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Aviation History
1959
1959 - 1388.PDF
671 FLIGHT 15 May 1959 Scooped: a Bristol Sycamore HH.14 of No. 275 Sqn., R.A.F., demonstrates marine rescue technique. (Right) Possibly the first helicopter to otter passengers an "airline-type" interior, the Vertol 44 B is now in service with New York Airways The Toy that Grew Up be its own aircraft carrier, and great hopes are placed on the success of trials with an evaluation batch of Saunders-Roe P.531s from a frigate later this year. This shows that the Royal Navy is continuing its pioneering, as does the conversion of H.M.S. Bulwark into a helicopter commaffdo carrier. Nor is the British Army overlooking the more offensive possibilities of the heli- copter, for it is carrying out weapon trials that include firing medium machine-guns and Bren guns from the cabin of a Whirl- wind and air-to-ground launchings of the Vickers Vigilant wire- guided missile. Before we leave military helicopters, a story which arrived a few weeks ago from the U.S. Army seems worth recording, if only to demonstrate the versatility of helicopter crews and the hazards they face even in peace-time Canada. It seems that rela- tively mild weather last winter kept the Churchill River in Mani- toba free of ice for longer than usual. Unable to make their customary migration over it, the local colony of polar bears not only camped near the Army's First Arctic Test Center at Fort Churchill but even invaded the post to scavenge through garbage cans. One poked his nose through the window of a radio shack; and the occupant, momentarily forgetting the Canadian game laws, attempted polar bear murder by rapping the inquisitive nose with a handy fire-extinguisher. The bear left. Protected as they are by conservation laws, the animals were finally routed, not by gun-fire, but by the effective herding tactics of helicopters. The clamorous "choppers" descended on the bears, and directed at them the twin weapons of noise and rotor downwash, which routed the enemy without harming them in any way. From animals (even polar bears) to farms seems a reasonable step and this brings us to one of the most widely-practised com- mercial uses of the helicopter—pest control. The pioneer in this field was the now-defunct Pest Control Ltd., which carried out what are believed to have been the world's first spraying trials with a Sikorsky R-4 in 1945. During the next two years it designed and built helicopter spray gear suitable for an S-51 and in 1948 offered the first contract spraying service in the Commonwealth with this aircraft. Today its successor, Fison-Airwork, is the largest operator of agricultural helicopters in the western world, claiming a total of 1,631,027 acres sprayed since 1948 in the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, the Sudan, Ceylon, the Caribbean, Central America, Rhodesia and elsewhere. This seems a pretty unglamorous business until one remembers how much depends on pest control in a world where insects eat or spoil a third of everything we grow, with further heavy losses from plant diseases. Then the news that Fison-Airwork have proved the ability of the helicopter to protect Jamaica's banana trees, which had previously been considered too delicate to with- stand the rotor downwash, takes on an added importance. So, coming back nearer home, does the work which Fison- Airwork, B.E.A. and other operators did last year when it seemed that blight would reduce the average yield of the potato crop in East Anglia from 12-14 tons per acre to two. B.E.A. decided to adapt one of their S-55s for the task; this was not easy, as nobody had previously used such a large helicopter for crop-spraying. Disregarding U.S. practice, they built a 23ft-wide sprayer-bar to . be fitted over the aircraft's nose, giving the widest swath width in the world, and mounted a 110 gal tank for chemicals in the cabin, to permit 20 minutes of spraying per flight. After only the briefest of trials, the S-55 set out for a two-week attack on potato blight at Holbeach in Lincolnshire. From there it went on to Chelmsford, Lincoln and other areas, finally logging a total of 7,592 acres dealt with between June and August 13. As a result of this work, and that of other companies, some 56,000 of the threatened acres of potatoes yielded an average of over 10 tons an acre. Although some had to be treated five times, this was still cheaper for the farmers than losing their crop. In many places, of course, it is still far cheaper to use fixed- wing aircraft than helicopters for agricultural work, and it would be foolish to expect helicopters of current design to compete with the aircraft used in New Zealand's booming top-dressing cam- paign. But where fields are small, trees and hedges numerous and landing fields few, as in Britain, the helicopter's manoeuvrability and versatility offsets its higher operating costs. For more about this see Flight, April 3, pages 462-6. Many techniques that were publicized as stunts a few years ago have become routine. Typical is the practice of flying slowly over crops threatened by frost, using the rotor downwash to force a warm blanket of air into the lower layers of cold air and so keep the temperature at ground level above freezing point. In areas where crops have been saved by this method, adjacent un- protected crops have often suffered up to 50 per cent loss. Another highly effective technique is to spray chemicals over cotton crops to defoliate them for faster, more economical pick- ing. Spraying by fixed-wing aircraft usually defoliates only the top 4in to 6in of vegetation, requiring a second application and a prolonged waiting period for the leaves to drop off. The rotor downwash ensures that spray is forced down to coat even the lowest leaves. The speed of such operations was well demons- trated in West Texas, where a single Bell 47 defoliated a 3,000- acre cotton crop in only 65 flying hours. One application did the job, and labourers were able to start stripping the cotton bolls from the denuded stalks only three to four days later. Progressive cotton fanners in North Texas, by teaming up the helicopter with the mechanical cotton picker, have consistently delivered their cotton to the gin at a total cost of $18 per bale, as opposed to $45 by normal methods. What is more, each producer found that he needed only two men for the whole job, one to fly the helicopter and the other to work the mechanical stripper, relieving him of the time and trouble of dealing with field labour. A Sikorsky S-S8 conducts a complete pylon-erection operation in California, from transporting the ready-mixed concrete in a slung hopper, pouring it into the hole, and lowering the pylon into place
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