Thought I'd share one of the many weird things you see in this job and some nice photos too.

 

We got tasked while in transit towards skye to a cliffhanger, I've not had many proper cliff hangers so got my heart going a bit. Long story short we got a wiggle on and were there in 12 mins and searched the bowl they were in. We learned they were deer stalkers and on the third pass I spotted a waving hand. They were dressed in tweed and that real tree cammo and it bloody works. There were 3 of them on a 70 or 80 degree slope at the back of the bowl. The highest was genuinely precarious pretty much clinging to a birds nest with his face.

picture taken as we flew away it doesn't look much but they were about 850 foot up the back of it just on the edge of the area in shadow.

 

Was a bit tricky we stayed fairly high so as not to blow them off (steady) and had about 150 foot of cable out with the tail 15 foot from the rocks. With the cliffhanger rescued quickly we slowed it down and got his mates along with their gay carved walking sticks and rifles. The winchman performed a manoeuvre only I was witness to but with a kick of his legs swung in a graceful arc, hung upside down to snatch up a walking stick and then landed legs astride the second stalker. What a ninja.

 

As we left the bowl the cliffhanger (surname Smyth-Oswold) broke out a sandwich and got stuck in as we dropped them at their land rover. We gave them some parting words like "carry an orange bit of sheet to flap at rescuers in future." "Don't be ****ing stupid." And "so the deer won today then lads"

 

Good fun, more pictures to follow.

Murderers and mysteries.

 

An interesting day, after 2 hours of station wets involving 8 consecutive recoveries of fast jet pilots from the sea one at a time (annual training requirement) we had a the HF radio burn out then a fuel leak and an emmergency landing. Excitement over we managed 3 hours of emails and admin and no sooner had I put my emmergency pizza in the oven than the bell rang.

 

"Lossie, dry job, rtc, one deceased one vsi trapped in the vehicle scramble"

 

Oven off ran to the cab, to find the phone ringing on the pan. "Stand down the air ambulance will do it." Back inside put my pizza back on, 10 mins later "BRING BRING BRING" **** sake! Oven off (didn't fancy getting retasked to a burning hangar). Same job air ambulance are too far away scramble. We got there (20 miles) from the second call in 15 mins prepped for resuss and ready to go.

 

We landed to this

One indeed dead, an audi of some sort in the side, torn open looking like a bean can shot with a 12 gauge. We packaged the casualty in the ambulance and took him to hospital. The 33yom was hammered and had been the driver, the passenger was dead. The driver had breaks and cuts but was ok. As we landed in Elgin the winchman got off to keet a second ambulance and the driver got fighty with me! I had put an ecg and other obs on him and he started tearing it off and trying to get off the spinal board. Against my logical "this man is a murdering *******" mindset, I reverted to type and was calming and sympathetic, he listend to me and started crying and I was probably the last friend he will encounter on his way to jail :(

 

After all this we were back at lossie and I put my pizza in for the third time, 10 mins later the pizza kind of looking edible my nose against the oven door "BRING BRING" **** sake! Oven off "Hi lossie, wet job, dead man on a boat scramble."

Off we went prepped for resuss again, heading towards Tain we hit fog, I jumped into RADAR, the altimeter failed but before we had time to fly into the sea and die we punched out the other side of the fog. We got there to see a tri-moran??? Kattermarang thing. We dropped the winchman down and landed nearby.

 

 

The winchman canoed across :lol: and I went and talked to the police on the beach. The owner was 70 and died peacefully. The winchman canoed across with a next of kin we since learned that the reason the winchman laughed on the radio when the police said "Its a crime scene, do not touch" was because looking round for a towel to cover the mans face, all he could find was a cowboy hat :lol: he removed it for cluedo reasons.

 

After a bit of a chat with various emmergency services, we went home. We had a Utility hydraulics failure on the way, but other than thay nothing to say.

 

Other than pizza tastes shit when you cook it 3 times!

You guys are kept busy Tom and great work Tom in all you do. Thanks for sharing again and stop inhaling them fumes mate.:biggrin:

Another story today but while the video is uploading (slowly) to youtube I can do a little lesson in SAR.

 

At all times during the flight of a Sea King you are in one of three flight conditions, Safe single, Fly away, Committed. We always keep track of this, when a pilot calls a safety state, all of the crew parrot it back as confirmation. The reason for this is that a Sea King has 2 engines. The safety states refer to what will happen if one fails (one failed at Boulmer today so they do conk out from time to time).

 

If you are hovering and both engines are working at 50% and one fails, then the other one will scream it's tits off and run up to 100% and after a brief shudder and wobble you will still be in the hover. That makes sense, in reality the numbers are different but that's because you can rev an engine above 100% for a few seconds. So here is the Tom Wilson safety state poster...

 

 

First one then, the very rare safe single, this is what it might look like while winching.

 

 

Safe single is normally associated with being on the fuel light, or it blowing a gale. You rarely are pulling that little power.

 

Third safety state committed, this is also obvious, if you are pulling lots of power you're going down, but this should be planned for so that you are commited 'to' something, like the top of a cliff.

 

 

Or the middle state flyaway, this one is harder to define because if you have enough room you will always be flyaway, for complicated aerodynamic reasons a helicopter uses less power flying forwards than when hovering. So you sit high and plan to stuff the nose down and get the coals on, gain some airspeed reduce power and keep speed on before either re starting the engine, or doing a running landing somewhere.

 

 

My job is to not kill the winchman and/or casualty while doing these things. A job that highlighted this was a winch into a quarry...

We were high above a quarry and we were flyaway (with height) pulling about 90% torque. There was no option to land as it was on a steep wooded hillside in Wales. Ideally you don't ever want a person on the wire more than 20 foot above ground or 50 foot above water. Sometimes there is no choice and you have to accept the risk. We could have descended the aircraft to reduce the exposure for the winchman but this would have given us a really ugly commit into trees, so we just winched out at height, about 200 feet.

 

 

I have 3 options on the winch,

 

Winch in

Winch out

Cut

 

I have to plan to preserve the winchman throughout the evolution. As the winchman goes out the door of anything goes wrong I will winch in and hopefully get him back onboard. Below that height he will get dragged through trees so I will winch out and cut before the drag gets dangerously fast. Inside the quarry he is in trouble, I will have to just react as best I can and cut as appropriate. In this instance I put him out over a slight pond just incase it made the difference between broken and dead.

 

This should show his exposure to danger

 

 

That may seem a load of information but todays job involved all of that stuff, I'll put the video up tomorrow now, but today we winched a bloke out of trees from 200 foot up, the trees were a good 100 foot tall. The thing is though that for the extraction to guard against a wobbly hover bouncing the winchman and casualty off trees, we descended from a high flyaway into a lower commit (to a horrible crash into trees) in order to give the pilot better hover references. This meant that we traded 3 minutes of risk against a safe extraction from the woodland.

 

I hope this is of some interest, I'll get that video up asap, its good. :)

 

Oh and sometimes the hoist lets go which is why we avoid winching out at height. Only like 1 every 5 years or something.

Edited June 7, 201411 yr by tomfromthenorth

Sorry for the delay we were out from 11 till 2 looking for a 19 year old lad who unfortunately drowned trying to swim across a river.

 

We were called to a fallen mountain biker near Dundee who had cuts and breaks but the air ambulance couldn't extract. We dropped the winchman off in the field, ran for fuel and then returned for a winch recovery.

 

For all the hype and stuff on tv, a lot of the time you can land and pick people up but this was a proper winching job. We started high with a flyaway, with the hook to the wimchman we then descended briefly in order to improve hover references and ensure that we picked them out of the trees safely. This was about 2 minutes where of anything went wrong we were committed to a nasty crash but was safer than spending ages trying to do it at height. The initial winch out is at a good 200+ feet, we recover nearer 150.

 

Chunky on a lot of cable: http://youtu.be/6gJH7xNSxTg

 

 

In that picture you can see the slight clearing and the air ambulance.

 

[Video deleted when I got that telling off for the drag racing]

Edited July 5, 201411 yr by tomfromthenorth