Meanwhile, back in Perth our lounge ceiling decided it had hung about for long enough and came crashing down. It brought all the mulched paper ceiling insulation with it, much to the delight of son, Nic, who was sitting beneath it at the time. You can imagine the mess just sheets of Gyprock would make but with all that mulched paper as well . . .
bubbles so there must have been dust on his camera lens.
Have you ever wondered why the handrail on those moving walkways - the ones that take you to the next level in shopping centres - travels just that little bit faster than the walkway itself? If you don't adjust your grip you are slowly pulled into a forward lean.
Hey, but aren't the walkways clever, the way they grip the supermarket trolley's wheels on the slope? Pity the same brains can't find a way of designing a trolley that will roll straight even when it's fully loaded. Why is it necessary to have all four wheels castoring? Back in W.A. they trialled lightweight plastic trolleys with fixed front wheels and which used only the rear wheels for steering. I found them fabulous, once I'd mastered the technique of swinging the rear end wide on corners. Then they disappeared and I haven't seen anything similar since. C'est la vie.
This Azure Kingfisher sat on the guy rope outside
the caravan door, trapping me inside. I had to resort to
photographing it through a tinted window and a fly screen, then artificially
restore the colour.
We weren't able to decide from our bird book. We see quite a lot of these lovely little birds.
Okay, birds, on three raise your left feet. One, two, THREE!
With just over a fortnight until Christmas, New South Wales was beset by bush fires. Two helicopters being used to carry water had been involved in accidents and two more were involved in a mid-air incident, all in the space of 24 hours.
• One chopper crashed in bushland "in thick fog" near the Dorrigo National Park killing a ranger and badly injuring the pilot.
• A second suffered a heavy landing near Tamworth when its engine malfunctioned. That pilot was slightly injured and the aircraft substantially damaged.
• In a third incident near Bathurst, the water bucket of one helicopter came into contact with another helicopter in thick smoke. Both of those aircraft landed safely.
By a coincidence, we were showing our good friends Ross and Jan Taylor some of the sights around Tamworth. Ross and Jan had driven all the way from Brisbane to visit us. We'd taken a drive up to Nundle and had stopped on the way to look at the Chaffey Dam when a huge commotion overhead announced the arrival of a water bomber helicopter.
A short note on this helicopter:
Registered in Canada as C-FCAN, this Bell 212 belongs to Wildcat Helicopters
based in British Columbia. It has very recently (post April 2009) had
a "FastFin" kit fitted to improve stability and performance.
The water tank beneath the fuselage is filled through the blue hose
as shown below. Over the fire, the floor of the tank is released to
hinge down and all the water is dumped at once.
Since writing this page I received an
email from my brother Jim who has spent a good many years fighting forest
fires in Canada. He writes: As the snow continues to fall outside,
I was just looking at the pic of the Wildcat 212. This machine was under
contract with the Forest Service at the Rapattack Base in Salmon Arm
for the summer. They have 3 such 212's used for rappel and extraction
(winch visible on starboard side) of fire crews usually into heavy timber
or steep terrain. CAN was based with a crew in Williams Lake for the
latter part of the summer and was used on at least 3 of the fires which
I had reported when flying air patrols. As well as having the belly
tank to dump directly onto fires, it can off load from a hover, via
a hose line, into a 300 gallon bladder that the crew rappel into the
fire with them, giving them a limited water supply for mop up. More
often than not, these crews will restrict themselves to building helipads
to allow other crews in by more conventional means.
An insite into how the Canadians tackle the fire problem. Thanks Jim.
(See picture lower down this page.)
Notes on
this Bell 204 "Super B":
Registered in Australia as VH-UHF, this 'copter belongs to Commercial
Helicopters of Mudgee, N.S.W. It started life as a Bell UH-1 Iroquois
- the famous Vietnam War "Huey" helicopter. Over sixteen thousand
of these 'copters were built between 1959 and 1976. This one was converted
to a Bell 204 "Super B" heavy lift helicopter. It has a longer
tail boom, longer rotor blades and a more powerful engine than the original
UH-1. It is now capable of carrying 1,830 kg. which correlates to more
than 1,500 litres of water in its bucket.
The photo was taken from a mezzanine floor; we were not allowed to go down close to the moving parts.
coloured balls of wool ready to be knitted into garments, but it's all there at Nundle.
