McIntosh’s Apple

McIntosh, a native of Glenariffe, one of the nine Glens of Antrim, recalled fondly the job at Central Park that paid the rent in the years after he came to New York in 1989 at age 20.
He remembered one animal, a “great character” whose one flaw was its terror of a certain type of vehicle, which it inevitably passed on to its carriage drivers.
“A garbage truck would come racing beside you and the horse would jump up onto the sidewalk,” he said.
It got to the point, McIntosh joked, that even while walking city streets on his nights off, the roar of a garbage truck would send him scurrying for cover.
The job, too, would foot the bill for the expensive flying lessons that led ultimately to a career as a helicopter pilot.
McIntosh has long left the leisurely pace of the horse and carriage behind him. On a typical working day, he’s to be found at an altitude of 2,000 feet — or at 10, or 11,000 above clouds when the weather is not sunny — cruising at 160 miles per hour to or from one of Manhattan’s three heliports.
He’s a captain with HeliFlite Shares, which offers fractional ownership of helicopters.
At the high end of the market — with twin-engine aircraft like the Bell 430 and two pilots, as used by HeliFlite — a 1/16th share might cost up to $500,000, to which must be added monthly maintenance costs and hourly usage rates.
HeliFlite has three helicopters and about 20 captains and co-pilots. The company also has booking and scheduling staff, with backgrounds in similar work with the major airlines, to manage the needs of its ownership.
“It’s a time-saving tool,” McIntosh said.
A trip to the Hamptons, perhaps the most frequent destination outside the city, takes just 35 minutes. And he flies from Manhattan to Newark, where HeliFlite is based, in just six minutes.
For McIntosh, this is the best job he’s had in an eight-year piloting career, with good pay and conditions and first-rate helicopters.
His career idea took root only after he’d immigrated to the U.S. Growing up a Catholic in Northern Ireland, he said, joining the military, the most likely route to piloting a helicopter, wouldn’t have occurred to him.
He’s the third of a family of seven children born into a farming family.
His father also a runs a caravan park. “You need an alternate source of income if you’re a farmer in Ireland,” his son said.
Another career for Archie McIntosh, one that provided little remuneration, was as a public representative. He was elected to Moyle council in 1977 for the SDLP and held the seat for most of the next 20 years.
After getting some experience in construction work at home in Northern Ireland, Alex McIntosh did similar work in London for 18 months before leaving for America.
When he obtained his green card in the early 1990s, he was free to pursue his flying career. Lessons were about $200 each.
“Right now you’re looking at $45,000 to get your licenses,” he said. “It’s a bit of a risk, because you could do all the training and never get that first break.”
As with many pilots, much of his early work was as an instructor himself.
Students added an element of unpredictably to the job.
“Like the horse, and sometimes with the same intelligence level,” he said, laughing. “Just when you think you’ve thought of everything, they do something that surprises you.”
McIntosh also worked on charter flights and sightseeing before he got a position with Channel 7 News, which he had for three years.
“Every day was a little different — chasing the news, house fires, car crashes,” he said, adding that the Martha’s Vineyard accident that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999 was the highest-profile story he covered

Veteran insight
When he moved into the corporate area, his training continued.
McIntosh has been in class with veterans who were often more experienced that the instructors.
He recalled that in a session discussing every possible emergency situation — some of which seemed rather abstract to the younger pilots — one vet had experienced all of them.
“Yeah, I had one of those in a Cobra in Vietnam,” he said about an engine fire. “I crash landed in a paddy field and I’d forgotten to jettison my missiles.”
There are still many Vietnam veterans flying for a living, McIntosh said, most of them it seems in the 55-58 age range.
His copilot one day last week, Jay Ferguson, is an eight-year military veteran of a later generation.
“It’s pretty exciting,” he said of his current position. “The most fun you have in any aircraft is taking off and landing and we have a bunch of them all day long,” added the pilot, who served in Afghanistan recently.
Ferguson, a Detroit native, said he was learning a lot from his Irish-born captain in what is his first civilian job and his first time working in the New York area.
“He’s a good guy to work with — very easy going, very easy to fly with,” he said.
And their job is ensure that it is comfortable to fly with them.
“They pay a lot of money, so we try to make it pleasant,” Ferguson said of the passengers, who are generally wealthy individuals or executives with top corporations.
The “Frequently Asked Questions” section of HeliFlite’s Web site list queries like “Why own a share in a helicopter when I also own a share in a jet?” and “Are pets allowed onboard the aircraft?”
The answer to the second question is “Yes” — pets are welcome. In reply to the first, HeliFlite says that a flight by helicopter from Manhattan to Philadelphia, for example, can be done in less time than it takes to drive to one of the local New York airports to catch a business jet.
Heliflite shareowners generally make good passengers, the County Antrim man and his co-pilot agreed.
“To them, it’s like getting in a car,” McIntosh said.
But even less experienced travelers seem to take to helicopter flight easily.
“I’ve only had two people get sick in the last eight years of flying — one was on a long, flight from Baltimore on a windy, turbulent day,” McIntosh said.
Such problems are less frequent than on fixed-wing planes, though he’s not sure why.
“Maybe they’re too terrified to get sick,” he added.
The high-end corporate sector particularly stresses safety.
All of HeliFlite’s pilots have at least 3,000 hours of flying time and one of the two at the controls must be at the captain grade level.
McIntosh, who has 5,000 hours’ experience, works six days on, four days off. FAA regulations stipulate that he can’t be in the air more than eights hours in a 14-hour shift.
His own commute by car from Newark to his Upper East Side home, where he lives with his wife, takes 40 minutes.
McIntosh and Ladan Golestaneh, who left Iran with her family when she was 13, married six months ago. They’d met six years before at the Oyster Festival, which at the time was held outside Swift’s on 4th Street.
Golestaneh, who has just completed her residency at Monte Fiori Hospital, is an attending physician working with dialysis and other renal patients.
“The other doctors now call her McIntosh, because it’s easier,” he said.
His wife and his parents back in Northern Ireland don’t worry about him any more than they would if he’d chosen a career that required less nerve.
“They’ve made great advances [in safety] since Vietnam,” he said, adding that much more is understood now about the science of helicopter flight.
If you don’t get into a car crash on the way to work, McIntosh said, then your day is looking up.