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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 1555.PDF
FLIGHT, 2 November 1956 713 Another scene—and an impressive one—from the British Columbia hydro-electric scheme. It is from sites of this kind that helicopter pilots sometimes have to use the "bump jump" take- off technique described below. HOW FARES THE HELICOPTER? . . . apartment building in Chicago. Far frombeing a stunt, this last operation with a Bell 47 avoided the necessity of paying 12men to erect scaffolding up the side of the building (it had been found that the sheetof glass was too big to go into the interior lift). It is possible to foresee a considerabledemand for this kind of commercial "flying crane" work in the future, because a greatdeal of money could be saved by using helicopters to lift into position steel con-structional girders or bridge sections. Air- craft designed solely for such work wouldcost considerably less than a normal heli- copter, because they would need no cabinor skin structure, and could consist simply of a power-unit and rotor system fittedwith a simple undercarriage and a cab for the pilot-operator. They might even beby-products of passenger helicopter design. Westland, for instance, see a possiblemarket as a flying crane for the uncovered-steel-tube "flying bedstead" airframe that they are building to flight test the basicrotor system of their projected 40-passenger twin-Eland-powered Westminster. Such an aircraft could be used to unload ships inplaces where no dock facilities exist, or where they are so inadequate that ships now have to wait their turn in mid-stream,wasting precious days. Similarly, flying-crane helicopters could take the place of surface transport in undeveloped areas, their costbeing insignificant compared with the expense of building roads through deserts, mountains, swamps or forests. Even the helicopters of today, with their limited payloads, areprofitable under such conditions. Typical were the operations flown by Okanagan Helicopters of Vancouver in support of theAluminum Company of Canada's vast half-billion-dollar hydro- electric power project in the mountains of British Columbiathree years ago. Using, in all, five Bell 47s and two S-55s, Okanagan first completed in ten days a survey of the site thatwould normally have taken three years; achieved a similar time- saving on the triangulation for locating a water tunnel; hauledmen and equipment to camps perched on precipitous peaks; and flew to safety five men whose injuries ranged from missing fingersto broken backs. Travelling time for the construction men was cut from 75 per cent of their working week to only 8 per cent,and they arrived at the camps fresh instead of exhausted by a climb of several thousands of feet. Equally important, theirmorale was high, because they knew that medical care was only a short hop away if they were hurt. Using "airfields" that consisted at best of a wooden platform20ft x 16ft made from timber hauled up piece by piece by the helicopters, and at worst a cloth carpet over a flattened mountainledge, the seven helicopters airlifted a total of more than a million pounds of freight and thousands of passengers. Individual loadswere up to 1,700 lb for the S-55s and 600 lb for the Bells. At least one pilot made 40 trips in a single day, hauling twelve menand two tons of equipment 5,200ft up into the mountains in a 13-hour non-stop shift.Okanagan learned a great deal about mountain-flying from this job, including how to take off at a height where normal ascents areimpossible. Known as "bump jumping," this technique involves bouncing the aircraft up and down on its skids until it bumpshigh enough to be skidded sideways over the edge of the platform into the wide open spaces of the chasm. . . . Such techniques are not for the nervous and are hardly likelyto be found in the piloting handbook. But why should they be? The helicopter is like no other vehicle. It is unorthodoxand it makes most money when used in an unorthodox way. This does not mean that it has no future for work such asflying Aunt Bessie and little Johnnie from A to B as an air-bus; but the more money that helicopters can save the customer bydoing otherwise-impossible jobs, the higher will be the profits made by their operators.The job done by Okanagan in the mountains of British Columbia could have been tackled by no other vehicle, and itpointed the way for a similar venture in the Tarentaise Alps, where the French electricity authorities planned to increase dieamount of water fed into the Tignes Dam but had no way of transporting the necessary cement, sand, equipment and 20-ftpipes to the 7,900ft-high work sites. Even if it had proved practicable to build a mule track, the animals could have carriedonly 150 lb each at such altitudes and the pipes would have had to be cut in sections and welded on site. A single Bell 47Gairlifted the lot, including 58 men—a total of 108,000 lb—in 410 Air-to-ground television transmissions from helicopters have been made experimentally to explore their possibilities for police, traffic and other reconnaissance duties. The ground-screen view of Cambridge was received from the Pye equipment seen on the right in a Sycamore.
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