Articles for category Helicopter Sectors
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Feb
19
2018
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Posted by Admin
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The economic downturn that has been affecting the global helicopter industry has been very hard on original equipment manufacturers (OEMs); the companies who design and build the world’s rotorcraft. But these OEMs have been through tough times before, and survived. Here’s what they are doing to cope, as they wait for the next inevitable market upswing.
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Categories:
Helicopter Sectors
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Jan
22
2018
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Posted by Admin
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At the tender age of five Patric Wells was moving milk and pop bottles from his father’s Stratford, Ontario retail food store to a nearby storage building for 5 cents an hour. That’s quite a young age to join the business world, but it provided the foundation for his success today. “I guess it gives a kid a good work ethic, because I still work hard every day,” Wells relates.
Wells doesn’t have to prove his continuing work ethic; knowing that he operates four businesses simultaneously is enough. Combined, they offer a full range of services to customers seeking to buy or lease a helicopter and mold it to fit their precise needs.
East West Helicopter Inc. (EWH) based in Harrison, Ohio has supported the helicopter industry for more than four decades, providing maintenance, parts sales, helicopter sales and leasing. Panterra Heli Support Ltd (PHSL) based in Beamsville, Ontario, provides MRO, heavy maintenance, avionics integration, engineering, custom paint and other customizations, completions, one-off configurations, and field support for existing leases. NS Air Leasing and Borderline Air expand upon the sales and leasing aspect of the group, especially the Airbus product line.
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Categories:
Company Profiles
Helicopter Sectors
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Jan
08
2018
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Posted by Admin
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While the Southeastern U.S. was being inundated with record hurricane floodwaters during the fall of 2017, record-breaking wildfires were torching California’s Wine Country.
More than one million acres burned this year in California. The “October Fire Siege” fanned by Diablo Winds in Northern California constituted the deadliest series of wildfires in the state’s history, killing 43 people. The infernos torched at least 8,900 structures and 245,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of more than 100,000 people. As many as 11,000 firefighters were battling 21 major blazes in an area nearly one-third the size of Rhode Island. Insured property damage totaled more than $3 billion, making them the costliest complex of wildfires in U.S. history.
“I’ve never seen the utter devastation and destruction I saw around Santa Rosa and Napa,” said Barry Lloyd, helicopter program manager for Cal Fire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection). “It was absolutely stunning.” This is coming from someone who has been a helicopter pilot for 52 years and fighting fire for 44 years. He flies one of Cal Fire’s 12 Type II Hueys.
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Categories:
Helicopter Sectors
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Dec
12
2017
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Posted by Admin
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Maintenance of helicopters’ onboard batteries is a critical function and it is structured on the basis of their component maintenance manuals. However, the knowledge of industry practitioners on how to accomplish onboard batteries related maintenance tasks sometimes is limited only to what is available in maintenance manuals. To inform professionals involved in helicopter maintenance, we reached out to experts in the field and identified a few factors to consider when performing and managing maintenance on these critical components.
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Categories:
Helicopter Sectors
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Nov
27
2017
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Posted by Admin
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In late August, the Rotorcraft Pro team was diligently working on the feature articles for this issue you are reading. Though every story involved helicopters, none had anything to do with hurricanes. Then storm history occurred on what seemed like a Biblical scale. I watched in shock from the safety of my Florida office the heart-breaking images coming out of the Houston, Texas, region in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Upon dumping a record 51 inches of rain on the area, massive flooding left tens of thousands of citizens trapped and in need of rescue.
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Categories:
Human Interest
Helicopter Sectors
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Nov
14
2017
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Posted by Admin
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Considering the complexities of the air medical industry, completely removing all risk is a challenge. The road to progress, if not traveled in a deliberate manner, could lead to bad outcomes—this industry has seen far too many outcomes of that type.
Although many factors can lead to bad outcomes in HAA, some unfortunate events can be attributed to the very thing that gives our industry its name—helicopters. They are labor-intensive machines that have regularly scheduled maintenance. However, from time to time well-maintained helicopters simply break. Pilots spend most of their time in one primary aircraft. When maintenance issues dictate, they swap to their backup aircraft. Herein lies the problem.
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Categories:
Safety
Helicopter Sectors
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Oct
30
2017
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Posted by Admin
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Upon graduation, the young man came very close to working in banking and finance. “The guy that ran NationsBank in Dallas said something to me that really changed my career path. I was very outspoken back then, and he told me that in the corporate world, 50 percent of the job is political. He told me that if I wasn’t prepared to play that game, then banking and finance wasn’t the place for me. That struck me and I realized my heart was in aviation.” After Mast realized his plainspoken, direct nature wasn’t tailored for bankers in Brooks Brothers suits uttering politically correct bromides, he returned to his first love and to the company that had helped him pay his college bills. AvGroup’s Ed Tomberlin had a job for the returning graduate that required neither political maneuvering nor silk over-the-calf banking hosiery. Nevertheless, Mast was expected to wear clothes. “He offered me $2,000 a year more than my banking job and $500 so I could buy some clothes,” Mast chuckles. “Ed was truly a brilliant man and entrepreneur. I was fortunate to learn the ins and outs of the industry under his tutelage.” Yes, Mast found employment in an industry that he loved and that fit him better than banking. Parts and components don’t care what you say or wear. Aviation is all about “mission accomplished.”
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Categories:
Career Development
Helicopter Sectors
Company Profiles
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Oct
23
2017
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Posted by Admin
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Colombia historically has been a country full of security challenges. For more than five decades, its military and police forces were engaged in a bloody fight against armed terrorist groups and drug trafficking organizations that claimed more than 220,000 lives. These armed organizations such as FARC (in English, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia) unfortunately brought Colombia an international reputation for high levels of violence and cocaine production.
The extended internal conflict in this South American country has led to improvements in military and police capacity and equipment. Colombian armed forces once lagging behind in technology and operational readiness are now strong, trained, and global benchmark institutions in the fight against terrorist organizations and illegal drug trafficking.
The National Police of Colombia’s Police Air Service is an integral part of this transformation. Since its founding in 1958 with a few Cessna 206 aircraft to control crime, this unit attached to the Anti-Narcotics Directorate has boosted its capabilities and exponentially increased its aircraft fleet. Thanks to the help of the United States, the Police Air Service currently has in its inventory 80 helicopters and 60 airplanes that record a total of about 42,000 flight hours annually to support police operations in both rural and urban missions.
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Categories:
Helicopter Sectors
Company Profiles
Training
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Oct
16
2017
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Posted by Admin
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The following is a sidebar of Rotorcraft Pro's story on Hurricanes Hit - Helicopters Rise that outlines ten valuable lessons learned from the first responders that were on the ground in the days following Hurricane Harvey.
1. Think about roles and responsibilities in advance, and put safety first. “People can get into these disasters…and they start to take risks they wouldn’t take elsewhere,” Tom Baldwin, Air Evac Lifeteam safety manager said. Put an immediate stop to any of that. Debrief after every shift.
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Categories:
Safety
Helicopter Sectors
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Oct
16
2017
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Posted by Admin
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Facing a mind-boggling 122,000 victims who needed to be rescued across 182,000 acres of flooded neighborhoods, air rescues were especially critical to the massive effort to save lives when Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast Aug. 25 then stalled and dumped a record 51 inches of torrential rain in three days.
The federal government deployed more than 21,000 staff to the hurricane area in late August, but that wasn’t enough. Alongside volunteers, private industry was essential to search & rescue as well as recovery efforts – especially air operations that could spot and rescue people in areas that were inaccessible from the ground. Everyone worked together under the same incident command system.
Hundreds of helicopters performed a variety of simultaneous missions in the worst of conditions and somehow avoided accidents. Crews cut through roofs to hoist people stranded in attics, flew patients in critical condition out of flooded hospitals, and repaired major transmission lines.
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Categories:
Human Interest
Helicopter Sectors
Company Profiles