He's walked away from a midair collision and survived more than a few attempts to shoot him out of the sky. He's plucked lost hikers out of narrow mountain canyons and threaded his way through tangles of power lines to pull schoolboys from flooded storm channels.
But today, helicopter pilot Tony Pachot just wants to pull off one final soft landing.
The pioneering Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department flier will end a 33-year career when fellow deputies stage a retirement ceremony for him in Lakewood.
Pachot, the Sheriff's Department's first black pilot, will have plenty of tales to tell if his buddies press him to reminisce about the old days.
Like his unforgettable first day on helicopter patrol, when he swooped in on a group of car-strippers in La Puente and a sudden wind shift sent him spinning into a nearby lemon tree.
Or the night a Compton Police Department helicopter collided with his as he hovered over a gang fight in South Los Angeles.
And the disorienting moment one moonless night during the riots that followed the 1992 Rodney King verdict, when exploding transformers caused a power failure that plunged the city beneath him into a horizon-less blackness.
Not to mention the heart-stopping pursuits that have landed him and his copter on the "World's Scariest Police Chases" show more times than he can recount.
But Pachot worries that tonight's farewell dinner at the Centre at Sycamore Plaza could be his most challenging moment.
"I'm afraid I'm going to get all emotional," he says.
That's a sentiment that is never on display in the dozen $2-million AS350 B2 Eurocopters that sheriff's deputies fly each day out of their Aero Bureau base at Long Beach Airport. The department's 25 pilots strap pistols to the waists of their flight suits when they lift off, prepared to chase down lawbreakers over 4,000 square miles of county territory.
Pachot, 60, of Ladera Heights, became a sheriff's deputy as a reaction to being stopped in 1970 by a pair of Los Angeles police officers for an allegedly burned-out license plate light. It was pouring rain and the water company salesman was dressed in suit and tie as he traveled to meet his future wife, Darlene, for dinner.
The police would not let him retrieve an umbrella from his car, Pachot said. And then they appeared to purposely drop his car registration into the street's overflowing gutter. "I was livid. That day I decided to become a cop so I could make sure others weren't treated that way," he said.
