Alan's Ramblings - helicopter tag

It's that helicopter time of year again

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:40:49 GMT

The Moors For The Future project has been working since 2003 to repair the damage caused to the moorland of the Dark Peak, which I live on the edge of. Part of this work involves spreading heather brash over the areas of eroded peat, so as to provide a micro-climate that will enable the surface of the peat to revegetate. Because of the nature of the terrain, it's impossible to access it by conventional means so everything has to be airlifted in by helicopter. There's a short period when this work can be done, between the end of the shooting season and the start of the nesting season, so it's a pretty hectic time. This year the project is doing its biggest-ever airlift which will be using three helicopters to transfer 24,000 dumpy bags of heather brash onto the moors, which will be spread across 1,600,000 square metres of eroded peat. The Peak District Rangers provide ground support for the helicopters, so I'm going to be out at least a day a week for the next month or so helping out. There's a video below that I took a couple of years ago showing what's involved - the helicopter carries six bags at a time and drops them off in pairs at the places we indicate. It's a bit scary the first couple of times, but the skill of the pilots is really amazing, and so far nobody has been buried under a bag :-) The project been front-page news in the local press - yeah, it's quiet around here - see these articles in The Glossop Chronicle and The Glossop Advertiser

Airborne muckspreader

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 10:12:20 GMT

A couple of weeks ago the Moors For the Future folks started up the heather brash spreading operations that I've helped out with before. The aim is to spread a thin layer of chopped up heather (brash) over the bare peat as part of the process of getting it to regenerate. In the past the heather has been airlifted by helicopter onto the moors and then spread by hand. This is a very time and labour intensive process, and it is quite difficult to get an even layer. This year they are using a different technique (and a different helicopter company). Instead of the heather being lifted on site and then spread it is loaded into what I can only descrive as an aerial muckspreader which is then flown under the helicopter.

Here you can see it on the back of the truck - there are a pair of the spreaders, whilst one is being filled the other is being flown over to the spreading area. The bottom of the spreader is a conveyor belt that moves the heather towards the back of the contraption. The two vertical shafts with the disks and tines on them rotate towards the gap in the centre and fling the heather out of the back. The whole thing is powered by a small petrol motor underneath the hopper.

The lift site was right at the summit of Holme Moss, next to the transmitter tower. Being a peat bog means that even though the ground looked frozen it was actually very soft underneath - as they found out when they tried to drive the truck over to the stockpile of brash bags!

Needless to say a cooperative farmer and a large tractor were required to hoik the truck out of the hole it had dug for itself and move it over to the bags.

The helicopter they were using was a Squirrel. They'd taken all the seats out to keep the weight down - each spreader weighs about 1/4 tonne and holds up to 6 cubic metres of brash, so they needed all the umph they could get.

Unfortunately this meant we had to walk the 2.5km onto the moor, and boy was it cold. The spreading area was directly around the trig point on Black Hill - anyone who knows the area will understand just how bleak it is, and it was pretty windy too, which made it feel all the colder. The mast you can see in the background is the Holme Moss transmitter - at one point this mast provided TV coverage for most of the North West of the UK.

Once on site two people stood either end of the swathe they wanted the helicopter to cover and the pilot flew over them, turning the spreader on at the appropriate moment. It took about 30 seconds to dispense the 6 cubic meters of heather. The area on the right of the photo has already been covered, and the area on the left is not yet treated. Depending on the height, each run covered a swathe about 5 - 8m wide and perhaps 100-150m long. This was at the start of the day and the pilot was coming in relatively high, by the end of the day he was coming over us at about 2 - 3m above head height.

Here's a view of the contraption in action - you can see the stream of heather being flung out by the counter-rotating spreader shafts at the back of the hopper. The aerofoils above and to the side of the spreader shafts are to keep the whole thing stable as it's being flown under the helicopter.

And here's the net effect when you are stood underneath acting as a human marker flag. And yes it does itch when you get a load of heather down your neck, although the helmet and the goggles keep most of it off of your face :-) I was initially a little skeptical about the likely efficacy of this technique, but it was really very impressive. It gave a much more even coverage than hand spreading and is obviously far faster. The only problem was that the heather bags had been standing for some time, and the combination of them being stacked on top of each other, compressed, soaked in rain and then frozen meant that a lot of the brash was in solid lumps that jammed the spreader. However on subsequent days they got a machine up to re-shred the heather to get the lumps out and solved that problem.

As with the spreading done last year this is still very much an experimental technique, it will be interesting to see how effective it has been over the next couple of years.

First t-shirt patrol of the year

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:12:37 GMT

Today was really rather warm - in the mid to upper teens (mid 60's fahrenheit for any colonials listening in), so rather than being bundled up like an Inuit I got to walk around in my t-shirt - it looks like spring is really here at last. Unfortunately the warm weather also meant is was very hazy, so I didn't get any decent photos. However it's only a few weeks since we had some significant snowfall - the pictures below were taken on Kinder Low when we were airlifting at the beginning of the month.

I'm particularly fond of the one below - apart from correcting the blue colour cast and contrast problems you get with photos of snow, it's untouched.

Helicopter in the hills

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 10:45:49 GMT

The Moors For The Future project are back on the job again, spreading cut heather on Bleaklow as part of the attempt to re-vegetate the eroded peat. I helped out with loading the lift bags last year, and this year I'm getting to help with the second part of the process, airlifting the bags onto the moor. My first stint was this Wednesday - we drove up the track to Glossop Low where we were airlifted by the helicopter onto the moor:

As we were walking to the drop area, a couple of guys and a dog came up to us, the dog was a rescue dog wearing a distinctive NSARDA coat, so we guessed there was a Mountain Rescue callout in progress. It turns out that someone had been missing since the previous day, and a total of six MR teams were looking for him. They asked if they could use the helicopter to help search for him, so as a result we had to mooch around for a couple of hours while they looked for him, without any success unfortunately.

Once the helicopter returned we split into two teams of three, and each team took a set of GPS coordinates where the bags were to be dropped. The helicopter can lift six bags at a go and drop them in pairs, so each team member stands where the pilot needs to drop a pair of bags. Helicopters can only hover into wind (and it was very windy and cold!), so the person who is most downwind holds their arms up to signal the helicopter for the first pair, and he works his way upwind dropping bags as he goes. It's quite disconcerting to have to stand there as half a dozen large bags come swinging towards you - the pilot comes in fast and low and drops the bags within six feet of you, sometimes closer - and he's only a short way above your head, looking at you through a window in the floor of the helicopter and a couple of tatty wing mirrors attached to the outside of the chopper:

After he's dropped one set of bags, he flies back to the staging point on Glossop Low and picks up another six, and delivers them to the other three man team. Whilst he's doing that, the first team gathers up the lifting strops and parcels them up into a rope bag so they can be taken back down to the staging point the next time around:

And finally, here's the result of our handywork - all the white blobs are lift bags full of heather waiting to be spread. Whilst we were waiting for the helicopter we spread some of the heather brash - it needs to be spread about 1cm thick over the bare peat, and it's surprisingly hard work - the easiest way, bearing in mind the strong wind, was to toss armfuls into the air and let the wind do the spreading.

We had to pack in about 3:00pm because the RAF declared a no-fly zone over Bleaklow so that they could get one of their Sea King search and rescue helicopters in to look for the missing guy - unfortunately he's still missing, and the search has been called off until Saturday, which doesn't bode well for the individual concerned :-(