#5 Helicopter Check Ride Ground School Wire Strike Avoidance

Always assume all towers and poles have wires. You've heard it. The next one's wire strike avoidance. You know, I made you work the last one. I'll give you my take on wire strikes. Wire strike avoidance is a big deal, as you already know. You're a commercial guy, you've heard about it. Helicopters fly into wires. It happens. People get hurt, people get killed. Wires are absolutely everywhere. And we know this, we see them. And it's not just towers. It's thinking about wires across rivers. You know, people go, I like to go fly low along the river. Well, people string wires across rivers. This is a big one. One of the ones I train is fly over the towers versus in between the towers. And some people, some people like to argue this one, but I was trained over the wires. That's or over the tower, even if you're with a series of towers. And that's acceptable for my exam that I've been using all these years. And I've always thought going over the tower is going to be best because if I'm over the top of it and I have an engine or equipment failure, I have a choice to go left or right. You know, on the right there's a woods, on the left, maybe there's an open field. So, you know, always flying over the towers. God, they're everywhere. And going and doing off airport landings. That's where you've probably. Somebody's probably told you along the way it's best to go out and visit a landing spot if you know you're going to go out somewhere and land off airport if you can. It's best to go drive there first and encourage your students to do the same thing. Go out to the area and take a look at it firsthand and find these wires because they can be very, very, very hard to see. Just like this picture here. I don't know how well you can see it. Probably can't see them. But just real quick, I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. There's 16 separate wires in this picture for this tower. Part of them for the tower. Two of them are going across some other direction. I don't know where those two are going. You know, the whole wire strike thing is big and way to go.

Over the towers. Over the towers. Instead of going in between them this way, you know where they are fixed to that tower. You know, they're not going to be any higher, they're not going to be any lower.

Exactly. I had an ems, Czech Airman, show me something one time. You know the normal transmission lines that go cross country, Big, tall towers. Have you ever noticed the two really tiny, small wires at the very top?

Yeah, yeah.

Have you seen those? I mean, I'm flying commercially, flying as a, you know, EMS pilot, been flying for however many years, and he points that out one night we're doing a flight and we had night vision goggles on. He goes, hey, have you ever noticed those two little tiny wires above the others? And I looked and I'm like, wow. No, I've never seen those. And there's. I don't know, you would think the two smaller wires would be below the bigger, heavier wires, but I flew for a lot of years before I ever knew that. On a lot of these towers, you see these, you know, four, six or eight big, heavy wires at the very top. There's two. On some of these towers, there's two tiny wires running along the top. So flying over the top of the towers, visiting landing sites that are off airport, prior to, you know, landing at them, probably the best thing to do. You know, we kind of talked about protecting your students. When you're letting them solo, they need to understand they cannot land. You know, you don't want them going off on doing airport landings because this is the kind of stuff that they'd get involved in. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know what else to say other than I know there's some statistics in my notebook on the amount of pilots that hit them and how often they're fatal and.

Yeah, I was gonna ask you that. It's a high number.

It's a pretty high number. And it's. I remember jotting it down. And right now I can't spout the number off the top of my head, but you can never rely on anyone else. And, you know, I keep going back to the EMS thing, but I think that's good because a lot of people like you or other people may be looking to fly EMS later and you learn a lot of good stuff. And the thing they taught us was you never trust the ground people. When they tell you there's no wires, don't believe it, because there's probably going to be wires there that they don't see. And it's not. They're not, you know, the firemen or the police officers, they're not trying to kill you. They just don't see them. And the other thing I can tell you is people think because of watching television that we go to where we want to land and we go straight down and then we go straight up and we fly away. Well, you know, we do if we have to sometimes, but we, you know, now as a commercial guy, we want to come in with airspeed and on an angle, same thing, taking off if we can. So people on the ground that are not helicopter pilots, when you talk to them and they say, oh no, you just land here in this spot, you're good. And I'll give you example, I was pretty new at this, at the EMS thing and they told us that in our basic training, hey, never you still get a report from the people on the ground. But don't take it as, I don't want to say, don't take it as the truth. Just realize that there's times that they don't understand wires that they think are far enough away can be too close for us or maybe they just don't see them. And I was going to land in an accident and the fire department says, oh, you're clear, land in the intersection, all four sides are clear, you're good. And this is at night, and it's a little bit of rainy, snowy mix, so it's already kind of a nasty night. And I'm coming in nice and slow and I'm looking around my searchlight and what do I find? Wires. So then I look over on this side, what do I find? Wires. There was wires on all four sides of this landing area and I still made it in there, but I saw the wire. So I did, you know, got to a hundred or two hundred foot hover and then did the descent the way I had to do to get in there. But they flat out said no wires. Well, they just thought, I think in their minds the wires were far enough away that they weren't a problem. Them not understanding how we really want to land. So, you know, that's where the really comes into my mind was one of the biggest things that kind of opened my eyes is people will tell you that, oh no, you can land there, there's nothing, there's no wires or oh yeah, but they're way far away. So you don't ever trust anyone else. You know, you have to got to stick with what you know.

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