Seeing as how I've been at the business end of this stuff for a while I should lend a few comments.
Foot and mouth is one disease you missed Sasless. The whole of the north of Australia is paranoid about that especially with our northern pig population when the boat people would land on our coastline. One mob landed right by Darwin, walked up and hailed a taxi from downtown, the taxi driver ‘woke’ and took them to the local fed shed. Now they all go straight to the 5* accommodation at Xmas Is.
Lots of problems portrayed in the video and Shy T is right, with two shooters there should two engines, in fact two machines, one the other side of the thickets to blow the critters out into the clear air and the other mows them down, could be the message.
Rule number one get the second shooter out. Allow the pilot to concentrate on one gun which will give him enough power margins to do so. Plenty of times you can see him labouring while the engine man throws a few more shovels of coal in to get the steam up while the earth just stands still, at a very unsafe vertical distance below should the engine decide to quit. In that terrain flying outside the H/V so much is just not on.
Rule number two, never but never lift that barrel skywards. At the 4.38 mark the rear shooter raises his barrel skyward. Very tired of living that boy! Over here you do that, you walk and don't fly ever again, and you be lucky the pilot doesn’t bash p**s outa you.
Sasless suggested figures of 30 per hour; we have consistently shot in good conditions 120 to 140 per hour. That's brumbies, pigs, donkeys, buffalo and feral cattle.
We averaged close to that on one donkey shoot over five years and 2200 hours.
Rule number three wrong position; get lower and from the rear quarter behind the last in line and work along the line of animals, and slow down, keep in formation with them instead of over flying them. That’s where the lower AUW really counts. I’ve often had a shooter on board, didn’t have to move his barrel at all, I just lined it up with the pedals each time and he just kept pulling the trigger at about one per second. A line of twenty animals behind a twenty shot mag was very common. Best I ever had was a bloke that put down 286 donkeys in 18.5 minutes. Then we landed to reload the 10x20 and 3x30 shot mags. We went back and finished off about five which weren’t dead, he was phenomenal, by far the best I ever saw. A bit like Custer's last stand.
Rule number four, get some accuracy. That’s the worst shooting I’ve seen. In the donkey shoot I talked about we averaged 1.3/hd and in the early days of BTEC it was the same with bullet counters everywhere. Later because of the greenies we developed the double tap just to make sure, so now it’s around 2.1/hd. Never shoot while turning which is obvious here - often.
Rule number five. No loin shooting as we see in the video. If that footage gets out into the greenie arena you can forget it red rover, all over. Also as seen a couple of times animals left not dead, we never left animals without ensuring all were dead. That was imperative.
We started in the eighties with open sights then peep sights and then the two power optical, which were very good and nearly all head shots. The red dot scopes mostly fell apart. The scope in the front gun is a magic device an EO Tech, about AU$1,500.00 for a good quality one. It is impossible to miss with the damm thing. The barrel mounted video on the rear gun is through another type of scope we were to use on another contract here but didn’t get. It is also very good, and can be plugged into an internal monitor can record for several hours and be coupled to a GPS. No arguments then about where you were. With the monitor the pilot can fly the sight line.
The shooter should get a foot peg mounted onto the skid upright, a very simple gadget. The shooters should also be wearing helmets, what’s wrong with them?
The rifles look like AR15’s. They have shown themselves up to handling long hard hours over here with the .308 round. For pigs you would probably only need the 5.56mm.
Unless some reforms are implemented in Texas I can see it being a short term crash infested affair. In OZ we have shot well over 2 million ferals, without pigs and we had very few accidents, less than ten at that work over twenty years. The majority of which were caused by wires. One bloke shot himself down with a ricochet going back into his T/R on a R22, another two put empty cases into the engine cooling fan on 47’s.
The trick here was all that work was done with experienced pilots, most of whom are now elsewhere.
One last thing, the camera ship was living dangerously looking for a ricochet fragment to come his way, tell him to p**s orff behind the line of shooting, halfwit.
Nowadays I would much prefer to mount up in an Enstrom 480B with a stabilised rifle mount, plenty of room, power, endurance and cheap enough to run. I bet it would outperform the R44 on a per head basis.
Pandalet,
Not quite IFR, but I have seen footage of FLIR hog hunting on some island group, can't remember where, (costa rica perhaps) quite remarkable. Trophy shooting it was. someone might find it.
cheers tet