Powerline maintenance by helicopter

Datura

Datura

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We were out paint balling on Saturday in Morning Star (Near Melkbos in the western Cape) and we saw a red helicopter cruising quite low with a long rope hanging from it. As it got closer we saw that there were two people attached to the end of the rope (Approximately 15m below the helicopter). The pilot lowered the two people onto a power line tower and flew back to pick up two more guys and dropped them off at the next tower and then another two guys for the tower after that. These guys were super fast at attaching and detaching themselves and that pilot was moving them from tower to tower at quite a high speed. I am just interested to know a little more about this type of work. Does Eskom own the helicopter or is it via contractors and what sort of pay do these crazy people dangling from the helicopter get?

Was a truly amazing thing to see. I tried to capture footage of it but was too far away to get a clear shot.
 
Its something Eskom do afaik... and there is a contracting company that does it as well.

IIRC, these guys trek all over the world to do it now since our guys are the best in the world.
 
Eskom has been doing this type of Maintenance for quite sometime, the guys would inspect the Glass Isolators between the cables and the towers.

Sometimes the Helicopter would have the ability to wash the isolators with a overgrown water pistol :D
 
Wires are live - thus they need to use a Helicopter. Helicopter just needs to be careful of trees. Trees == Grounded == R.I.P
Some time ago (somewhere) they doubled the "thickness" of the Glass Isolators after some troubles with Whatever. I also heard these guys work at the speed of light!

Sometimes they use this not just to do maintenance on the cables but to lay new ones as well.

Edit:
http://www.chopperworx.co.za/powerline.html
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Electrical-Engineering-1356/Helicopter-Maintenance-High-Voltage.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEKbMMHAwm0
 
Last edited:
Hmmm... with Eskom its usually a case of maintenance by ROFLcopter... :D
 
Wow. Crazy links.

I am not sure what these guys were doing but whatever it was they were doing it at a crazy pace. Just clipping themselves to the rope took a couple seconds and the same for unclipping. Hectic stuff. Ta for the info :)
 
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