Big Balls

Even if you don't fly you've probably noticed those big orange balls attached to power lines (termed 'catenary' by the FAA) stretching across canyons and passes and the like.  The balls' purpose is to warn aviators of the catenary's presence, but as a side benefit they have determined that the balls also alert unsuspecting birds, for which evolution has not yet equipped a need to search for power lines, and have reduced aviary fatalities by up to 50%.


 The FAA has rules for where to put the balls, their spacing and their color.  This is a picture of thousands of catenary balls, ready to be installed by some very skilled and probably slightly crazy helicopter pilot on the new power line project I'm flying on.  


The casual observer may note just simple hemispheres that look a lot like weber grills, but the balls are specially designed to last awhile, because god knows you don't want to be replacing them every five years, and they are also treated to avoid the Corona Effect (a discharging of electricity that can happen when you attach two weber grill shells onto a line carrying a bazillion volts of electricity).  


For you aviator types, if there are multiple balls strung along a length of catenary, the aviation orange ones should be nearest the towers, with alternating colors of orange, white and yellow in between.  If there are fewer than 4 balls, they should all be orange.  

Tailgating

Sometimes the best seat in the house isn't in the cockpit.

Kayaks and Helicopters

A Twinstar, flown by Ivor Shier, dropping a kayaker into the rapids just preceding a waterfall.  Some more impressive pictures here, including an amazing time lapse of the jump sequence.  

The Most Assuredly Moronic Thing

 You get in your helicopter, and there is a power pole staring in your face, just off to the right and just next to the rotor arc.  You strap in, do the prestart checks, and then you look both ways before starting the rotors, and as you complete your visual sweep that same line of power poles is still staring you back in the face, still alarmingly near your rotor arc.  And as you prepare to lift off you look around one more time, and that same line of power poles, not having moved an inch in the last 10 minutes, still there in alarmingly close proximity.  So what should be the absolute last thing on your mind at that point, the most assuredly moronic thing you could possibly do with a 6 ton helicopter?  Doing anything but going straight up.  What does the pilot do?  The most assuredly moronic thing.  

20,000 Rubber Balls

What do 20,000 small rubber balls look like when dropped from a hovering helicopter?   Funny you should ask.  

Vietnam, A Personal Recollection

From Stewart, recalling memories from his tours in Vietnam (the video was sent to him by a fellow USMA classmate):   "Images stir memories, now 40 years old, of U-ies (UH-1s) and Loches (LOHs).  Never had the stick, just flew in em.  Logged 200 passenger hours, during 18 months in RVN.  First as an "LT" flying first light VRs (Visual Recons) to check for nighttime VC sabotage of QL-1 (main supply route), then as an "Old Man" (at 22) commanding a company of combat engineers.  Roads, bunkers, fire bases.  Isolated FBs (now called FOBs) required the Flying Crane, to bring in our Case 450 "toy dozers" or the bigger ones, D4s, that came in two sorties.  Required assembly on-site.

Only one airmobile insertion, to support a road-opening operation.  Cold LZ; happy campers we were.  Fired at on two other occasions, but not disappointed with no PH.  Easy to tell the experienced pilots, who got up/down/in/out quickly from the "Wobbly-Ones" (WO1) who'd just come over from Rucker.  Eager but still a bit cautious.  (Have fond memories of the "pogie-bait" they slipped us during air ops in Ranger School.  Still think of those student pilot Wobblies every time I eat a Peter-Paul Mounds.)

The other memory stirred is of an Infantryman who died too soon.  My last roommate at WP.  Jim Smith.  Prior enlisted.  Sport parachutist.  A cadet, but a father of two.  G-4 company commander.  Fair, firm, charismatic.  Name is now on that Wall.  Some mishap in a routine chopper landing in Da Nang, four decades and four weeks ago: 15Feb71.  Like others we remember, and memorialize at Lusk Reservoir, they all died too soon.  But we're grateful for the ones saved or sustained by the choppers, the men who flew them and the ones "in the doorway."

Random Photo

One of our Mercy Air Bell 222's circling over the desert.  An older but still graceful ship.  

Newly Released/Leaked Helicopter Video Footage of 9/11

A new perspective on the Twin Towers on 9/11.  As Huffington Post notes, this may be difficult to watch:  NYPD 9/11 Helicopter Footage