Tag Archives: helicopter

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.

Farnborough ’92 – The Rest

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The attendance of the Russian contingent at Farnborough in 1992 was pretty impressive but they weren’t the only game in town. There were plenty of other aircraft on display. The Rafale prototype was there to follow up from the demonstrator a few years before. The first A340 was also part of the flying display.

Plenty of smaller types were on show including the Optica and the Pillan. Harriers and Hawks flew and the Gripen development program was represented by one of their jets. The Tucano for the RAF was taking part and the US military had a Black Hawk in the static display. Quite a variety of stuff to enjoy and interesting to see what is still in production today and what has disappeared from service.

Pleasure Flight Robinsons

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If you wanted to get a bit of an aerial view of Half Moon Bay and the Dream Machines show, one option was a helicopter flight. Two Robinson R-44s were running flights all day. The flights were not long and not particularly cheap but that obviously was not a deterrent. The two seemed to be flying almost constantly all day. They barely had time to refuel and swap crews it seemed.

The two 44s were similar in appearance but my usual fascination with helicopters took over and I ended up taking way more pictures of them than was absolutely necessary. I even told Hayman to stop me if I kept shooting them! He obviously wasn’t too thorough on that one as I have a fair few shots. I even got some when we stuck in the traffic leaving as they were coming right over us for a while. When going through the shots, it is sometimes fun to see the passengers watching me watching them!

NAS North Island

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The north end of Coronado Island is the home of the US Navy’s NAS North Island. Home to a lot of helicopters as well as an overhaul facility for F/A-18 Hornets, it also seems to have a lot of transient traffic. We were on vacation so I was not going hunting for airplanes. I even managed to not have the camera to hand as we walked along the water when an MH-60 came heading towards us. I have had some crummy luck when trying to shoot at North Island in the past anyway.

However, when we were up at Cabrillo National Monument, we had a great elevated view of Coronado with the station laid out in the foreground – relatively speaking. Shooting long range is not going to get great shots but the haze was relatively controlled and the light at that time of day was starting to be on your side. I got a few shots of the base as a whole which give you an idea of how it is laid out.

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!

Hiller Aviation Museum

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I took a trip to the Hiller Aviation Museum recently. The trip was to see a speaker who was appearing there and that will be part of another post. However, I did have a good look around the museum while I was there. Located on San Carlos Airport, I have been to the museum a few times in the past when I was visiting the area for work but I hadn’t been since we moved west. My buddy, Hayman, is a volunteer there so I have no excuse for not having been recently!

A few things have changed since I was last there. The SST mockup has now gone freeing up some space for other exhibits. This post isn’t a comprehensive review of all that is there. It is more a focus on some of the things that caught my eye while I was walking around. One item I have to mention is the Boeing Condor unmanned vehicle. It is a cool thing to see but, since it is so large, it is squashed in amongst all of the other exhibits. I decided that I should try and get something to show it in all its glory. There was a balcony which would have had a better angle but that was restricted to some simulation experience. Instead, I decided to try a pano approach instead. It came outs reasonably well although taking out some of the distortion in post processing was necessary.

I had another go at a pano with the interior of the Albatross. It is a lovely looking aircraft with a great interior which is visible through the side door so getting too much of a shot of the inside was hard to do. A pano gives a bit more of a feel for the layout in there. It looks like a nice plane to take around the world!

The museum is great and the gift shop is pretty cool too. I have to admit a model helicopter left with me and now sits on my desk. It is an AW101 in Canadian rescue colors and looks pretty sharp!

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.

Apache at Dayton

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One display at Dayton that I liked was the US Army Apache display. I have seen a few displays by Apaches over the years but they are not a regular feature of shows. The Apache is an impressive looking machine and given its nature, it can be kept close in front of the crowd to make a display that never loses your interest. Service pilots don’t tend to put the machine through as aggressive a flight demo as a company pilot might when trying to sell it. However, they do still show it off well.

The subdued finish on the Apache makes for a harder time getting shots on overcast days. However, it does take away the problem of harsh shadows on an already dark airframe. The subtlety of the different greens on the airframe are hard to show in some cases but here they do actually become apparent.

Working Bell 407

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I was heading back to the airport in Tucson to catch my flight when I came upon a Bell 407 doing some long line work with a person on the end of the line. Normally this sort of thing happens when you are nowhere close to a convenient place to stop. However, this time I was in luck. A turning was coming up and it had a great place off the road to stop. Consequently, I got to spend a bit of time watching the team training.

They were from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. I have no idea what that is and as a dodgy foreigner, I wasn’t going to ask. They were lifting a guy from the ground, holding him for a while and then depositing him back on the ground. They also landed briefly during the time I was there. I did have a flight to catch so I couldn’t hang around for too long but I was able to get a few shots of them at work before it was time to take the car back.

Since they weren’t too far away, I was able to use the 70-200mm. That also gave me some flexibility for playing with low shutter speeds. As I do in these cases when I have the time, I ramp the speed lower and lower. That way I figure I will get some sharp ones and then gradually increase the failure rate until nothing comes out sharp or, as is the case on a sunny day in the Arizona summer, I run out of apertures to slow the shutter speed any further. In this case, I had good luck throughout the range and was able to get some really nice discs for the rotors.

Marine Week

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En route from a day with a client to the airport I had a spare hour to pay a visit to Boeing Field in Seattle. I figured that my time window would mean there was nothing much to see and I didn’t have anything longer than the 24-105 with me anyway. However, when I got there I could see an interesting collection of USMC machines on the opposite side of the field and the Blue Angels were parked up near the Museum of Flight.

I took a ride around to where the Marine helicopters and V-22 were parked and got chatting to one of the crews. He explained it was the start of Marine Week and offered a chance to walk around the ramp with one of the crew. I was not going to refuse that. Mario kindly showed me around and let me shoot anything external. They had three UH-1Y Venoms and three AH-1Z Cobras along with a single V-22. One fof the Cobras was marked up in special squadron colors. I took a walk around all of them and grabbed a few shots while chatting with Mario about what it was like to support these machines. He had worked on the UH-1N before converting to the Venom so he had some interesting perspectives on the relative reliability of the two.

These machines were going to be progressively moved across to the other side of the field as part of the public displays for Marine Week and the first of the Cobras actually was towed while I was there so my timing was excellent. However I did have to go and then my timing let me down as, while I was driving away, I saw an AV-8B Harrier II coming down the approach. Oh well. I still did better than I had expected.