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Wire Strike Avoidance Helicopter Online Ground School

3,357 views · Published 26 April 2014 · 7:42 · Indexed 25 October 2026

Channel: Helicopter Online Ground School LLC · 2014 · Education

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Always assume all towers and poles have wires. You've heard it; the next one's wire strike avoidance. You know, I made you work the last one, I'll give you my take on wire strikes.
 Wire strike avoidance is a big deal. As you already know, you're a commercial guy, you've heard about it. Helicopters fly into wires, it happens. People get hurt, people get killed, wires are absolutely everywhere. And we know this. We see them. And it's not just towers. It's thinking about wires across rivers. You know, people go "Ah, I like to go fly low along a river." Well, people string wires across rivers. Ehm, this is a big one.
 One of the ones I train is fly over the towers versus in between the towers. And some people like to argue this one. But I was trained over the wires -- or over the towers. Even if there is a series of towers. And that's acceptable for my examiner I've been using all these years. And I voice that going over the tower is going to be best because if I'm over the top of it and I have an engineering equipment failure, I have a choice to go left or right. You know, on the right there is a woods. On the left maybe there is an open field. So you know, always fly in over the towers.
 Got them everywhere. And going and doing off airport landings. That's where somebody's probably told you along the way, it's best to go out and visit a landing spot if you know you're going to go out somewhere and land off airport. If you can, it's best to go drive there first and encourage your students to do the same thing. Go out to the area and take a look at it first hand and find these wires because they can be very-very-very hard to see.
 Just like this picture here. As you can see them -- probably you can't see them, but just real quick. I can see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen: there's sixteen separate wires in this picture for this tower. On top of this tower. And two of them are going across to some other direction. I don't know where those two are going.You know, the whole wire strike thing is big. Student: So you teach students to go over the towers, instead of going in between them. This way you know where they are fixed to that tower. You know, they're not going to be any higher, they're not going to be any lower.
Kenny: Exactly. An EMS checker showed me something one time. You know, the normal transmission lines go across countries; big, tall towers. Have you ever noticed the two really tiny, small wires at the very top. Student:  Yeah, yeah. Kenny: Have you seen those? Student: Yeah. Kenny:  I mean I'm flying commercially. Flying as a, you know, EMS pilot. Flying for however many years. And he points it out one night. We're doing a flight and we had night vision goggles on and he goes "hey, have you ever noticed those two little tiny wires above the others?" And I looked and I'm like "wow. No, I've never seen those."
 And there's -- I don't know, you'd think the two smaller wires would be below the bigger, heavier wires. But I flew for a lot of years before I ever knew that on a lot of these towers you see these four, six or eight big, heavy wires but at the very top there's two -- on some of these towers -- there's two tiny little wires running along the top.
 So flying over the top of the towers, visiting landing sites that are off airport prior to landing at them is probably the best thing to do. You know, we kind of talked about protecting your students when you're letting them solo. They need to understand they cannot land, you know, you don't want to go off and do off airport landings because this is the kind of stuff they'd get involved in.
 And you know, I don't know. I don't know what else to say other than I know there's some statistics in my notebook on the amount of pilots that hit them and how often they're fatal and...  Student: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was going to ask you that. It's a high number though.
 Kenny: It's a pretty high number. And I remember jotting it down and right now I can't spout the number off the top of my head but you can never rely on anyone else. And you know, I keep going back to the EMS thing but I think that's good because a lot of people like you or other people may be looking to fly EMS later. And you learn a lot of good stuff. And the thing they taught us was "You never trust the ground people when they tell you there's no wires." Don't believe it because there's probably going to be wires there that they don't see. And it's not their -- you know, the firemen or the police officers, they're not trying to kill you.

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