Tag Archives: midwest

Thornton Quarry Part 2

I mentioned before what the lift at the quarry involved.  However, I thought it was worth talking a little bit more about the work of the guys on the ground.  There was a good team spirit needed for this job and the guys worked hard throughout the day to get everything done.  With the many rolls of netting to put in place, there was plenty to do!  These were long rolls.  The later rolls were over 300′ long and they were hanging from 150′ of lifting line!  Also, it could be breezy and keeping the net under control was interesting!

There was one group of guys at the top of the quarry who were responsible for hooking up the nets.  They would put the roll into place and unroll it along the roadway.  When the helicopter came in, it had a special fixture on the end of the line.  This was a spreader bar with hooks for the net.  The bar was attached at the bottom but a ring was placed into a hook to turn it up the other way.  This meant that the hooks would be the right way up to hold the net.  When the release was triggered on the hook, the spreader bar would flip over and the net would fall free.  Then the whole thing could be repeated.

The other guys were on the top of the rock face ready to attach the net.  A wire line was rigged across the top of the rocks.  When the net came in, they guys had to grab the net, bring it into place and start wiring it to the line.  Two guys would be in harnesses and they would head over the edge as the net was lowered to ensure that it was aligned correctly and were it needed to be.  Joining each net down the rock face would follow another day.

The guys worked well together handling the nets into place and making sure they weren’t aligned incorrectly.  If the wind twisted the net, they had some good techniques for getting them back around the right way.  The was vital since the release would not work if it was facing the wrong way!  Jim was flying during all of this with a very long load so he did a great job to stay focused.

Thornton Quarry Part 1

The main job of the day was at a quarry.  This was a more unusual job than the ones I have normally seen with Midwest.  For a start, it was a long job.  This was actually the second day of this job and a third would be required before it was finished.  The task is to place wire netting on rock faces to stop and falling rocks from flying freely at anything below.  The nets hold any debris against the rock face.

You will have seen things like this before.  However, if you are like me, you hadn’t really given any thought to how they are put there.  Today I am going to focus on the flying aspect of the job.  The work of the guys on the ground was a separate issue and I am going to give them their own posting to follow this one.

The rolls of net are laid out on the ground and picked up by the helicopter.  Then Jim had to fly this very long roll across to where it was supposed to be placed.  The guys on the ground would attach it and then Jim would lower the net down so the bottom became the top and the top ended up at the bottom.  There are over a hundred of these rolls and each one takes several minutes to place.  Consequently, it was necessary to land several times during the day.  One need was for fuel but another was for a break.  This is a long time to be hovering a helicopter!

The weather was really nice for the majority of the day and I was able to get around the site and see the work from many different locations.  I also got to have a break during the day which most people didn’t so it was easier for me.  Even so, I was bushed at the end of it all.  At least I got to fly back to base and not deal with the traffic!

McCook Lift

As I hinted previously, my day with Midwest involved a couple of lifts.  The first was a relatively straightforward job.  In common with a lot of jobs it was cooling systems for the roof of a building that was being constructed.  The equipment was laid out on the ground near the building and the guys were ready to roll when we landed.

The location is quite close to Midway airport.  We talked to them as we came in and the traffic from the airport was close to where we were operating.  A couple of times, a low flying Boeing 737 from Southwest could sneak into my shot.  They were obviously well clear of us and there was no problem but it was quite fun to see something different in the background.

The job went off without too many issues and soon the aircraft was back on the ground and we could hop on to head to the next job.

Frosty Start

The good team at Midwest Helicopter called me up recently to see if I wanted to go out on a job they had scheduled.  There were two jobs on the one day, one of which was going to be a long one.  Anyway, I need to get there first thing to be ready to head on out with the team.  I was going to ride in the aircraft so no messing around in Chicago traffic for me during the day.  Just sail across.

It had been a cold night so there was ice on the ground and frost on the aircraft.  I am not much use to the guys while they are getting ready.  Telling me what to do would probably take longer than doing it themselves and they would probably want to check whatever I had done anyway.  Therefore, I took the chance to get some shots on the ground of them getting ready and of the aircraft.

Normally I see the aircraft when it arrives at the job so getting it at rest was a nice change.  Also, the weather was great with lovely soft morning light so it was a great opportunity.  Here are some shots of the morning.  The jobs themselves will follow in the days to come.

Millennium Park and a Helicopter? Result!

The good folks at Midwest Helicopters were recently undertaking another lift in downtown Chicago and invited me to come along.  This one required two goes since the date of the first attempt awoke to find cloud base down amongst the buildings – not ideal conditions for a flight of any sort let alone one that requires weaving between the buildings downtown.

The forecast for the second attempt was considerably better.  In the end it didn’t quite turn out that way with a slightly grey and overcast morning for the lift.  This was a mixed blessing really.  I was going to be facing east so would have had some awkward lighting angles if the sun had been strong.  However, cloudy skies are not a great backdrop.  This limits some of what you can get but, in this case that wasn’t too much of a problem.

Cloudy skies also soften the light in total which can avoid some of the harsher contrasts that you can get shooting aircraft.  Since Midwest’s fleet are painted orange and white, this contrast on the airframe alone can sometimes be a problem.  Moreover, I have a lot of pictures of their fleet.  Shots against a blue sky are not terribly new but something that brings in the different backgrounds in which the work is being done are a lot more interesting.

The location for the lift was a building directly across from Millennium Park.  This should be a photogenic location.  In advance of the job I was pondering where a good spot to shoot from would be.  Involving the Bean would be a good feature.  However, if I shot from near there, I would basically have one shot and miss the rest.  Getting a reflection in the Bean was another idea.  However, the shape of the Bean acts as a very wide angle viewer which means getting anything specific reflected in it – especially something not too large like a helicopter – is problematic.  The idea seems good but it is hard to make it happen.  If we had a second lift, I would certainly give it a go but I had to make this one count.

The roof was going to be the location of choice again.  This way I can get the aircraft with the park in the background, have it flying in front of other buildings, look down on it while it is low to the ground and also get some of what is happening on the roof as the load is set.  This was a little more tricky since I was actually operating mainly from a slightly lower section of roof than that on which the loads were being delivered.  I also had to make sure to keep myself out from underneath the path of the loads as they came up.

All in all, it went pretty well.  I got some good shots and most of what I was hoping for.  Sometimes you wish you could instruct the crew where to fly for the benefit of the shot but that isn’t why they are there!  However, it was funny at one point to look at the images and notice that Jim, the pilot, must have just spotted me as he brought a load up since he is briefly looking directly at me and grinning!  A couple of frames later and the grin is gone and he is back focused on the task – a task that requires quite a bit of concentration!

Navy Pier Lift

Regular followers of this blog will know that I do a lot of jobs with Midwest Helicopters.  Earlier this week I got a call from Jim telling me that they were planning a job at Navy Pier later in the week.  Given the location of the pier, the possibility of some nice city backdrops was very tempting.  Where to shoot from would depend on where the actual lift was.  For those who haven’t been there, Navy Pier is pretty long!

I went to the website to try and get a contact on the pier who might be able to get me into a location that would be good for shooting.  They have a contact for people wishing to photograph (commercially) on the pier so  I contacted the person and they got back to me a while later.  Turns out, the pier is very focused on what is necessary to get a shoot arranged.  They had a series of terms, most of which were not a problem with the exception of getting them named on my insurance overnight!  They also had a fee which was quite substantial.  Since the shoot was associated with some work for them, they were prepared to consider waiving the fee.  However, the manager was out and by now the lift was the following morning.

Outstanding commitment on the part of my contact meant I got the all clear at 10:30 the night before.  I am very grateful that they tried so hard and it was certainly nice to be totally legitimate.  The morning dawned with some very promising conditions.  We all rolled up to the site and got set.  Unfortunately, the loads were not ready so the lift was postponed for half an hour while the rigging was set up.

Eventually we went ahead.  A theater on the pier has a fabric cover that had been ripped in a storm.  The new covers were going up and a damaged vent was being brought down.  The guys receiving the loads were working on some temporary cable rigging under the main beams.  They were not in much of a position to manhandle the loads as they came in so Jim was a busy guy making very fine adjustments from the helicopter to get everything in place.  He did a great job and I was well positioned to get some good shots.  I particularly liked the angle looking down the roof line at the heart of the Ferris wheel behind the theater.

I was with Brian on the parking deck.  He had an idea for a shot that I hadn’t considered.  He would be hooking on the lift line as the helicopter hovered at head height.  He wanted a shot that was a city panorama with the hook up as part of the scene.  I hadn’t considered doing a pano with action in it before but gave it a go.  I actually tried several during the lift and they actually came out quite well.

Stitching the pano of Brian was harder than I thought.  Photoshop did a great job of creating the pano and totally excluding the helicopter since it was only in one shot.  However, the layer was still there so some delicate masking work could bring it back in.  It was actually really cool to watch it appear on the monitor.  The pano is not something that will always have a place on a shoot but it is an interesting idea to add to the shoot list.

For more pictures of the lift, you can go to this gallery.

Midwest in the mist

Got a call from the guys at Midwest about some upcoming work recently.  Asked if I wanted to come out and ride along for the jobs, one of which was in the Chicagoland area and the other was over in Indiana.  Let me think about that for, oh, I don’t know, a microsecond.  Sure, I will be there.

There is one downside to these jobs and that is that they mean an early start.  The night before Jim texts me to say the weather is looking pretty dodgy and do I still want to come along?  Predicting weather is not something that I can rely on so I was still in and if the weather screwed things up, then we scrub it and have another go some other time.

I made the early trek down to their base but before I left I checked the weather radar on the computer.  There was an evil looking line of storms marching up across the state.  Looking out of the window, the tops of the surrounding buildings were shrouded in mist.  This wasn’t looking promising.  We would see…

When I walked in, Jim had already been talking to the O’Hare controllers since one of the lifts was under their approaches.  With the storms coming, it was already clear that we would postpone the first lift until the storms had gone through.  As for Indiana, that was looking unrealistic since the south end of the lake is the most unpredictable for weather and it was a long run across even to get to the job.  We hung out and waited.

The storms never appeared!  They stalled a way off and the mist lifted a bit.  In the end, it was good enough to go so Jim, Phil and I loaded up and headed out.  Joe was on the site so he had to sit there and wait it out.  I suspect he was glad we finally showed up!  We ferried out to the site and set down.  I hopped out while the long line was attached and Jim make quick work of the two picks.

For the journey back, I climbed up to the second seat.  The cockpit in the S-58T is right on top of the airframe so you have a great view of things.  Shame the weather meant it was not a great day for sightseeing!  The transit back to base was a fun run and then we all headed off for breakfast.  Not a bad way to start a day!

Wrigleyville Lift

Got a message earlier in the week from my buddy Jim at Midwest Helicopters. Another job was coming up, this time up in Wrigleyville, and would I like to tag along? Of course I would. How likely is it that I would turn down an opportunity to shoot an aviation job, particularly one with the Midwest guys that are always so good to me?

After a week with some variable weather, Saturday morning turned out to be pretty good. It doesn’t seem very long ago that we were gathering for these lifts before the sun was up and when the mercury was certainly very low on the scale. To be out when the temperature was above 40F was a great change.

I hopped up on the the roof where the equipment was to go and set myself up. I had a great view of the pick location down on the street and could easily move to see where the cell phone transmission equipment was going. Only problem was that the sun was directly on front of me that way.

Since I have shot these operations a few times before, I decided to try a couple of tighter shots as well as the more regular stuff, hopefully including a few with Wrigley Field in the background. The lift went well and I got some good shots. You can see more of them here if you want.

Thanks again to the team at Midwest. Always appreciate you letting me join the jobs and the team are always good for a laugh early in the morning.

If you want to see more shots of the lift, click here to see more of the lift.