Watched some helicopter guys play with insulators a couple of years ago (I did medicals for a couple of the company pilots, and they clued me in to where they would be working, after we were talking about those sorts of ops)
They said it was “hot hand work” in which the poor guy doing the actual work was brought up to the potential of the line and then did the work without conducting to ground.
Anyway, it was a high overcast day, and this guy crawled out onto a little platform on the side of the helicopter.
I was standing by the side of the road
maybe 200m from the Hughes something or other when a poor fellow with a dorsal harness crawled out on an aerial platform on a skid, stuck a three foot pole out with a hook on the end of it, and accepted a really visible 3 meter arc from the line.
After he bonded on (he hooked the lead onto the wire) the helicopter kept him adjacecent to the area of work until he was done.
Everyone involved clearly bore elephant nuts….
Last edited by 421dog; 12th Jul 2022 at 09:00.