Low Altitude Flying

TangoWhiskey said:
Or you die.

http://www.oaoa.com/news/article_aa81da36-8b01-11e4-ace2-673160e23094.html
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denverpilot said:
Got a friend doing that stuff now. Young guy.

An airplane he flew over 800 hours in, a couple of years ago, was crashed by a 28 year old yesterday near Odessa with a fatal outcome. His first time hearing that a plane he flew for his job, was destroyed with a fatal. Probably won't be the last.

My friend drove up from the new work place near Midland to hang out with the shocked former co-workers in Odessa tonight. He didn't know the kid.

http://www.newswest9.com/story/27686034/officials-on-the-scene-of-plane-crash-in-west-odessa

Kid was from Colorado. Haven't had a chance to talk to his instructor, who recently retired for medical reasons. I'm sure he'll be upset.

Other folks who I know, live a five minute walk from the instructor's house and after we chatted on the phone about it tonight, were going to walk over to tell him in person, in case he hadn't already heard.

Tomorrow they all get in their respective airplanes and go do it again. There aren't any "safety stand downs" (or even any calls from the boss to anyone about it, supposedly) in the pipeline patrol biz.

Crank 'em up and go...
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Yep, it happens, I got close a couple times pushing through fronts, if I hadn't been in a PA-12 with big tires bouncing along the right of way, crow hopping fences, I would have been in trouble with ice. There are no stand downs in pipeline inspection. We had a 3 day window in which to get any individual patrol done (I had 5 routes total some which included collection fields along the mainline route). If a front stalls out and day 3 shows up and the weather is still crap, guess what, you're going anyway. In TX/OK/NM/CO where I was flying it, spring, summer, and fall were ok and typically passable <100', but winter sucked. I know several guys that got killed flying Ag, but none that bit it on a pipeline run.

Since these are Federally mandated inspections, and all the flying happens below 200'AGL, the FAA doesn't really get involved very much.
 
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TangoWhiskey said:
What do they look for in pipeline patrols? Leaks? Tampering? Anything else?
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Everything, the most common call in I made was for people digging over the pipe. In fact I landed on the ROW once where there were some guys running an excavator right over the Texas pipeline freeway next to I-20. There are 7 pipes parallel (and crossing) in the same ROW, they were sure to hit one, and I know at least 2 of them were high pressure natural gas.:yikes: I landed right there and warned them, normally I would just radio it in to the pipeline company office and they'd send a guy in a truck, but this one was close to an immediate screw up.

So yeah, another thing I look for is evidence of planned construction along the ROW, survey stakes and such.
 
Silvaire said:
But even freakier are those unmarked tethered balloons that belong to the DEA or somebody. There's one in Key West and another in New Mexico that I know of. They go up to 15,000 feet on a dang cable! :eek: They have Restricted zones on the charts but I think a family did hit the one in Florida one time.
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I worked as Flight Director on the one in Deming, NM for 5 months in between military contracts. Typically they fly up to ~10,000 AGL, but as the chart says, they can go much higher. And that aerostat is huge.

I know of one (although there might have been more) light plane that flew into the tether at Cudjoe Key, FL. The tether wasn't damaged at all. The plane wasn't so lucky, and all aboard were lost.

edit: I've been in helicopters flying past tethered aerostats, and even though I know where the tether should be and exactly how thick it is and what it looks like, even I had a hard time seeing it when there was terrain in the background or dust/weather was a factor. Stay out of the restricted areas and you'll never hit the tether.
 
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Rigged4Flight said:
I worked as Flight Director on the one in Deming, NM for 5 months in between military contracts. Typically they fly up to ~10,000 AGL, but as the chart says, they can go much higher. And that aerostat is huge.

I know of one (although there might have been more) light plane that flew into the tether at Cudjoe Key, FL. The tether wasn't damaged at all. The plane wasn't so lucky, and all aboard were lost.
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http://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=43817

Poor people probably had no idea what just happened...
 
TangoWhiskey said:
Wow! The aerostat (blimp) is visible in this view, just north of the launch site:

Big indeed. But you'd never see the cable. Like a knife through aluminum.
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These are pics of the NM aerostat (same type as Cudjoe Key) from close up during a couple of emergency maintenance activities this summer. In the big "catchers mitt" on some of the pics you can see a man and extrapolate for reference. During some of the preventive maintenance, we actually walk around inside and even crawl up and down the inside of the tail fins. Crazy stuff.

But all that was to say this: It's freaking huge, and definitely dangerous to aircraft, whether you wander into the tether or the aerostat itself.

...and I'll stop hijacking the thread now. :)
 

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Objects that are big enough to see while there's still plenty of time to avoid them are a lot less of a problem, IMO.
 
Palmpilot said:
Objects that are big enough to see while there's still plenty of time to avoid them are a lot less of a problem, IMO.
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If you're talking about the aerostat, it's usually up at 10K AGL. If you're down at 3-5K, or below clouds, you aren't going to see the tether unless you hit it.
 
Rigged4Flight said:
If you're talking about the aerostat, it's usually up at 10K AGL. If you're down at 3-5K, or below clouds, you aren't going to see the tether unless you hit it.
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Yes, that's what I was trying to get at. The aerostat itself should not be difficult to see, but I expect that wouldn't apply to the tether.
 
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