Flight of the dragonfly by Jean Sorensen
Canadia Forest Industries magazine
September 1998 |
| Steep Slope Logging MacMillan Bloedel’s new reality includes a significant and growing role for helicopter logging. With this comes the challenge to heli-log, and practice non-clearcut retention logging, without paying a heavy price in safety or fibre cost. Canadian Air Crane’s grapple logging system may be part of the answer. The men wait on the mountain ridge some 2 000 feet above sea level on a cool, B.C. summer morning. The ground tumbles down at a 70-80% slope, pouring out rich hues of timber greens and browns slashed with the colour of fireweed. It is beautiful scenery but treacherous terrain. A fluke fog is a problem - delaying the heli-logging operation. So, a $15 million Sikorsky S-64E sits grounded and the MacMillan Bloedel field staff and the men from Canadian Air-Crane (CAC) wait on the ridge. The cool morning has shown one foible of heli-logging. Weather is everything. "He won’t go until he is sure he can get back to his service area," says marketing manager John Smith for Canadian Air Crane (CAC). The helicopter is 25 feet high and 88 feet long and no places exist below where the craft can sit down if required. Yesterday, the craft worked from early to last light. Today, it is almost noon before the sun and wind burn and blow the wisps of white away and the Port Alberni Inlet appears on the horizon. Soon the blues of the ocean frame blend with the greens and browns. A crew member radios. Visibility is clear in the draw and it ’s a go. Back on another hill comes the thunk-thunk-thunk sound of a huge prop blading the air; it builds, grows, intensifies and then the huge body of the Sikorsky sweeps over the group like surrealistic dragonfly in a shrunk-the-kids-flick. It is a sensual rush of power. It’s also a kind of emotional relief. Everyone wants wood. " The pilots want to fly since they get paid for the time in the air," explains Smith, a former MB logging supervisor who moved over to CAC after the stress of dealing with enviro-kids took the fun out of the job. "I wasn’t enjoying the work anymore," he says, describing the constant run-ins with young people often street kids recruited by the environmental leaders. Smith now travels the B.C. Coast bidding on jobs for the Sikorsky 64E and it’s bigger sister craft a Sikorsky S-64F that has a heftier lift capacity. Fall to spring is the busy season for putting in bids - and, tricky as the area is often covered with snow. Every job is challenging, different and interesting. He never tires of watching the big bird. The Sikorsky is a craft that is visually commanding. In simple terms, it resembles that needle-like fly with the large head and vibrating wings as it swoops and zips about. "Many people say it looks like a dragonfly, " he laughs. Nevertheless, it is the workhorse of the skies. "They built it from the hook up," Smith says of the helicopter designed for Vietnam to lift heavy loads (machinery and buildings) into war zones. (Other models have been used in WWII and the Korean war). It has a lift capacity of up to 20 000 lb or ten cubic meters of wood while the F can go to 25 000 pounds or 12.5 cubic meters. It can travel 115 knots and has a climb rate of 6 000 feet per minute. The tremendous lift comes from the two Pratt and Whitney engines powering the main rotor that has a 72-foot diameter. As crew chief John Burns explains, it’s not the frame of the helicopter which lifts the load. It’s the lifting force generated by rotary prop powered by the powerful engines and the load is centred below the prop creating almost an elevator effect. Down in the draw, the Sikorsky is moving into position. Ted Kimoto, MB general manager for the Franklin and Sprout Lake operations, is pleased with the progress the heli-logging has made on the steep slope. CAC’s Sikorsky is using a newly-designed grapple at the end of a 150-200 foot line and the whole operation on site is dedicated to grappling on the steeper areas. "It’s a much safer way to log," says Kimoto, standing on the slope that drops down to a thread of a road below. The Sikorsky is only 1 500 feet from the landing and the cycle time is about two minutes on average. The aircraft is dropping logs at an impressive pace, largely due to the skill of the pilots and the bunching grapple that CAC has designed in-house. While CAC’s operation looks smooth, grapple heli-logging has taken a year to iron out the kinks. As Smith says, CAC’s Sikorsky is the only machine on the Coast dedicated 100% to this type of logging. (Other companies mix chokers and grapples). For grapple yarding to work well in big timber, planning and skill must be present. Pick-up sticks big time Kerry Walchuk is one of three pilots who fly the huge craft and for him the Sikorsky is the "ultimate logging machine." "If you have a 15 000 pound load of logs and an engine failure," you just shut it down and carry on with the other. This is a safe machine for logging," he says. The mechanics of what Walchuk and the pilots do to bring in the wood are awesome. This is pick-up sticks big-time. The guys who fail or can’t cut it, go straight home without passing Go and without collecting $200. In the pilot’s seat, the right view window has been bowed out about a foot and a strut with a shoulder pad is built onto the seat. Walchuk leans into this cup looking several hundred feet onto the ground and while hoovering the machine must land the grapple on a log below. The controls send pressure racing down through hydraulic hoses to open and close the six-foot grapple jaws that can open over 60-inches. The grapple, which looks like an oversized ice-tong with an over-bite, has gone through several designs. It now has what looks like two maple-leaves welded onto the inside throat of the grapple, an innovation that CAC came up in a bid to build a grapple that could collect wood. (CAC’s Gary Gentile did the bulk of the work). The maple leaves came after discarding other ideas such as shark-tooth like prongs on the tongs. (These teeth made it hard to shed the load). But, the maple leaves points have proven more effective. As the closing tongs move beyond centre they push the log up into the gullet where this pressure pushes the maple leaf points into the bark of the logs holding them in place and allowing the tongs to open for a second and third large log. In cases, up to a dozen smaller logs have been bundled. This feature is especially valuable to have when flying smaller timber or doing clean-up on smaller pieces. Since Walchuk doesn’t have the luxury of a rigging crew on the ground to choke the logs, he’s playing pick-up-sticks 150-200 feet in the air. Meanwhile the co-pilot is monitoring the weight of the load, the gauges controlling the helicopter and watching the Sikorsky’s tail. When the grade is steep like the conditions Walchuk is working on at the MB show, there is a lot of manoeuvring to get the logs. When the logs are felled across the hill, they still may roll, jamming up into pots. That means extra pulling to get logs clear of these piles so that he can pick them up. That exercise is often akin to trying to untying shoelaces with chopsticks. Add to that the fact that each species has its quirks as to weight. A 41-foot Douglas fir log, 48-inches in diameter can weigh 24 000 pounds, while hemlock 43 inches in diameter would weigh roughly the same and cedar would be lighter. The stress level soars. Walchuk says concentration peaks so high in the cockpit that even a trivial occurrence like the radio cutting in to ask a routine question can be a major annoyance. It is while this concentration level is high, a tendency exists to forget the immediate surroundings. The copilot ensures that Walchuk never turns his tail into the slope - a manoeuvre that can spell tragedy for all on board as such a move would cause it to crash into the bank. " Grappling is a mind-set scenario," says Walchuk. This mental pressure is why pilots rotate from the hot-seat every hour spelling off into the copilot’s seat and after four hours onto the ground. On the ground, the pilots along with CAC’s logging supervisor Seppo Hassinen, a former manual faller on the coast for 22 years, talks about the changes needed to make grapple heli-logging more efficient. Travis Harold, a U.S. pilot on a contract to CAC from Erickson Air-Crane (which owns the license to the Sikorsky 64 air crane models and leases helicopters to the Canadian company), maintains that "we need to pay three times as much attention to the falling" as is now done. "We need to fall and buck for weight," he says. It’s the cost of the helicopter that has skewed the economics of processing the wood on the ground. Right now, fallers are bucking logs to meet mill specifications. However, that means if there is a tree length that has a short log, it is cut off while the pilots contend it should be left on and bucked at the landing. That short log may mean making another trip or not yielding the full potential of collecting logs. The operating cost of the CAC Sikorsky is about $l1 000 ($7 500 U.S.) an hour. "That’s quite expensive to carry short logs. The time to buck a log in the landing is cheaper," says Harold. Hassinen believes the best solution for companies is to have trained fallers who understand the special requirements of the helicopter pilots who do heli-logging, whether it is grapple or choked loads. Fallers need to buck for weight not length. "The biggest problem is the felling - it will make or break an operation." Making it pay When the system works well, heli-logging can rain wood. On the side hill as MB woods personnel and CAC people are watching, the Sikorsky is firing wood into the roadside landings snaked over a hillside at a pace that keeps two TMAR Mark IV SK400 Kobelco loaders busy. The helicopter herringbones the logs along the side of the road, thus limiting movement required by each loader. Ray Sumner, MB’s logging manager for the area, estimates that in the Franklin River area about 20% of the l00 000 cubic meters to be cut this year will come from heli-logging. Heli-logging is expected to grow further as it lends itself to retention logging, which is part of the new era of non clearcut harvesting MB is now pursuing. Smith says using helicopters to do retention logging has several advantages. When openings are kept small, there is less visual impact of the logging. As well, retention logging can mean less road construction into an area and less downstream reclamation work and costs plus environmental disruption. Finally, retention logging also has the advantage of being able to select pockets of species such as cedar and fir that is now selling on the market while other species are not. Both Smith and Sumner point out another advantage. As the Mark IV loader loads a truck in the landing with the longer stems, Sumner points out that those longer lengths would not have made it into the landing using conventional cable yarding methods without having some breakage. The reduction of breakage is especially significant in today’s market where cedar is selling at twice the price in retail yards as it was a year ago. Sumner says that while heli-logging is more expensive than conventional yarding on a straight line comparison, there are other cost savings plus the reduction in breakage. For example, loading jumps up markedly. At the landing, he is loading out 700-800 cubic meters of wood per day. That is greater volume than the 200 to 300 normally realized. If a long line had been used to pick up wood 1 500 feet out, a good day’s load out would only have reached 200 cubic meters. The speed at which the Sikorsky can work is partially what holds the audience on the ridge over the Corrigan Creek area MB is logging. This speed comes from the pilot’s ability, the machine power (it can dead-lift a load straight up) and also the design. Another factor of efficiency is the fact no ground crew has to clear the load. On the steep terrain, up to 80% grade the men on the ground cannot move quickly. With no ground crew, the pilots move the hook about fast without having to worry about men below. Safety on the steeper slopes is a primary reason for using the grapple system. Crews on the ground not only are too slow to hook the loads, but the steepness of the terrain can cause logs to roll into gullies inaccessible or dangerous for men to enter. Or, there is the constant danger that a log on a steeper slope will roll causing injury to ground personnel. The grapple is also able to handle blow-down on a slope as it can take a tangle of trees, pull loose the up-ended trees and place them to an area where a faller can reach them on the slope and buck the root ball and top in a safer location. That ability is also there for a tree that gets away from a faller before bucking and ends in a gully. The bottom line on grapple heli-logging is - as Smith points out - it’s a way of getting steep slope wood that would not have been accessible or economical by any other means - the Dragonfly pilots pull wood from ground most men fear to tread. |
