Originally Posted by
havick
How's your vertical reference skills at night time down in a valley full of wires with a 200' longline?
Can you provide examples of operators or organizations doing night time HEC longline ops?
All I'm trying to say is that hoisting offers way more operational advantages. HEC has always been the cheap way of doing things.
If we are talking exclusively about rescue operations the hoist has a lot of advantages, listed above.
Most of the fixed line HEC in the US is not rescue, put powerline construction. There are at least 50 aircraft doing fixed line HEC for powerline maintenance and construction every day in the USA. About 80% of those are MD 500s with the occasional, MD600, BH407, AS350, AS355, or EC135.
It is all done vertical reference, no spotter. No variable line length.
There are a lot of advantages to doing it this way, both in safety and efficiency the difficulty is that it requires an extremely proficient VR pilot.
Anyone who has achieved their private pilots licence knows you have to be one step ahead of the helicopter. If you are relying on spotter to relay directions to you that inst possible.