Here's to My Colleages in the Field...

There's this amazing video of a local New York City TV station's helicopter crashing Wednesday into a residential building.

For those of us who have spent time flying around in news helicopters covering stories that are often not worth covering even if you're on the ground... this makes your heart stop.

Amazingly, the three-person crew survived. In the video, you can actually see the reporter staggering out of the wreckage — shocked, but walking... always a good sign.

I can't tell you the number of times I've knelt backwards in the front seat of a chopper, with my rear end pointing out the windshield while I talked to a camera in the back seat.

I actually once did a live shot from a helicopter at 5,000 feet over the Stanford Medical Center (search) about a heart lung transplant that had occurred below me the day before.

Never mind it being silly... we had the technology, so that's what we did.

In other words, for all the choppers bring us in the way of video we would never get otherwise... sometimes it's silly and it's often risky. Choppers stay up most all the time, but occasionally they don’t.

Lucky me I got out of them before one fell.

I remember Jane Dornacker (search) who did traffic from a chopper in New York. She was killed the second time one of her choppers fell out of the sky...

After the first one fell into the Hudson, she said, "I can swim pretty well, but not with a helicopter strapped to my back."

It's dangerous work, and hat's off to those who do it.

That's My Word.

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