Snowy Mountains Precissionists

My name's Morgan Sills, I'm the General Manager here at Heli Surveys. We operate utility helicopters, predominantly squirrels, in the snowy mountains. Today we've been out on a lift job for TASC Trails down on the east coast at a place called Tarthrow between Mirribula and Moruya. So we were helping to construct a walking track along the coastline there, so our utility pilot Tony Blumson was in there lifting bulk of bags of granite, rock, we've just completed some concrete lifts in there with our company kibbles. Basically before we'll get going we need to know the precise weights of all the lifting work that we're going to do, so we'll do a density altitude calculation and make sure that we can lift the weights that we've been given prior to any works commencing and we'll basically confirm that the aircraft's capable on the conditions of the day for lifting the weights that we've been given by the client. All crews, so anyone involved in the operation, will meet at the staging area for a safe work method statement briefing or a safety briefing. Basically go through the day's operations, the plan, go around the circle, make sure everyone's happy and comfortable and knows exactly what we're going to do before we get going. Today would have been between 700 to 900 kilos, so we had our B3 plus down there, so being at sea level aircraft can obviously lift a lot more. We had a little bit of a margin in there, a bit of a buffer between what it can actually lift so we can get the quicker turnaround times. We're pretty lucky operating in this part of the world, departing from the snowy mountains we'll take off, it's a 45 minute flight down to Tartra, we'll fly around basically down to Threadbo Valley all covered in snow and then in 30 minutes we're basically on the beautiful coastline of Maroombula. So you go from snowy mountains to pristine beach, pretty lucky. We've got three full-time crewmen that work for us here at Kelly Surveys, they're dogmen, they're truck drivers, they're camera operators, so we're really lucky to have such quality crewmen on these jobs so when we're coming in with the line on they'll be talking to the pilot, you know, 10 feet, 10 feet, 9 feet, 8, come right and they've been trained very well and so we're pretty lucky to have guys of that quality. My name's Tony, I'm a utility pilot here with Kelly Surveys in Jindabyne. So we're getting organised to head down to Tartra, we're working on a walking track down there, so we're doing some long line work, moving some walking track materials in and out of a staging area down onto a walking track for crews to build a track with. We did quite a bit of work up here on the Snowy Iconic walk on Kosciuszko main range and this year we've been spending a lot of time down on the coast, we've done the light to light walk and then this job here in Tartra has been going on for three, four sessions now so I think this is supposed to be a lifeline for that one. B3 is a fantastic platform for long lining, it's super stable, super capable, especially a day like today down at sea level. We can pretty easily lift 900 kilos a thousand and do a lot of precision placement with a B3, it's such a stable, comfortable platform to operate out of. So today the staging area is a bit of a small hole in the trees, we'll be using most of our 100 foot line to get down into that and then the walking track itself is in coastal heath and shrubs so it's a bit of a mix, it wanders along the coast in the open in some places and then through the trees in others. Jindabyne's pretty good, I really enjoy living up here, it doesn't get cold in the winter, it gets busy in winter with ski season and all the tourism but in the summer time in particular it's a fantastic place to be, there's mountain biking and hiking and all sorts of stuff to do around. I really enjoy being a utility pilot, it's the variety, it's something different every time we go. Today we're going down the coast, we're doing some long lining, tomorrow could be up in the mountains working with parks crews or moving people around, we do a lot of aerial shooting work over in South Australia so a lot of variety in the work, that's what I really enjoy. Yeah so today went really well, we did 45 lifts between staging and along various locations along the track and Tony did an absolutely amazing job so a few of the spots we had to get into there wasn't much gap in between the treetops so he did really well and the crewman did really well so it all went really smoothly.