Top Gear Aerial Camera Work

[FLY 7]

Did anyone see Top Gear on Sunday?

BBC iPlayer - Top Gear: Series 14: Episode 1 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p1lgb/Top_Gear_Series_14_Episode_1/)

Go to almost the end, where the trio are driving on the fabled mountain road built for Ceaucescu. Even Clarkson comments on the helicopter cameraman. Slow it down and you'll see how close he was to the cars.

What's the risk assessment on something like that?

[No-ID]

Are you referring to this bit?

GXvLbuezNnY

link: YouTube - Transfagarasan Road - Romania (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXvLbuezNnY)

[VeeAny]

It starts at about 58:50 on the clock.

[griffothefog]

As an expat of 10 years plus, I find the program hilarious and a great reminder of how people back home get wound up so easily..:E

As for 3rd party indemnity.... :ugh: It's a helicopter people and that's what they do. Don't forget, wherever there's ****.....there's a helicopter:ok:

[alouette]

It is what it is. That's what helicopters are made for.:ok:

[JTobias]

It reminds me of the other day when I was unsure of where I was. I decided to follow the M1 North and the next thing I know I'm going the wrong way and I do a 180 turn only to see that I'm only about 10-20 foot above a bloody HGV.

These bloody HGV drivers are a pain in the arse. I mean fancy driving so close to the motorway I'm flying down!

Unbelievable. Anyway no harm was done, but I did find it a bit of a squeeze flying through the tunnel.

Joel ;)

[Non-PC Plod]

Fly 7 - I have to disagree with some of the comments on here, and I'm guessing you are thinking along the same lines as me.
Its what you do in a helicopter...............if you are a complete cowboy! There is a time and a place for putting an aircraft into a situation where there is little margin for error or malfunction. This was not life & death, it was not military. With a bit of careful planning and preparation, I am pretty sure that the right shots could be set up in a way in which safety is not compromised. (ie, a professional approach)
Alternatively, you wazz and zoom, and it all looks great on the telly until one day.............

[Whirlygig]

that I'm only about 10-20 foot above a bloody HGV.Joel, I think you'd better get your eyes tested - you should be able to read the roadsigns from at least 50 foot away (I can) :}

Cheers

Whirls

[Flying Lawyer]

What's the risk assessment on something like that?

I would have been perfectly happy to be in either the helicopter or one of the cars. :ok:

Preferably a car (and preferably driving) because it's such a fabulous road for doing what high performance sports cars are designed to do. :)


.

[Tarman]

" 40 lives lost building the road ! " I don't think that Risk Assessments come very high on the agenda in that Country.
That said, I would have been a happy passenger in the Squirrel, the flying looked like fun.
I'm not so sure I would have driven under the helicopter in a 5 foot hover though. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .who am I kidding, of course I would have.
I probably would have screamed like a big lassie though :eek:

[stringfellow]

i for one loved the aerial work, the non skeptical viewing public i imagine think the same, great prime time pr for the heli business. remember risk assessments and the nanny state that comes with it have driven the country to its knees.
i thought the footage was brilliant.... that hover did seem excessively low tho!!!!

[2papabravo]

I thought it was great too. Yes the flying was pushing the limits, but there was danger throughout the scene...like driving 3 high performance cars, at high speed along a road with no crash barriers and steep cliffs.

As someone else said...it is what it is...

[JTobias]

Whirly,

My eyes are fine, the problem was I was watching a film on my iPod at the time !!!

Joel :}

[eivissa]

Looks more like a B3 to me :ok:

http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/2426/82091504.jpg
http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/5441/27879023.jpg
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/3372/79846352.jpg
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/2276/80778109.jpg
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5444/36177793.jpg
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/3703/56871819.jpg
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/2230/42776663.jpg

[slingyerhook]

A superb programme,with great scenery,great car's and some great footage of a flash B3!.:ok:

Keep it up guys.:D

[toptobottom]

i thought the footage was brilliant.... that hover did seem excessively low tho!!!!

It was a bit low - but not too low. I mean, there must have been at least a metre between the skids and the cars :}

Top Gear is great TV. Glad to see the boys are back on form after the disappointing previous series :ok:

[Blue Rotor Ronin]

Get a life notcopandfriends, perfectly happy with that, learn how to really fly before byatchin'! It's a fookin' helichopper...Hell's teeth you donuts make my bloody teeth ache from gnashing..:ugh::mad::E

[bottom rung]

Presumably another chopper hovering next to the B3 to get the shot of it hovering over May's head?

[starflex3]

Looks like fun to me!

[lelebebbel]

How irresponsible! If this was in the UK, they would've had to use an IFR twin.

Actually they wouldn't have shot the episode at all because the speed limit on that road would be 15mph, with a traffic camera every 50m.

[sunnywa]

As much as the flying would have been a hoot, if I had a choice, the Aston Martin is the vehicle I would have chosen. What a great day out:D:D:D:D:D:):):)

[farmpilot]

As someone who spends a lot of time in the back doing exactly this kind of job I cant help but think this was a bit off mark.

Yes it's great fun, looks amazing and is a real rush but for those reasons alone I feeling this was either poorly thought out or more likely actually a stunt to enhance the show.

Aerial cameramen have at their disposal many new (not so new now) tools to choose from that get far more dynamic shots in a far more safer environment. In fact you can almost limit the exposure to zero in most cases. Loosing a motor is almost a non event now as both the crew and the camera can walk away from it. Obviously there are risks but I would hazard a guess and say that if anything had gone wrong on that shoot the aircraft would have been bent, people hurt and the industry as a whole condemned.

As an example, during the filming of District 9 we were tasked to film convoys, shoot outs, car chases and riots. All of this was filmed within the existing laws of South Africa, no special permissions required.

He was a good cameraman though, very impressive!

[Trans Lift]

Looked like a lot of fun to me too. Cars or heli I would've been more than happy.

I once did a scene for a german movie (not a porno) in which I was driving a land rover as fast as I could down a very dodgy road on the west coast of ireland with a JetRanger up my ass. I wish I had been flying it, although the driving was fun!!

Top Gear is one of the most entertaining shows on TV by a long shot!:ok:

[iainms]

Good heli work and good Top Gear is back !:ok:

[Non-PC Plod]

Ronin,

I'm not gnashing any teeth, I'm just saying (and farm pilot seems to back me up on this) that with a bit of thought and professional planning, it could have been done differently.
As for learning to fly - perhaps people who have had to put themselves in real danger enough times are more selective about putting themselves in danger when it is not necessary?

[FLY 7]

I wasn't passing any judgement in my OP.

It was simply interesting that, after all the aeial work TG must do, this was the first time that the camera helicopter has appeared in shot, and Clarkson made specific comment - implying that this helicopter was getting closer to the action than normal.

Personally, I'd be happy to see Top Gear ditch the cars and go 'aviation'. Afterall, Clarkson loves aircraft and speed, May has a Decathlon, and Hammond has an R44 R2. So they are all enthusiasts.

[Bravo73]

FWIW, back in the UK, the BBC are particularly risk adverse and incredibly stringent when it comes to selecting approved helicopter operators for filming. I'd be very surprised if these sequences would've been approved if they were filmed in, say, the Lake District.

[chopperpug]

Ummm...... really??
FFS. It was a TV show, yes its made to look flashy, thats the whole point. Yes, they may have been able to do it safer, but maybe that wouldnt have given them the shots of the Heli they wanted? As someone else said, driving the 3 cars down the road had more exposed risk, for a longer period, than the heli. And maybe they don't have all the fancy camera gear in Romania to do it any differently. As for the rest of the flying, I don't see any problem with it at all, there was no overflying of public gatherings or buildings at low level, clear area, obviously he was aware of the wires and no doubt had done a very thorough recce of the area before hand, as all of us should.
At the end of the day, maybe the hover on the road was a risk if he had of had an engine failure just as the vehicles were approaching. But then, every day at work I fly over a whole bunch of stuff, both on dept. and app. that if my donk were to withdraw its enthusiasm for life, I would be up the ****ter too, Just like every fire pilot, or sling pilot, or various other jobs that we use these wonderful machines for.

Calculated and accepted risk.

Its either that, or go wrap your self in cotton wool, and don't live a life. :ugh:
If the rest of the world turns out to go the way of the Nanny state, I will give up flying I think. Well.. I would have to, because we wouldnt not be able to do the sort of work that I do in that case. :yuk:

[Mark Six]

I flew JC around earlier this year in an AS355N. Footage should appear on an episode of TG in the new series if it didn't get edited out. His wife was lying down across the back seat so that she didn't appear in the shot of us landing. Clarkson said his favourite helicopter is...the MD500.

[Bravo73]

Clarkson said his favourite helicopter is...the MD500.

Really? He told me that it was the Apache that he went in... ;)

[Mark Six]

Yeah, I was a bit surprised at his choice. Made me doubt his judgement on cars as well. He had recently been in NZ where he did a fair bit of flying in 500's so maybe that influenced him.

[JimBall]

"Presumably another chopper hovering next to the B3 to get the shot of it hovering over May's head?"

No - a crew on the hillside above.

[mickjoebill]

Without being there, it is not possible to make a sensible judgement on how this flight was conducted.

Flying with a cameraman shooting from a side door creates a set of flight restrictions and pilot pressures that in the past have been significant factors in accidents where controlled flight into terrain was the cause.

To date there have been, by comparison very few accidents due to controlled flight into terrain involving nose mounted gimbals. I think only one (flying too low over heaving seas)

In Top gears latest escapade, a nose mounted gimbal would have provided more sense of speed and enabled shots looking left right and backwards at 120 knots, probably a good choice if shooting sports cars!

But a $200? per day Romanian cameraman is a lot cheaper than a $2000 per day stabilised camera.

If there had been no sign of the cameraman (as is the case when using a gimbal) Clarkson would have said what a great job the Romanian pilot was doing:ok:


Mickjoebill

[JimBall]

It was an English cameraman flying on an AOC flight.

[PH-SCP]

Looks more like a B3 to me http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/src:www.pprune.org/get/images/smilies/thumbs.gif

Good observation ! YR-CBO is a B3 model (cn 3544)

[rotorrookie]

Looks like a normal car commercial or car movie shot to me.. surely it can look like a cowboy stunt, but in this landscape the best spot to be at if the engine desides to take a break is above or close to that road,
To me, the most hazard there for low level flying was all the power lines there
Neat shots but nosemount would have made the pilots day lot easier thoug.

[12Watt Tim]

I suspect everyone involved knew enough to make a rough assessment of the risks and judged that their enjoyment and the completion of the job justified those risks. Life is full of risk/benefit analysis, many of them less obvious than this one. Individuals should be allowed to make those judgements for themselves where they have the necessary information.

Looked a whole lot of fun on either end of the the camera :ok:

[Helinut]

12Watt Tim,

You have my vote for European President :ok:, but you will have to bang a few bureaucrats heads together to achieve your aim, and make a lot of lawyers unemployed :D

[mickjoebill]

It was an English cameraman flying on an AOC flight.

It is anyones guess why Clarkson referred to him in the story as a Romanian.


Mickjoebill

[Blue Rotor Ronin]

Ronin,

I'm not gnashing any teeth, I'm just saying (and farm pilot seems to back me up on this) that with a bit of thought and professional planning, it could have been done differently.
As for learning to fly - perhaps people who have had to put themselves in real danger enough times are more selective about putting themselves in danger when it is not necessary?Non plod. I'm ex SAR. It's the frantic perfunctory rush to condemn a pilot operating near the margins without any knowledge of that pilot's physical environment or skill level on that day. Armchair condemnation. Annoying. That's all.. :ok:

[Non-PC Plod]

Ronin - fair comment..... but in the same way, its unwise to rush to endorse a performance which may warrant a more critical approach.

[Heli-Ice]

I am sitting here in my armchair and shouting "Dang, these were some cool shots!"

Rotorrookie.

I agree with you :ok: