10,000 Hours!

[Bladestrike]

Woo hoo! Just tootin my own horn....broke 10,000 accident-free helo hours 175 nm offshore Nova Scotia in a 332L today, wind blowin 50 knots, 30 feet seas, just perfect! Started flying Bell 47s in Northern Ontario in '85 so it's been a long time coming. I know there's alot of guys kicking around with far more hours but I'm still excited.....

Hope the next 10,000 are as much fun!

[carholme]

Congratulations and I hope the next 10K are as safe as the last.

carholme

[NY HELICOPPER]

Congratulations! That's quite a milestone!

[meloni]

WOW!! congratulations!!

Well, you start flying the same year I was born..
I hope I can pass the 1k mark this year ( but I doubt :suspect: )

Congrats again :)

[bh412tt]

Congrats! I remember 10K, just passed 15K accident free! Well, there was that one wreck early on............but it only took a few seconds.

[the coyote]

Well done! But a wise person once said to me, I don't want 20,000 hours, because its 20,000 hours away from my family....

[Bravo73]

But a wise person once said to me, I don't want 20,000 hours, because its 20,000 hours away from my family....

Really? Do you take your family to work with you? ;)


And congrats, Bladestrike, on passing that milestone. :ok:

[Nigel Osborn]

Well done!! The first 10,000 hours seem to come quite quickly but the next 5000 hours seem to take for ever!! Don't let the occasion make you think you now fly twice as well as when you had 5000 hours. Can be a big trap, so fly safe!!:ok:

[22clipper]

....first the test then the lesson. I clocked up a thousand hours in a ten year fling with a little R22 Bladestrike. It was a stormy torrid involvement, the first few hundred hours were the scariest. I still remember the words I wrote at the milestone, "My thousand hours in choppers taught me patience & respect for the machine, fear & loathing of wires & weather, gratitude & appreciation for the experience. Most of all I’m relieved that I’m still here, the first few hundred hours were a steep learning curve & the definition of an optimist is a low hours chopper pilot who gives up smoking."
I can only begin to imagine what secrets you've learned in the next nine thousand?

[Bladestrike]

Thanks for the kind words guys. It's all I ever wanted to do since I was a youngin...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v222/darcyhoover/Helicopterkid-1avatarsm.jpg

Got the first thousand under my belt before I turned 20, best year was 980 hours, but years of EMS with breaking 200 considered a good year, kind of messed up the average.

[SASless]

Just a miss spent youth it sounds like.....you should have taken up the Piano instead....at least the girls in the bawdy house are better looking than most of the passengers you have carried. :E

Ten Thousand Accident Free Hours is a worthy accomplishment....how many total hours you got?;)

[Pink Panther]

Congrats Bladestrike:D, continued safe flying:ok:.

[drugsdontwork]

Congrats that man, fly safe

[topendtorque]

congratulations Bladestrike, you've done a good mile,
had my first flight about the same age, but it was a DH82. another long 15 or so years before I sat in one what them wings on top turned round on.
cheers tet

[WOP]

Congratulations!

[DOUBLE BOGEY]

10K.....hmmmmm thats 1 year and 51.5 days. I see you have been flying for 25 years. What the hell have you been doing for the other 23.7 years...you lazy sod!!!!

[Capt.Gonzo]

Congratulations!
Maybee I will have 10000 hours when I´m 100 years old an still flying...

[grumpytroll]

After the first 1500 or so the goal is to avoid flying as much as possible. :p It seems at times that the harder I try to not fly, the more time I get. I recall one in particular when the commander offered a 2 hour mission on a cold winters morn. I reccommended (from my comfy office chair) that he give it to the young warrant officer across from me. The boss took me up on my offer and my co-pilot thought he had just witnessed a grand act of senior wisdom. 2 hours later the 5 hour grinder came down the pipe and I was left to perform! Co-pilot lost his respect for my scheming abilities. Argh

Congrats and Cheers

[Neptunus Rex]

Bladestrike

10,000 hours flingwing - how are your haemorrhoids?

(OK Spellchecker - Piles!)

[DennisK]

Ahh ..... Just passed the 'one year, seven months and 22 days airborne with a quaint bit of rotating metal strapped to my bum. But as a 78 yr old have I been even lazier?

Regards to all out there. Dennis K

[Focha]

Congrats. I am still unborn. I have 144 hours of CPL/IR. I am sure of one thing... 300 hours will be a milestone for me if I ever get the change of doing that. :} But I guess that when you reach 300, you want 500, and when you reach that you want 1000. 10k! Congratulations Bladestrike. I hope one day to celebrate my 10k and if everything permits it to be accident free like yours 10k. My wish for you, is that you can celebrate your 20k accident free in the future. :ok:

Fly safe. Regards.

[Davey Emcee]

What type is that on ??

[Thomas coupling]

Congrats Bladestrike: a good innings.:D
For my own curiosity how many of those hours would you genuinely say were "quality" hours. That is to say those involving the physical flying of the machine other than autopilot and or route flying?

[lelebebbel]

How about some statistics for your 10,000hrs?

like, number aircraft types flown, or countries flown in... number of helicopter parts fallen off... birdstrikes.... engine failures... famous people carried, etc

[Bladestrike]

Well, wood bladed Bell 47s to start, then metal bladed turbo-charged 3b-2s, in Northern Ontario, Moose Surveys and what-not. Had an engine quit my first year but got it restarted before terra-firma. Then gravitated to Jetrangers, a few thousand hours on A/B/L/L1/L4 etc towing birds, moving drills, bucketing, wildlife surveys, you name it, tent camps for months in the high North, no schedule whatsoever. There's soome Hughes 500 and 205 thrown in there as well. Quite abit of longline, setting communication towers and the like in the mountains of Northern Quebec (the "Out-West" fold scoff at Quebec mountains but there are big rocks!). Then got my IFR and took over a EMS 222A base in Northern Ontario, Base Manager, wrote the manuals and did all the training for the type for the company, some 1600 hours there. Then flew Bandage One, Toronto's EMS S76 for two years (I guess most of that was Kenora actually, but Toronto was the fun stuff, only one bird had the autopilot so the vast majority of that was hand-flown), then got on S61's on Canada's East Coast and Azerbaijan, some 3000 hours on those beasts, no autopilots in those and lots of real in the clag time, mins approaches in 80 knot quartering headwinds,etc., lost a can in an unforecast 1/8 vis snowstorm longlining in Gross Morne national park, that was scary...ran it on an invisible runway bordered by mountains with a 45 knot tailwind, then gravitated to Pumas, some 2000 hours there, all out of Halifax, but I run the Norway sim a half dozen times a year for our crews as well. There's tons of odds and ends like tail-rotor gearbox chips, and two autos to the ground (one in the hover), loss of oil, engines fires, etc but haven't managed to prang one yet despite my best efforts! I'd say most of that is hand flown quality hours.

I'd tell more but I'll be late for my morning flight!

[Thomas coupling]

Yeah...but apart from that..........:O

[malabo]

Jeez, 10,000 hrs of that without an accident? Kudos and congratulations. Especially like your outlook that an autorotation is not an accident if it ends successfully :D. Thought maybe you were one of those white-shirt North Sea guys that drives a Class 1 bus from the time they get their license until they retire. Your flying experience is why I like Canada, sounds like you've had a fun run.

[griffothefog]

Sincere congratulations..:ok:

I passed that waypoint 2 years ago and it would have come a lot sooner if it had not been for 12 years of ems/police ops.

Although the flying I do now can be a bit scary, I think the first 1000 hours (mainly spraying and bucket) were the most "ball shrinking" of the total :eek:

Nowdays if I don't like it I can just say NO..:ok:

[TipCap]

Many Congrats on the milestone, Bladestrike :ok: and I hope you have many to come.

I wont tell you how many hours I got as I retired after 45 years of flying because hours are only a number.

Its the love of the job that is important and you seems to have that. Keep flying safely

Hey Malabo, I don't know when they last wore white shirts in the North Sea. Oh maybe, I do. We wore them up to 1977 until one of my mates went for a swim off Aberdeen :)

Best wishes

John

[TorqueOfTheDevil]

Is that 10,000 hrs night?:E

Seriously though, many congrats both on the hours and in particular on skilfully keeping everything sunny side up when the chips were down...