Tag Archives: Chinook

Firefighting Helicopters

When someone in Chicago needed to lift something that was too heavy for the S-58T fleet of Midwest, there was a good chance that CHI Aviation would get the job. When I first worked with them, they were known as Construction Helicopters but their scope has grown a lot and so the name has been changed. Whether it was the S-61 or the Super Puma, some big payloads could be taken up. I thought I wouldn’t see much of them once I moved to California. I was wrong.

They have acquired some surplus CH-47 Chinooks from the US Army and a number of them are currently based in California working on firefighting contracts. Some of them were deployed to help fight the Wragg Fire and I had a chance to go hunting for them while I had some free time up there recently. I had no idea where they were going to be operating. A look on Flightradar24 showed that there was a lot of activity in the vicinity of the fires including fixed and rotary wing assets but I was heading off with little real idea what I was looking for.

I took Route 128 that goes up through the hills and past Lake Berryessa. This road had been shut at one point when the fire first got established but had since been reopened. Even so, as I drove across, there were fire appliances from all over the state in any turn off I passed. There was also an orange streak on the road which, I assume, came from a fire retardant drop of some sort. As I came by the lake, I didn’t see any aerial activity. There were plenty of boats on the lake so I figured that they weren’t picking up water from there. It later turned out that was a false assumption.

I dropped down from the hills and came around a bend in the road to find myself facing a Chinook coming in to pick up water from the river beside me. Fortunately, I was able to pull off right there. For once, I was well prepared. I had figured that I might see something and need to have the camera ready so I had fitted the lens and set everything up before starting the hunt so I grabbed the camera and started shooting.

There was a pair of the Chinooks coming in for water along with a Sikorsky Black Hawk. All of them were using Bambi Buckets to get water from the river before heading back to the fight. I got a bunch of shots from the road before things quietened down. Other than an Army Chinook without a bucket that seemed to be coordinating things (and marked with purple markings over its normal camo), nothing was moving. A guy came up from the river with his fishing gear in hand and suggested I go down to where he was to get a good shot.

I did as suggested but, of course, nothing was happening now. A couple of times I wandered back to the car only to hear something coming over and rushed back. Sadly, these were flights to the lake rather than the river. Finally I did get lucky and got a few shots from river level of someone picking up a load. Then it went quiet again so I headed off for a while on an idea that proved fruitless.

My return brought me back past the same spot and things were happening again. This time there was a Huey involved and he was running a lot of lifts. He also was loading from a slightly different part of the river. One of the Chinooks still showed up but at the original spot so I had to make my choices. Eventually, I needed to head back so started off. However, the Chinook and another Huey put in another quick appearance so I stopped for them and then finally headed back.

This was a totally impromptu trip and I ended up getting a lot of time with the CHI Chinooks as well as some other types too. Obviously, it is not great that they are needed with these fires raging but it was impressive to see the crews at work providing such a valuable service. Now I want to see them again, hopefully in a slightly more controlled environment! I wrote a piece for GAR which you can see here.

Desert Pink Jets (and not jets)

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My friend, Ben, put some pictures on Facebook of a Jaguar being restored in Arizona that is being painted in the desert pink colors that were used during the first Gulf War. I worked a little on Jags in my days at BAe and have always thought it was a cool jet. It is nice to see one showing up in restoration over here. It triggered a discussion between a few of us about the colors that were used at that time.

In 1991, I went to Mildenhall for the, then annual, Air Fete. The Air Fete went away a while back and now it looks like Mildenhall itself will follow into the realms of “once upon a time”. However, there was a time when the Air Fete was possibly the premier military air show in the UK. For a while it was a regular feature of my year. (The weekend before my university finals started was I a) studying hard at college or b) at Mildenhall for the show? I was studying aeronautical engineering so surely it counted?)

This was the first big show after the end of the war in the gulf and a lot of the aircraft that were on display were pretty much unchanged. This included the desert colors that had been applied in a hurry along with mission markings and less official images that the crews had painted. One of the Tornados on display showed how quickly things had been done. They had painted the jet with the flight refueling probe still attached which, when removed, left a grey patch amongst the pink on the front fuselage.

Not everything was pink. The tankers that went over had already adopted a hemp color in the previous years so they were already quite well prepared. Also, a Chinook was on display that had a mottled finish that was supposedly the result of being used for special forces missions.

Needless to say, most of these colors were pretty quickly removed as the aircraft where cleaned up after their return and put through some deeper maintenance and the rapid war modifications either removed or upgraded to a clear condition. (Lots of mods were done under a “war only” approval. They were less likely to kill you then the opposition but hadn’t gone through the full clearance process. They weren’t approved for peacetime use until a more thorough evaluation had been done. Of course, we had a fair bit of testing experience to do the clearances with given how much they had flown in theater!)

The pictures are scanned from old negatives so not fantastic but they are a snapshot of an interesting time!

Stead Field National Guard

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Quite a few years ago, I was on a visit to NAS Fallon with my friend Richard. (You can check out his work at http://www.aviationimaging.com/ and I recommend you do.) Another buddy, Paul, was also along and the day after we were at Fallon, Paul had arranged a visit to the National Guard facility at Stead Field, north of Reno. (Paul’s work can be found at http://skippyscage.com/) This base operated a variety of helicopters including Chinooks, Black Hawks and Kiowas. It was also once the home of CH-54 Tarhes. It was in looking for pictures of the CH-54 that is preserved there that I came across the rest of the shots from that day.

I took one Chinook shot that morning that I have used a number of times but the rest of them had kind of been forgotten. We had a great time wandering through the hangars seeing what was ready for use or undergoing maintenance. The high point of the day was that a Chinook was launching and we were allowed out onto the ramp outside the fence to be in place when the Chinook taxied out and took off.

As it happened, the Chinook pulled up into the hover and stayed there for quite some time. Since I had time, I progressively lowered my shutter speed to try and get more rotor blur on the famously slow turning Chinook rotor. I had just got as low as I could go when he suddenly transitioned to forward flight. I was at totally the wrong shutter speed and ended up with some parallax issues as he flew by but it was all good.

The Chinook obviously features here a bit but I wanted to share some of the other helicopters that were there that day. It was fun to see some shots that I had forgotten about long ago.