Superior Pilots: Trimming Trees From A Helicopter! (Video)
Thursday, June 5, 2014 at 08:14AM
The first time I viewed a video of a huge 10-blade vertical saw suspended from a helicopter and cutting tree limbs near large power lines was shortly after I launched AirPigz back in 2008. It was crazy and amazing to me back then, an there's no surprise that it remains that way to me still today. It's just much more relevant to me today since I've recently trimmed and cut down some large trees in my neighborhood using a chainsaw. I did not, however, use a helicopter!
I did use a 60' boom lift tho, which I found to be incredibly enjoyable work (which oddly might lead to a career change here very soon), but it's slow and tedious work even with the lift. I felled an 85' Maple tree that had lots of branches hanging over two houses... hours were spent cutting off limbs from the lift before I could take the saw to the trunk. I can easily understand the massive amount of man-hours and equipment traditionally required to trim trees along a powerline path. The helicopter and the horror-movie-like vertical saw definitely makes quick work of the difficult task of tree trimming! I'm confident however that the pilot would say it's still very tedious from his point of view!
That's the reason I'm sharing this video, to call attention to the skill and focus these pilots have. Honestly, I'd lean toward calling them crazy if it wasn't for the fact that I've seen lots of videos of this kind of work being done and it always seems to work out just fine. With the right pilot and the proper equipment, it appears to be a completely safe method of tree trimming.
One of these days I hope to be able to chat with a pilot who has done this and get a better idea of just how challenging it is... and then after that I need to find one of the guys that flies the line-checking helicopters like the one in the video below. Those guys are ARE crazy, even if it seems to work out just fine on a regular basis as well.
Let's also have a little hat tip to the Hughes 500 since it seems to be the dangerzone helicopter of choice!
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