Cornwall Air Ambulance's New AW169 Helicopter Takes Flight | Heli2 Shakedown with Pilots - video Dailymotion

Cornwall Air Ambulance's New AW169 Helicopter Takes Flight | Heli2 Shakedown with Pilots.

Transcript

00:00So this whole period is taking the time, so we call it a shakedown, just to try and figure out

00:10how the aircraft behaves, how it performs, make sure that our procedures are working and that

00:15there are no surprises with it really for when we come back to doing our day job of flying hems

00:20with it. The shakedown is about 20 hours of flying. What we want to do is actually try and

00:25get a reasonable amount of value for money for those flying hours. So rather than flying off

00:29for 20 hours and just burning holes in the sky, we've been doing some school visits and

00:33visiting some of our supporters and things like that. It's got two real benefits to that

00:38one, sort of landing in a school that's very similar to our day job with the other aircrafts

00:42or the hems landing sites, so it's a good way of us flying the aircraft in a very similar

00:46manner to how we're going to be flying it when we're operating it. So it's really good training

00:50for the crew. On the other side, as it says on the side of the helicopter, it's your

00:54aircraft and it's allowing us that rare opportunity to come in, show the helicopter to people,

00:59talk about what we do without impacting the service because so the first helicopter is still

01:04out there and doing the job while we're doing all of this. Because it's slightly different

01:08and it's not the life-saving work we do, we need to go right back to basics with the planning.

01:14So we need to contact the landowners, make sure we've got permission for that. We need to

01:17use the mapping to sort of check surveys, make sure the size is big enough, make sure that

01:20we've got no obstructions from there. So all of the things that we do a little more dynamically

01:25when we're doing it for a hems mission because again it's life-saving work, we have to do

01:28in slow time just to make sure that we've covered everything off from that. So there's risk

01:32assessments and all of those other bits and bobs that are sorted out.

01:37So yeah, once the shakedown period's done, we'll be basically bringing the aircraft into service,

01:42we'll be using it in the same way that we've been using the first aircraft, introducing the techniques

01:50and the procedures that we've established for the additional systems we've got with this

01:55and just making sure that that method of swapping between one helicopter and the other is as smooth

02:02as possible. So here in the hangar, we have two aircraft very close together, we need to be able to

02:07swap them around, move them around together and things like that. So it's just making sure that those

02:11processes are in place and working so that we can operate them both as well as we possibly can.

02:20We'll see you next time.