“It’s almost like you’re looking through binoculars and trying to drive a car,” says Chief Pilot of Two Bear Air Rescue James Heckman, as he references the risks and challenges of piloting a helicopter at night to complete a rescue. This particular flight was a call from Borah Peak, Idaho where a hiker was suffering from altitude sickness at 10,000 feet. In aviation speak, this means the air is thinner and there’s less lift. The winds are gusting, there’s no reference point, no peripheral vision. It’s all hands and voices on scene, and even though it’s high stakes, this is essentially another day on the job for the team that makes up this world-class lifesaving search and rescue team.
“You’re looking through these goggles and your head’s just gotta be on a swivel,” says James. “I recall telling our systems operators, ‘Man you need to just be—you need to be talking a lot and you need to be on your game as best as possible tonight because things are going to be challenging for me and I need all the information from you to help keep us in that one specific location'…When you’re on a ridge line at night and the highest thing is a rock, and it’s a long ways from the helicopter, you have a really tough time trying to maintain your position off of that.”
James chalks up how he landed his position within this air support crew as “right place, right time” but it’s that steadiness and humble nature with which he also speaks from that perfectly encapsulates any mission he’s called on. This is a team sport with a team mindset. They—the ex-coastguard rescue swimmer, ex-marine, ex-army, ex-PJ, just to name a few—are equipped with high caliber knowledge, strength, and experience that the gig requires.
“We are currently staffed so we always have one EMT and one paramedic on board so we have the ability to provide that advanced, lifesaving rescue or medical care,” says James. “It’s all just like an orchestra.” And that orchestra is made up of three pilots with rotating schedules, six full-time rescue specialists, and six deputies from Flathead County Sheriff’s office who are assigned to the program. And of course, a very important mechanic. On any given rescue mission, there is one pilot and two rescue specialists, to run the hoist and ride the hook. And it all begins with something that James speaks highly of—an SOS device. Once the SOS button is pressed, that information goes to a call center and is routed to the local sheriff’s office to be assessed for the best possible resources.
“Based on location, can we send the ground crews in there? Or based on the injuries, is it more advantageous to get air support as fast as possible?” says James, describing what goes through the deputy’s mind when a search and rescue call comes in. Since Two Bear Air Rescue is not a direct call for the public to use on a whim, James describes the process. “They’ll screen the call, make sure we are the best resource. From there it goes to the on-call pilot, so myself or the other two, and we gather the details, maybe assist in the accept or decline responsibility, and of course always look at the weather and determine if we can actually make it on scene.” From there, James will call the on-duty rescue specialists, convene at the helicopter and try to be off the ground no more than 45 minutes from receiving the initial call.
Something that keeps coming up in conversation, and keeps humbling us as humans living in this particular region, is weather. James mentions it several times to give it the credit it deserves. “Like everybody who lives in this valley or whomever receives this magazine knows, forecasting weather in northwest Montana is extremely challenging, so we can look at the forecast all day long and get on scene and be like, ‘Wow, I wish I would’ve known the winds were blowing 35 knots up here,’” says James. “You know, you’re in the mountains, it’s tough. Bless their hearts, those meteorologists.”
Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Two Bear Air Rescue averages two to three rescues per week. Frequent flights cause wear and tear on a helicopter, so the team is getting a brand new one come January 2026. “I guess you can relate it to buying a brand new car,” says James with a laugh. “Theoretically, you’re not going to have any problems for twenty plus thousand miles.”
While we can all imagine sitting in a brand new car, maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to even begin to understand the background of James Heckman, who showed up in Kalispell with a resume in hand to attend flight school in the midst of the Great Recession. With a firefighting background repelling out of helicopters, James had a preference for this line of work. The owner of the flight school was in works with other folks trying to start Two Bear Air Rescue and James pretty much worked for them right away when they needed a second pilot.
“I always dreamed of flying search and rescue and multi-mission aircraft down in the Grand Canyon and here I get an opportunity to fly for Two Bear Air Rescue in northwest Montana and cover a much larger area in a state-of-the-art helicopter—brand new—with a world-class crew, and I get to sleep in my own bed every night,” says James. A dream job, he agrees.
But we never know the value of a dream until we’ve seen nightfall (particularly through night vision goggles like James), and the “happy ending” doesn’t come until the job is complete. “Soon as we get the patient on board and we’re flying away from the scene—it could be gusty, it could be high and all that stuff—but the weight certainly is lifted from our shoulders quite a bit,” says James. “I don’t feel like that relief comes until perhaps we fill up with a full bag of gas and we’re headed back to the airport and the mission is over, the person is safe, they’re in good care, and we’re through with what we needed to do to help that person.”
ADD SIDEBAR
Whitefish philanthropist Michael Goguen supports all costs of this program, leaving no funding responsibilities to taxpayers.
“We are currently staffed so we always have one EMT and one paramedic on board so we have the ability to provide that advanced, lifesaving rescue or medical care."