San Juan County Sheriff's Office welcomes new helicopter into service

AZTEC — The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office’s aging aviation fleet got a whole lot younger last month when the agency received a new Bell 505 helicopter paid for with capital outlay funding from the state Legislature.

Sgt. Gary Mauldin, the chief pilot for the program, flew the helicopter to San Juan County from Dallas in early November, essentially closing the book on a years-long saga to provide the sheriff’s office with the new aircraft. Sheriff Shane Ferrari said the new helicopter had been on his wish list for an extended period, but it wasn’t until March 2022 that lawmakers appropriated $3.25 million to the county for the purchase of the aircraft.

After that, the county’s central purchasing office had to release a document inviting vendors to submit bids to supply the helicopter. Once a contract was awarded last year, the new aircraft still needed to be outfitted with all the hardware the sheriff’s office wanted and painted with the agency’s color scheme and logo.

Ferrari has said many times the two helicopters the sheriff’s office has been using for the past several years are approximately 50 years old, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep them operational. Both aircraft had been through numerous engine rebuilds, and finding replacement parts for them was presenting more and more of a challenge, he said.

Mauldin said piloting the new aircraft to New Mexico from Texas on its maiden voyage was a satisfying experience.

“Just the difference in this is unbelievable,” he said, smiling and comparing the smoothness of the ride in the new helicopter to the difference between going from driving a 1970s pickup to a 2023 Corvette.

The new chopper, with its state-of-the-art radar and imaging systems, will be a tremendous aid for the department in its pursuit of fugitives, Ferrari said, but it is likely to provide the sheriff’s deputies an even bigger boost in terms of finding missing persons. Mauldin noted that 70% of the missions he and the department’s other two pilots fly are devoted to search-and-rescue operations, while only 30% are devoted to pursuits.

Ferrari smiled ruefully when he recounted that pulling lost hikers out of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness south of Farmington is a regular occurrence for his department.

“We’ve collected more hikers from out there,” he said, shaking his head, while also describing how his agency’s helicopters have been used to rescue wayward whitewater rafters and hunters from precarious situations. “Who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t had that?”

Ferrari has always maintained that his department’s helicopter fleet — which was launched in the late 1990s with 20-year-old military aircraft — is a regional asset, one that regularly is called into use by public safety agencies throughout the Four Corners, including those in Arizona, Utah and Colorado. If it weren’t for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office helicopters, he said, the nearest chopper that could be used for local emergencies is in Albuquerque.

He said his agency’s choppers have been put to use in a variety of situations over the past several years, including in August 2015, when they were used to fly federal Environmental Protection Agency officials over the site of the Gold King Mine spill near Silverton, Colorado, to assess the severity of the situation. The choppers also are used on a regular basis to help fire officials get a better view of wildland blazes.

But over the past few years, Ferrari has had to face the realization that his agency’s aviation program likely was living on borrowed time unless it obtained a new aircraft. He said the program has operated for years on a budget of only $100,000 a year, but that has meant that some older aircraft have had to be cannibalized for parts to keep others in the air.

“The common sense of it is these are coming up on 50 years old,” Ferrari said, explaining that reality posed an existential question for the future of the program and that he didn’t want to have to be the sheriff who had to end it.

Those worries evaporated when San Juan County commissioners elevated a request for the money for a new helicopter to the top of the county’s capital outlay request list in 2022 and state lawmakers complied. Now, the new Bell 505 chopper serves as the department’s primary mission aircraft, while one of the older birds will serve as its backup. The agency’s third helicopter will be cannibalized for parts to keep the backup running.

“With the addition of this, we’ve really grown our capabilities,” Ferrari said, explaining that the new chopper is equipped with forward-looking infrared radar, or FLIR, which greatly enhances the ability of those in the aircraft to pick up thermal imaging signals at night.

He said the aircraft’s new high-resolution video system allows those in the helicopter to take screenshot images from a camera and transmit them directly to the cell phones of deputies on the ground, providing instant bird’s eye view imaging of a vehicle, structure or site.

“In a critical situation, you just can’t do better than that,” Mauldin said.

During its Dec. 5 meeting, the County Commission also approved a measure awarding a construction contract for nearly $1.3 million to Spellbring Construction of Farmington for a new hangar to house the aircraft. Ferrari said the existing hangar is a little too small for the new helicopter, and the new building will be both taller and longer.

He said the project has gone out to bid, but he expects work on the project to begin next month. The existing hangar will be demolished, and the new one will be built on the same site. The department’s helicopters likely will be housed at local airports during the build-out phase, he said.

Mike Easterling can be reached at 505-564-4610 or measterling@daily-times.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription: http://bit.ly/2I6TU0e.

This article originally appeared on Farmington Daily Times: Department's aging aircraft fleet modernized with new helicopter