Bob Dengler, Bell 429 Ambassador: Chapter Three

It took us 47 days to travel around the world. It was neat because we were interviewed in many places -- word would get out that we were making a trip around the world. They see it -- 150 Geo Canada 150 Global Odyssey. We wanted to commemorate Canada's birthday -- 2017 was on the 1st of July, Canada's birthday, and that's when we took off, literally the day I took delivery of that helicopter. I thought, man, you can apply this around the world -- it's such a fantastic helicopter. My name is Bob Dengler, I'm a retired mining engineer, and after my mining career I took up helicopter flying. The plaque commemorates the trip around the world, and I was the owner and pilot myself, and co-pilot our son Steven. It took one and a half years to get the permits to fly around the world. We started in Toronto and we had a great send-off, it was a fantastic trip. We had a certain amount of trepidation crossing from Canada to Greenland, and then from Greenland to Iceland, Iceland to the Faroe Islands -- those were all trips that we couldn't have made it without a bladder in the helicopter, and that gave us almost a hundred miles of extra range with the helicopter. It performed flawlessly -- the helicopter never gave us the slightest hiccup on the entire trip, and I thought that would be the case. The helicopter is very easy to fly, there's really only a few things that you have to monitor constantly, but everything is just so intuitive. For example, all your pressures and temperatures are arranged in such a way one glance and you see everything, you kind of don't have to pick them out around the panel. It's really well thought out, the controls are effective, this helicopter has Pratt and Whitney engines, and the whole helicopter's designed to be super reliable. In Canada, it was demoed by Bell Helicopter pilots on a couple of occasions, so it has been used more than just in pictures to show people what a tremendous helicopter it is. I got to know the Bell people pretty well, and they've been tremendous supporters -- and if I had any kind of an issue with the helicopter, I could phone them and they could describe what to do, or who to call, or how to fix it, or whatever -- just tremendous support. And the same applied to the Dallas Fort Worth facility -- I would go there regularly for my refresher courses, and again I would fly in with the helicopter and they would say, well, we'll just check it over for you and go through it all, helicopter -- it was never anything wrong, it's just a tremendous helicopter. They take great pride in what they produce, and they have tremendous support. I've got, over the years, I've managed to get to know some of the pilots as well as the executives there -- it's been a wonderful experience really. To me, there's only one helicopter in the world, and that's about it.