Jerry Foster, pioneering Arizona TV news pilot, dies at 82


Jerry Foster, who became Phoenix’s first airborne television news personality and whose dramatic rescues garnered high ratings that helped convince news stations across the country to put helicopter pilots on television, has died. He was 82.

Though a television reporter, Foster became an adjunct accessory to law enforcement and fire agencies. He assisted police on manhunts. He flew firemen close over raging rivers to pluck people in distress out of the water.

In 1973, one of his first years of flying a helicopter, Foster flew a sheriff’s deputy over the desert east of Phoenix and found a missing 2-year-old boy. From then on, Foster vowed to never be more than 20 minutes away from his helicopter in case his services were needed.

In 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan gave Foster a medal for public service through aviation.

Jerry Foster (left) and Bill Close confer in the Channel 10 newsroom in 1973.

Foster, in a 2014 interview with The Arizona Republic, marveled that he was still alive to reflect on his life and bask in the nostalgia longtime Arizonans had for his 25-year broadcasting career. Foster wrote a biography called “Earthbound Misfit,” chronicling his adventures in and out of the cockpit.

Foster said there was a saying that there were old pilots and bold pilots, but that there were no old, bold pilots. He smiled. “Really?” he asked.

Foster’s wife, Linda Smith, posted on his Facebook page on Friday that the “Arizona treasure and hero softly and tenderly went to be with the Lord today.” Foster had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was being cared for in a facility run by Hospice of the Valley.

In February, Foster was given a final helicopter ride, along with Bruce Haffner, the former pilot for KTVK-TV, Channel 3. Hospice of the Valley arranged the flight. On his Facebook page, Foster wrote that it was the “thrill of my flying career!”

While Foster became a local celebrity and friend of police and fire officials, Foster also led a life he kept hidden. It was one in which he palled around with a biker gang and used drugs recreationally. A purchase of methamphetamine captured on tape by police would bring an ignoble end to his broadcast career.

Foster flew and reported for three television stations in Phoenix in a career that spanned three decades. He helped each station climb in the ratings.

Foster was not a trained broadcaster. But his lack of polish didn’t deter his everyman appeal to viewers.

He was a trained pilot ― though the self-described “cowboy” in the cockpit bucked the rules in order to get the pictures and story.

Jerry Foster was a fixture in the air and on the airwaves for Channel 12.

Foster started in television at Channel 10, then known as KOOL-TV, the CBS affiliate and the city’s top-rated news station. Newspaper advertisements billed him as the “fastest newsman in town.”

Foster, in the 2014 interview, said he found himself getting more attention than reporters in the newsroom “who had gone to school and got degrees.”

In 1979, Channel 12, KPNX-TV, the NBC affiliate, lured Foster away. KPNX promised him a helicopter with the capability to broadcast live from the cockpit. KPNX started climbing in the ratings afterward.

By the late 1980s, two events would prompt Foster’s first retirement from television.

In 1987, the Federal Aviation Administration asked that his license be suspended for two incidents in which it said he flew too close to other aircraft. Foster defended himself saying he was chasing what he thought was a crime suspect.

Foster continued flying while he appealed the ruling. A few weeks later, he rescued a teenager who was lost in the mountainous wilderness east of Phoenix.

The second incident was one that would haunt Foster, though he maintained his innocence.

In February 1988, Foster flew over a school where students had formed the shape of an American flag. As he circled and prepared to land on the school grounds, his windbreaker flew out of his helicopter. Students at a nearby junior high found it and turned it in. Inside a pocket was a baggie of marijuana.

Foster maintained that he had landed at Saguaro Lake and saw the baggie sitting unattended on a picnic table. He decided it was best to take it with him and turn it in later, rather than leave it be.

“It was a completely innocent thing,” he told The Republic in the 2014 interview.

Caught on tape

Foster retired from KPNX in July 1988. At the time, he said he did so because of the FAA troubles and because of a close call during a rescue.

Foster became a pilot for corporations.

But, six years later, he was lured to his third station, Channel 3, KTVK-TV. In 1994, the independent station was starting “Good Morning Arizona,” a newscast meant to compete with the network offerings. The station wanted Foster for its traffic reports.

Foster became more known for light chitchat with the anchor desk rather than daring rescues. But he helped the show reach its goal: besting ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Today” show in the ratings.

Two years later, though, Foster had another fall from grace. Federal authorities investigating a methamphetamine ring had caught him on tape buying the drug.

Federal authorities determined that Foster was only buying for personal use, not for selling. He cut a plea deal that had him submitting to random drug tests and speaking to schools about the dangers of drugs.

The station fired Foster, who never returned to the airwaves while airborne again.

Foster became a recluse, figuring he had squandered any goodwill he had built up in the community. Years later, his daughter encouraged him to engage with people through Facebook and Foster found that people remembered his heroics, not the drug stories.

Former Channel 12 pilot Jerry Foster in a 2014 newsroom interview.

He was encouraged to write his memoir and meet fans at book signings.

“I never had anyone walk up and say, ‘Hey, you’re the one who dropped marijuana out of your helicopter.’” Foster said. “I’ve never had that happen, and I’ve been very surprised.”

Foster grew up in the Southwestern United States, living wherever his father found work in mining. He attended school only until the eighth grade. He enlisted in the U.S. Marines, following the path his father had taken and fulfilling a goal he had from childhood.

Two years into that stint, Foster broke into a bar in order to get beer. The stunt led to a felony conviction and him being booted from the Marines.

Foster moved to Arizona, attended flight school and earned his commercial license. He became a flight instructor, falsely attesting on his application that he had never been convicted of a felony. It was a habit he would continue throughout his life.

‘I just hid, hid away’

Foster considered joining the helicopter unit of the Arizona Department of Public Safety when it started but said he feared his felony conviction would be discovered.

In 1971, he joined KOOL-AM as a traffic reporter, flying in a two-seat gyroplane. Though he was hired by the radio station, Foster asked a photographer for the sister television station, KOOL-TV, to sneak him a film camera.

Foster employed the camera one day when a gasoline tanker overturned on the freeway. He piloted the gyroplane with his knees while holding the camera to capture the only images any television station had of the scene.

A few months later, Foster joined a manhunt in Wickenburg, working alongside law enforcement while still purportedly there as a journalist. Foster captured footage of the man, who was hiding in a large drainage pipe, being arrested.

The next year, KOOL decided to replace the gyroplane with a helicopter and make Foster a part of its top-rated newsroom.

Foster said that his close alignment with law enforcement and fire officials rankled other reporters in the newsroom. But he credited that relationship for his ability to be tipped off to major incidents and get access no one else could.

In 1972, Foster started hanging out with members of the Dirty Dozen outlaw biker gang. Foster told colleagues and friends that it was for a news story.

But, in the 2014 interview, he admitted that the gang members provided him the camaraderie he had missed since being booted from the U.S. Marines. He said he also felt more comfortable around the rougher edged bikers than his manicured, coifed and educated television colleagues.

Foster’s television stories in the 1970s and 1980s at times seemed more like an immersive action show with Foster as the hero pilot. He literally resuscitated some of his story subjects following their rescues from rivers. He flew his helicopter low to a car trapped in a flooded river, placing a skid on the top, allowing an officer to reach for the father and son inside.

Foster said that with his derring-do, coupled with the fickleness of 1970s-era helicopters, he assumed he would one day be a news story himself. “I figured one of these days I would end up a black spot with yellow tape around me,” he said during the 2014 interview.

Instead, his professional life came to an end with the methamphetamine charges.

He was a big enough celebrity that the arrest resulted in what seemed to Foster an avalanche of news coverage.

He thought himself a fraud, that he had led a better life than someone deserved who had an eighth grade education and had been kicked out of the Marines.

“I feel I pulled it over on people,” he said in the 2014 interview. “I pulled a fast one and I didn’t mean to pull a fast one.”

Foster became a private pilot, but did so without the spirit for flying he once had. His marriage fell apart and Foster figured it was a good time to leave Arizona.

He became a truck driver, figuring he could stay anonymous on the road and out of Arizona.

“I just hid, hid away,” Foster said. “I was nowhere to be found.”

In December 2009, at the urging of his daughter, Andryea, Foster started a Facebook page. Within a week, more than 1,000 people requested to be his online friend, bringing him back from his self-imposed exile.

Foster said he wouldn’t have changed any aspect of his rough and tumble career because of the difference he made, including the lives he saved.

“I don’t say that in a braggadocio way,” he said. “I say that’s the facts.”

Foster is survived by his wife, Linda Smith, and his three daughters. There will be no public service.

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