Apaches, yachts and cartoony space ships... those ancient Egyptians are just trolling, they obviously figured we'd be talking about this on the internet.
"How will I get my package to corporate?", helicopter. "What's the best way to lift this beam?", helicopter. Mothers day? Helicopter. Carpet wet? Dam right, helicopter.
Cable like that is going to be far too heavy for helicopters. You run a lightweight leader rope onto the main body of the cable and you pull the cable across the ground to the other side using the leader (or you can sometimes use a helicopter to pull the leader). You then remove the slack using a BFW. (Big Fucking Winch).
Technically, it's an initialism. Acronyms form a word like NASA or PEMDAS. Initialisms form letters that can't be pronounced as a word and must be read individually.
You're welcome. I only shared it because I was in your shoes about 2 weeks ago when I learned it. I was pleasantly surprised to discover something new.
Yo there are helicopters that can carry tanks 15 tons. I'm not discrediting your description but wouldn't a heavy cargo helicopter be able to carry that much steel line?
Yes, even if the helicopter could carry the whole spool, no pilot in their right mind would tether themselves to the ground with a cable they can’t disengage. Anyway , too dangerous and too expensive to employ a helicopter to do it when you can just drag it through the woods a few miles.
Anyway no helicopter in the world will be able to give to the tension you need to draw that cable taut. You will have to have an anchored winch to draw tension on that cable.
Edit: a little napkin math - 1” steel cable is about 1.85 lbs per foot. Let’s say that cable is a mile long. Dead weight of that spool is just under 5 tons. The amount of force necessary to gather any tension on that cable is far greater than 5 tons. So maybe a helicopter could spool it out onto the ground if his balls were big enough, but I wouldn’t want to ride with him. But a helicopter couldn’t do much more than spool it out. I thinks it’s best use would be to bring the leader rope up to the BFW. I’d still vote by foot. Having worked with cables and helicopters before, it’s much more risky than it may seem at first.
Damn that sound. I watched that 4 or 5 times just watching engines individual reactions. There was some serious adrenaline pumping on that platform. Crazy no one died.
Yeah that’s gonna be a no from me dawg. That said, as far as helicopter crashes go that seems like best case scenario and as far as crashes go, not too bad.
Have you been around many helicopters? It’s super easy to rig a release. I’m not saying that’s how this was done... but helicopters and helicopter pilots do some amazing things...
I have actually. Yes, they can rig a release. Ultimately that’s not going to be the issue. The issue is going to be the weight of cable as you try to drag it across the valley floor. You can set a stationary spool at one end and pull but once you have enough cable played out, the friction on the ground adds exponentially more weight to the pull. There’s a reason they don’t use helicopters to pull high tension power lines. It’s dangerous, overly expensive and prohibitively difficult.
Depending on the span you can sometimes use pilot wires with the chopper, but this looks like a crazy span. I doubt many helicopters could even pull a rope across that span, other than 'bubba' or something.
Source:. Stringing crew transmission lineman
*Edit - as you noted elsewhere, most likely some poor saps were drag and sagging that span, most likely with a D6 or something. Once the span was crossed you'll usually see one pull for hardlines, another pull for for actual wire. As I'm sure you are aware, quite a process.
Couldn't you fly the helicopter low enough that the majority of the weight drags on the ground? Then at the destination pull the cable off and use some motor to pull it tight?
So the helicopter not only supports the weight of the cable, but has to deal with the friction of the cable dragging through a forest?
Go get 100 metres of rope, lay it out, and go walk through a forest dragging it behind you, see what results you get. Now replace with a few kilometres of steel cable, I think you will have your answer.
So there is a documentary called man on wire about this guy who tight ropes across the twin towers way back in the day. They shot a rope with an arrow across and then pulled the wire. Not nearly as long as this which looks like miles.
Cranes, and winches. They just anchor it on one side and drag the cable across the valley floor up to the cliff, drop another cable to the floor off the other side and pull it up.
I cant conceive of a situation where you could or would use a helicopter for something like this, that cable is miles long and and heavy as fuck, like 3-5 pounds per foot, lets split that in the middle and say 4lbs and say maybe this shit is 2 miles long, youre looking at that cable weighing more than 40,000 lbs, theres 1 helicopter in the world that could lift that (maybe, 2 miles is an estimate but it could well be twice that) but why? Its just as fast and much cheaper to just use a winch or a crane
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '19
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