commonly
known as “Firebird One”.
I along with Brant Saperstein got a birds’ eye view of the city
and in particular,
On a cool November morning, we boarded the helicopter at
Our activities involved looking for a bad guy that shot-up a Pitney Bows office earlier in the morning. We observed some locations where the police thought that his vehicle may have been spotted. We also flew out to Buckeye and observed the home of his parents but while doing that, the observer received a radio call that said that he was spotted entering an apartment around 30th Ave and Bethany Home. We were advised to orbit about a mile out while the police on the ground worked to get him to surrender.
After the perp had been taken into
custody, we headed back to the
The accompanying pictures will tell the story of our mission as well as give one a little different perspective of flying over the ground at a much lower altitude than we are used to.
Click on a Ride
in Firebird One to view photos of this story.