Treasures from The Pioneer Era, reported by Ernie Tanner: All the richer now for my many experiences, I took off again for my second trip a few months later, in January 1973. This time I had a more powerful and faster machine, a Jet Ranger, HB-XCX. It might be expected […]
Helicopter
15 posts
Helimission helicopters often land in dusty villages. Generally speaking, helicopters don’t like dust. Dust wears down the edge on the rotor blades as well as the compressor part of the engine. The compressor has multiple blades and turns at 50,000 revolutions per minute (A good kitchen hand blender reaches a […]
In March, the official “Certificate of Airworthiness” for our helicopter PK-HCP was signed and the first flight was on March 18th. I did two training flights in the Palu area and was planning another one to the Wana area when we received an emergency call from Paramba. There was a […]
We were called to a lady in Tangumsili in the bush who was having trouble giving birth, so I immediately had Maichel, our young local pilot, plan the flight for the next morning. I had happened to run into a local doctor who used to fly with Helimission quite often […]
Treasures from The Pioneer Era, reported by Ernie Tanner: On one of my first flights from Africa back to Switzerland in the early 1970s: I flew merrily along the Italian coast towards Genoa. At La Spezia, I had to fly past the military airport giving it a wide berth of […]
Treasures from The Pioneer Era, reported by Ernie Tanner: On our more than six-thousand-kilometer return flight from Cameroon to Switzerland, we had to fly over the Hogger Mountains in Algeria as we had done on our outward flight. The red rocky towers of the Hoggar mountains rise up steeply into […]
Over the past two months the maintenance team and I have been working very hard to keep our services operational. Only one of our three helicopters was flying and it had only a handful of starts left before the engine cycled out and would need changing.
In 1986 we bought a helicopter in Abu Dhabi in the United Emirates on the Gulf of Persia. Now I intended to fly the machine via Ethiopia to Kenya where it was urgently needed.
After three years of preparation, training and many tests, Maichel, a young pilot from Papua, was finally ready. Just three weeks ago we completed the so-called type rating for our helicopter with him. And now it was time for his first real mission.
t requires a lot of skill, experience and high concentration from the pilots to fly in this challenging area with the helicopter.
To avoid long flights over water I planned to cross the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar, but because of the military no-go area I had to turn aside much sooner and aim for Morocco. I needed all my courage for the long flight over water.
The three-day flight program was well planned, so that we could combine serving three organizations in one mission.
