I spent my youth around the hangars at Cork Airport.
The sites of the original hangar and the development of the large hangar around 79/80 are now part of the new Cork Airport terminal.
I first became aware of Irish Helicopters around the mid 70s with the gas exploration off the south coast.
There was a rig located off the beach at Myrtleville, in Cork and was seviced by two Bolkow 105 machines one yellow and one orange. The orange one turned out to be EI-BDI which I recall may have been written off a decade later.
A school friend Derek, Cronin found the location of the IHL hangar at Cork airport and we headed there one friday eve after school.
Jim Egan, one of the engineers let us sit in the cockpit of EI-BAM, another B212 an Okanagan Helicopters machine was parked beside it. Stanley Horan was there that day as well.
Fergus O'Connor and another pilot an American named Bill Thompson were sitting in a portacabin and were the first pilots I met in my life.
I recall a couple of Okanagan 212s and a 61 around Cork at the time and those lads flew those machines everywhere.
I continued to visit the hangar as long as IHL had it up to around 1998.
The lads who worked there were the salt ot the earth and it was a blow when the company was sold by Aer Lingus.
I became friendly with a young engineer named Brendan White, who was a minefield of tech gen and I owe him a great debt of gratitude for the assistance he was to me in my aviation career.
Mick Hennessy was a brand new co-pilot on the 212 when I got my first "flip" from the site of the old hangar to the ramp at Cork airport around 1976, John Cooper and Alec Dunne strapped me in. I washed the windows of BAM and BDI to pay my debt for the flight.
I was hooked on helicopters after that and I'm sure the IHL lads regretted letting me go on that flip cos I was always around after that.
I never made it as an IHL pilot but had an opportunity at a flying cadetship around 1990/91 when IHL recruited 2 pilot cadets from the ECA which was a flying school based at Cork.
I had gotten an Aer Lingus cadetship a couple of years before and had just finished the course. I was grateful to Aer Lingus for the opportunity and decided to stay there.
As I recall, one of the trainees was an instuctor at the ECA and the other a student from the the school.
I remember the delivery of BHO and the training that went on around the airport in the weeks after its arrival. Cork Airport was the Mecca for helicopters in Ireland at the time.
There was a constant thump of the Bell's blades during the Summers, quieter in the winters.
I remember the preparations for the Papal visit in 79 and the new interior in 'Fox Hotel'.
I also recall the flying done around the time of the Whiddy Island disaster and the pipline inspections.
Thanks to all the contributors who have posted photos, they are fantastic and take me back to those great days...keep them coming please...