flightsimer wrote:
Brad wrote:
flightsimer wrote:
An Interesting story that was passed along from out crew upon retaining was that for some reason a SWAT like team intercept both hueys as they were leaving the airport on the trucks they had arrived on. Everyone was detained and the aircraft were taken into possession. I would imagine this was some sort of mistake, and probably had to do with some paperwork issues as I know we had to fill out a ton of paperwork for us to fly into Canada.
That is not even remotely close to what happened.
Please shed some light as we would like to know. They honestly did not know what was happening, but that's just how they described it as it appeared to them, though I'm sure it was probably exaggerated some. It would certainly clear the situation and avoid any rumors.
The way I wrote it also might have been a little overly dramatic as well, but my safari on my ipad kept refreshing and deleting what I had wrote and that was about the 6th time I had re-typed out the entire post and at that point I just went with it.
Tyler, were you there at the film location? It sounds like you were based on the way your original post reads and I met the rest of your crew but I don't remember meeting you.
Here's what happened. The other mechanic and I stayed out late in the evening taking the Hueys apart for transport after the last day of filming. Early the next morning, with the help of our two truck drivers and a crane operator we loaded them on our trailers and left the airport. The trucks left, loaded exactly like they had been two weeks earlier when they originally left Washington and exactly like we load Hueys on a regular basis. Me and the other mechanic got in our rental and were heading back to Montreal to catch our flight back to Seattle. One cop car pulled the 1st truck over infront of the Tim Horton's about a mile before getting out of town. The second truck, waiting at a red light, pulled up behind the first truck to wait. We saw it all happen and assumed somebody didn't signal for a turn or something like that so we pulled into the Tim Horton's Donut shop parking lot to make sure everything was okay.
One of the drivers told me it was a random commercial vehicle inspection and didn't seem like a big deal. It ended up that the cop was actually Canadian Department of Transportation guy. He was a very cool guy and friendly. Because there was two trailers he called for backup to come out. The second guy was an absolute jerk. I mean he couldn't have been anymore of a butthole about things. We had a little time to goof off before our flight so we just sat down and waited to make sure everything was okay. I went into Tim Horton's and got a bear claw for breakfast.
The first cop was quite happy with what he saw and was ready to let everybody go after spending about thirty minutes looking at log books and the trucks and cargo. The other guy wasn't letting it happen. Over the cours of the next two hours, he started coming up with all sorts of violations and accused one of the drivers of falsifying his logbook. Finally he presented his list of demands in the form of a citation and said if they weren't fixed then the trucks, trailers and cargo would be impounded. I asked then if we could move everything into the parking lot as we'd been blocking the right lane for a while. We were told no. We had gone through a broker in Montreal at the start of this trip to ensure all the rules of the road were met. A call was placed to him and he swore everything was right. The cop told him on the phone that he had to come out and look for himself or everything would be impounded. The guy said he was getting in his car right then and heading our way.
A good deal of this time I was giving tours of the Huey to the kids and moms that came to Tim Horton's. The cool cop's wife even brought out their kid to sit in the front seat. A good time was had by all until about ten or fifteen more minutes went by and the butthole cop, who had just told the broker we would wait for him to arrive, suddenly announced that a tow truck was coming to impound everything. He had suddenly decided that we couldn't block the road any longer. I asked again about moving to a parking lot and he said no. The other cop finally managed to convince him that we should be allowed to just drive ourselves over to the impound. I bought another bear claw and a cup of coffee for the road. The cops led us on all sorts of winding roads through alley ways and residential streets until we came to an auto repair shop with a small impound yard in the dead center of a residential area. Many of the residents got great pictures of the American invasion driving down their narrow streets. It took nearly an hour but the drivers managed to get both trucks and trailers with the Huey's on them into this tiny impound yard. The entire yard was taken up and the owner wasn't happy. The good cop was embarassed and the owners wife got in a fight with the butthole cop about something. I couldn't understand most of it because they were yelling in French. The butthole cop and impound yard owner were both mad because the drivers refused to leave them the keys to the trucks. Before we left I crawled all over both helicopters and took pictures of every square inch in the event that they tore something up. A crowd gathered up to take pictures over the fence. I dumped my coffee in a plant pot. Finally we loaded up the drivers and their crap in our rental and took them back to the hotel we'd been staying in and the other mechanic and I headed for Montreal.
Even though both trucks made it through customs, multiple weigh stations, inspections, 3,000 miles of Canadian highway and had the services of a professional broker, after holes were blown in every other charge they tried to bring, everything boiled down to the DOT butthole cop saying the Hueys were three inches too long. I'm not even sort of kidding when I say I saw them measure the trailers at least five or six times each. It took that long for them to come up with a measurement that was too long. Of course it was suddenly okay to drive an "overlength" load down the highway after you paid the right amount of fines and waited a couple of days for the new permits to process. While we were sitting in the parking lot waiting for the cop to finish his shakedown, an employee of the movie company stopped by to see what was happening. I told him and he said that it was very routine for the DOT guys to set outside of the film locations around Canada and just wait for the trailers to leave. He said they figure if they stop enough of the trailers with odd loads on them then they are bound to find something they can fine you for. I'm sure we do the same thing here in the US from time to time.
That's all there is to it. Not even a rumor until one was started here on WIX. There were two cops and only two cops. Nothing even remotely close to a "swat like interception" in any sense of the word. It was a simple, every day, traffic stop. Nobody was detained and nothing got hurt. The local government got a little more money out of the movie company, some kids got to play in a Huey on the side of the road, we got to talk to some single moms in very broken French/English, the drivers got to lay around in the hotel a couple more days and I got two eat two bear claws from Tim Hortons. I've got pictures of the entire incident, except the women and the bear claws. Maybe I'll post them here before too long.
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