“If you want to fly, lose weight!” Elena Goryacheva – about how she had to lose 50 kg for the sake of her dream

When we were kids, so many of us wanted to be able to fly. I wanted to fly, too. At a young age, when an airplane or helicopter flew over us, my mother always said, “Look!” And I watched, dreaming that I too was flying somewhere high in the sky, overtaking birds and looking down on the city. Romantic, but it doesn’t happen to everyone. Elena Goryacheva, coordinator of the helicopter search and rescue team “Angel”, has a completely different story. She wanted to fly as an adult. And the starting point was the search, which began the history of “LisaAlert” and the irresistible desire to help people.

Elena Goryacheva

Coordinator of the Angel helicopter search and rescue team

Tells about how her life changed after joining the search team and how a Kinder-surprise predicted her fate.

“If there were no searches, there would be no flights”

As a child I was not attracted to anything airborne at all, I never wanted to be a pilot. My history with aviation is directly related to search activities.

It all started in 2010. Then a woman, a girl and two dogs disappeared in Orekhovo-Zuyevo. I was on the search for Lisa. I couldn’t understand how it is that a person can’t be found? How can one get lost in the forest? There were no answers to these or any other questions, which could not fit in the head of an ordinary city dweller.

Many people usually think: a child is missing, so now all forces and means should be thrown into the search. But in reality it is not quite so.

Lisa was found dead. It is difficult for me to describe now my emotional state and attempts to understand how it is possible in the XXI century to die of hypothermia in a few meters from the settlement. Together with the same ordinary people we began to create a volunteer search community, which we named in honor of the dead girl. LizaAlert started with this search, and my search history began with it. I was the information coordinator of the search, the coordinator at the search site, and I went to the forest.

After this incident, I realized that I wanted to search for people.

Coordination and methods of interaction between LizaAlert’s foot volunteers and any aviation initially did not exist. Until in 2011 in Mytishchi district of Moscow region in search of a 17-year-old boy with autism, we did not realize that we need help from the air. After all, somewhere out there, in a huge forest, a helpless child is walking.

We came to the Interregional Public Organization of pilots and citizens-owners of aircrafts and asked for help. It was impossible to delay: it was late fall, the child went out in barefoot galoshes and a jacket. There are an incredible number of fields around the house, which could not be surveyed quickly.

Going a little ahead, I will say that the helicopter came to us and the boy was found not in a natural environment.

After this search we began to communicate with the pilots, finding out and clarifying how to “make friends” between the sky and the ground.

Then we conducted joint exercises: groups on foot and a large airplane group. There were a lot of airplanes and helicopters at those first exercises. Everything was buzzing, flying, spinning, and I realized how much I was drawn to it. It became incredibly interesting and, of course, I wanted to fly.

One of the pilots suddenly asked: “Len, do you want to fly?”. Of course I do! “Well, you’ll fly today for sure,” he said. I started to wait. And then all the aviation suddenly disappeared. They told me that everyone had left because the weather had turned bad. It was very upsetting.

I had to wait another nine months for my first flight.

“You try it in a helicopter!”

The first time I went on a search mission I flew in an airplane. The sensations were inexpressible, it was cool. Later I shared my impressions with my friend, and he said to me, “And you try it in a helicopter”. And how can I try, if no one offers? Then one of my friends invited me to the airfield and promised to take me for a ride. I arrived, and we flew.

At that moment I realized that my heart belongs to helicopters forever.

You feel completely differently in them, a different picture behind the board, a different angle of view. I was fascinated by this topic with my head, began to analyze the subtleties of search activity for aviation. And, naturally, I dreamed of flying myself.

I remember that the price tag for training was simply cosmic, and a lot of extra weight prevented me from flying.

“If you want to fly, lose weight!”

Yes, in aviation, weight does matter. Nothing should limit a pilot in flight so that he can react and control the helicopter properly.

The head of the Angel helicopter squadron once told me jokingly, “If you want to fly, lose weight!”

Something clicked in me. I needed to lose 20 pounds, but I wanted to understand what I would get for the result. “Well, if you lose it, you’ll fly,” the boss said. The process started. I immediately went to the gym, hired a trainer. I worked out three times a week and was on a strict diet.

I can’t even see a chicken breast to this day.

My friends were very supportive. They, of course, did not expect that I so abruptly decided to lose weight, and in order not to traumatize the body too much, we agreed to arrange me cheatmilas once every two weeks. But with a strict restriction: I could eat what I wanted while I was sitting at the table. As soon as I got up from the table, everything would go back to normal. It was very difficult.

I didn’t get involved in the training process at all. I wanted results, and I was ready to go to my coach as far away as the other end of Moscow.

I did what he told me to do: jump – I jumped, squat – I squatted.

As time went by, I continued to participate in the search work and in parallel I worked hard in the gym. And here on the scales was already minus 18 kg. There were only two kilograms left before the goal, and the weight traitorously stood up. Whatever I did, it was all for nothing. I had to let the situation go and move on.

Some time later I weighed myself again – my weight had dropped sharply to minus 22. It was 8 a.m. I started calling my manager like a crazy person: “Minus 22! When do we fly????”. He was still asleep at that time, he didn’t understand at first what “minus 22” was. But I was very happy, I knew that I had earned my flight and it would take place very soon.

By the way, during this year I lost 50 kg – from 130 to 80.

“Kinder-surprise predicted my fate.”

We have an interesting family tradition – every New Year our family buys and brings a lot of Kinder-surprises from different stores. We put them in one pile, mix them up, each of us takes out an egg and opens it. And then we all decipher together who got what. This New Year’s Eve, I got a little helicopter.

The Kinder became prophetic. That year, my friends gave me an apprenticeship for my birthday.

It was a shock to me. I passed the flight commission – and I didn’t believe it, I flew with an instructor – and I didn’t believe it, even when I got my pilot’s license, I didn’t believe it was all happening to me. Analyzing the way my dream came true, I can say that I am a “child of the regiment”. There they gave me a helicopter to fly, here they gave me training and so on. Apparently, I was really destined to fly.

They say you should visualize your dream. And I didn’t just visualize it, I felt it.

I could sleep and hear the noise of the blades or the engine. I had a lot of dreams about the sky: both scary and not. But they were all about helicopters and searches.

“The searchers must know what they are doing.”

Search life for the human body is very difficult. If you want to help people, be prepared for stress, constant sleep deprivation, malnutrition and later overeating.

On nervous ground, a person begins to pile on sweets and revenge everything in a row. Therefore, excess weight can return, despite physical activity.

This can happen, but not with everyone. All searchers are completely different. There are people with very good physical fitness. They come to the place of search, take the task and go to search “from dawn to dusk”. They, of course, have a much easier time in the search. There are overweight people, whom we try to limit in range. Once my partner offered me to go with him to search for 15 km. I agreed, because at that time I was already in good shape. But now I can say that I remember those 15 km for the rest of my life. It was very hard.

Every body reacts differently. For some time, for example, I could only walk not far from the headquarters, because I had to come back for a snack. On top of that, many searchers work at their main jobs and they need to rest. So you can’t do without time management in this environment.

At some point you start to realize that you have to make choices. Between prospecting and work, prospecting and family.

But there are a lot of pros to the search life. For example, it’s a huge social circle, because very different people come to help. Sometimes even whole families come. And not only husband and wife, for example, but even a mother with a child, but the child must be over 18 years old. In the community you can get a huge amount of knowledge. Over the years comes experience, you begin to better understand the issue, understand how to better organize searches.

All searchers are trained, from how to use a compass, to cartography and first aid. In the squad can get absolutely any person, regardless of gender or physical fitness.

Many people think they will be heroes if they walk in the woods from dawn to dusk. That’s not true.

You can also be a hero by working remotely: cartographers, info-coordinators, hospital call teams, drone image review teams – these are important and at the same time remote help in the search. The departments where you can find yourself are many, if you were willing and able.

“My life has been divided into ‘before and after’.”

After I joined the search team in September 2010, my life was divided into “before” and “after”.

I learned to take responsibility, not only for myself, but for others as well. You are responsible for the searchers, for the lost person, for his relatives.

We all come to search teams through emotions. But over time, you have to build barriers so that you don’t let everything go through you. Otherwise you can burn out very quickly, because all this is very painful. Especially when it comes to children.

My instructor always told me: turn off your emotions, they are incompatible with flying, especially when you are flying. In flight you have a few seconds to make the right decision, if you miss it, that’s it.

The sky doesn’t forgive mistakes.

I’ve been searching for 12 years and I’ve learned how to allocate my time wisely. When you first enter this field, you don’t care about the other life, because you are a hero. In the meantime, life on the other side of the search starts to fall apart. I, for example, lost a decent amount of friends. I was resented for coming to a holiday and could at any moment go off to search for an “obscure” child or grandmother. Only the most loyal, the most faithful, who are ready to accept me in any form, in any condition remained.

Now I had to reduce my participation in the search life, because I have a niece. She’s only 4.5 years old, and she once said to me: “Len, why do you come to see me so seldom?”. And I thought, and really, why?

Elena has found a balance between her search life and her personal life. If she is able to travel to search – she helps on the spot, and if not – remotely. To be in several places at once without a flywheel of time, like Hermione Granger, is simply unrealistic. By profession Elena is an economist, and in her free time from work and searches makes chocolates. For sweets to her even came to her on helicopters. “Perhaps I am the only chocolatier who has not been visited, but flown in for sweets,” she smiles.