I just noticed there is a new section that is right up my alley! About 90% of the flying I do is in a rotorwing, especially this year. In the spring I decided (foolishly) that it was a good idea to redo the interior of my 172 and as expected it took far longer than anticipated... It is however almost complete, thanks in great part to all the great info, pictures and inspiration here on the forum.

Here's a few pictures of some of the helicopter flying I've been up too in the last little while.

I'm also curious how many other rotorwing guys there are on here, so speak up!


This photo was taken last winter. I was out early morning doing some media work for a new local ski-touring tenure.



This was in the Purcell Wilderness Conservancy working with a group of biologists on Wolverine study.



I spent about a month last summer picking up our S61 from Brazil and ferrying it back to Canada. A local photographer took this pic in Farmington Mo. He asked for a business card and actually mailed me a CD with a bunch of pictures he took of us! Great airport and great people!!



Heli Bombing! We do quite a lot of avalanche control for the Ministry of Transportation.



Shameless selfie... Somewhere over the Caribbean in the 61



Radio Repeater in the Kootenays with our EC130B4



This one was actually with Nelson Search and Rescue. I believe it was for a broken leg. Steep slope, toe-in. We work a lot with Nelson SAR and do a lot of hover exit/entry training throughout the season. They are a very professional group.



Lunch!



This is a gazex 'farm' for avalanche control. We sling the propane and oxygen onto the farms every season.
http://www.tas.fr/en/products/avalanche-products/535-gazex-gazflex-en



This was a habitat restoration burn we did this spring just north of Castlegar BC. We started this one with a plastic sphere dispenser.
http://www.sei-ind.com/products/red-dragon



Earlier this year I got to fly a working antique water bucket called the Monzoon... Its a 45 gallon drum with a solenoid actuated flapper valve. Super simple and still worked great despite sitting in someones back shed for the last 50 years. Vertical Mag did a write-up on it. Its a pretty interesting piece of history. The first buckets were built at our airport and the family of the old timer came out for a little demonstration.
http://www.verticalmag.com/news/monzoon-season/

Killer pics! Would be great to read captions to give them a little context.

I added this new sub one day a few weeks ago after getting the bug to get my rating. Unfortunately it will be a while as money is earmarked for the Bearhawk.

Parker77 wrote:

Great pics, and what a cool job! Thanks for sharing.

What is this apparatus used for?

Parker77 wrote:

What's going on here? high wind landing?

ExperimentalAviator wrote:

Parker77 wrote:

What's going on here? high wind landing?

I think the view is down-slope. Note the ski tracks.
Great new sub forum and pics

What's going on here? high wind landing?

Just dropping skiers on a slope, drive the nose into the snow and hold it there with forward cyclic and collective while everyone gets out. Stable, just need to watch for blade clearance on the upslope in front of you. Need a good guide to unload the ski baskets and control the passengers.

Good pictures, good aircraft, and looks like good work. My main concern, as a Med Evac pilot, was that my crew kept troops out of the rotors while doing their regular EMT duties. I had another pilot, medic, an crew chief on the Huey. The Army is very safety conscience.

Crzyivan13 wrote:

Parker77 wrote:

Great pics, and what a cool job! Thanks for sharing.

What is this apparatus used for?

Awesome pics and thanks for sharing. This pic in particular is pretty scary!

Great post and awesome pictures.

Gotta love the 'stoke.

Like the call sign FAK too.

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I did an edit and posted some descriptions and even a couple of links.

Nice!! I've got a few I can add later tonight...


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Keep them coming!!!!!

Looong day at work - the real fun started when I got out of the cockpit.

Here's two quick snaps from some unprocessed video I captured today. We were shooting rockets to help another platform during a test. Might be the last US aircrew to fire rockets from an OH-58D - it depends if 1/17 does a gunnery in the next few months before they turn the last of them in.





I took the next two during a field problem/aerial gunnery in Alaska. We were on Firebird Landing Strip in the Yukon Training Area and it snapped cold. Went from 50's to this overnight.





The next two are from some neat helicopters I got to fly while at TPS. The first is the Boeing AH-6i, and the second is a turbine S-55. Both were unique and fun!





The next three are also from TPS. This is what a Lakota (UH-72, or EC145) looks like at FL180. It flies like a marshmallow up there, by the way. And oxygen masks are for the pointy-nose guys - was not my favorite part of the exercise, haha.







The next one is from Khowst, Afghanistan. This is my sistership hovering on a 10k ft peak. There was a bit of a crosswind, but the background lined up better from this angle so he just dealt with it. Beautiful country.



The next is a sunrise over Mosul, Iraq. Moments of beauty in that country, but overall not terribly impressive. The "plus" in my windscreen is a reference point for shooting. KWs don't have a targeting system. It's all done by grease pencil (or just by looking and knowing the sight picture if you shoot often enough). The unit wanted to standardize our reference points so they drew all those on with permanent marker. I wasn't a fan. If you look closely at the first two pictures in this post you can see a black dot about halfway up all the way over on the right side - that's what I prefer.



Finally, the worst picture any pilot could ever imagine seeing.



That was all the aircraft from my last Squadron (6/17) at AMARG. So sad.

How long ago where you at Farmington? Was it Marvin or Fred that sent the pictures? I wish I would have known you where there would have come down.

Every picture I see of Afghanistan, in the mountains anyway, looks like the Lemhi Range out of Mackay here in Idaho, I guess that's why some training goes on here. Great pics CamTom, frigging awesome!

Great New Section! Awesome pictures. Keep them coming....

Stop off in McCall with our new A109E


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CamTom12 wrote:

I
The next three are also from TPS. This is what a Lakota (UH-72, or EC145) looks like at FL180. It flies like a marshmallow up there, by the way. And oxygen masks are for the pointy-nose guys - was not my favorite part of the exercise, haha.



The next one is from Khowst, Afghanistan. This is my sistership hovering on a 10k ft peak. There was a bit of a crosswind, but the background lined up better from this angle so he just dealt with it. Beautiful country.

Rockets look like a blast! Seriously, cool.

I didn't know those spinning little wings would keep something flying at FL 180!

And the pic in Afghanistan is just badass. I have heard and what pictures I have seen, it is a beautiful country. If you can get past the other stuff.

I agree! I think the amount of fun one has while shooting is directly proportional to the size of the boom you get .

As for the high altitude stuff, that was a really neat exercise. There's a thing called the Lock number, which is a proportion of the aerodynamic forces to the inertial forces on a rotor blade. At super high altitude, the aero forces are weak and the inertial forces are the same, which changes the way the aircraft handles. It was pretty wild to experience it first-hand. The rigid rotor system of the Lakota (which has a ton of authority, normally) had a ton of lag from control input to aircraft response. It took larger inputs to generate a moderate roll rate, and there was more pitch/roll control mixing apparent.


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