Capitol Helicoptersによる公共事業の任務

My name's Austin Bradley. I am a pilot at Capitol Helicopters at Sac Exec Airport. They brought on some 429s here at Capitol, and we reached out -- I've known the guys that own Capitol for a long time, and reached out for an opportunity, and they gave it to me. And here we are a year later. The 407 and the 429 -- Bell did a good job with the machines together, they tried to keep them as simple as they could for the pilot side of things. The only difference is learning the autopilot and learning some of the buttons and things like that, but outside of that it flies almost just like a 407, so they did a great job with it. So the benefits of the 429, besides obviously comfort and speed, is it's just an increased safety level with a second engine on there. We're operating low level in the power line environment, we're over trees, over homes, we're over towers doing longline stuff with guys on the bottom -- so having that second engine, and knowing we have the capability to fly that aircraft away if for some reason we lose one, is just an increased safety addition, and a little safer on the mind as well, to know you have that capability. The autopilot system's fantastic for long distance stuff especially -- once you learn all those systems, you really use them to your benefit, and it can really continue to keep a safe environment for you in the cockpit. The power does well -- we're operating at 8,000 feet, and it's not normally a nice cold day, we're normally running at pretty high temperatures, and I haven't had any issues. We're running at high altitudes, high temps, and normally pretty high winds, and the 429 does really well -- it's handled really well, and the 407 does well at that altitude too. So customers love the 429, it's one of the more popular aircraft we have -- I'd say speed and comfort, they call forward a lot, and they all get really excited when it fills up. So yeah, I'd say that customers love the 429 for patrol, it does fantastic -- like I said, it's smooth, it's fast, it's comfortable, it's got great visibility for the guys in the front and the back for the HEC, or human external cargo work, it does well, and it does -- I mean, we've been able to do pole sets, we've been able to do all kinds of other different equipment that we use for cargo, stuff that those guys are using on the jobs and the towers and stuff. So it's really kind of a jack of all trades -- it's been able to do pretty much everything we need from it, and we haven't really had any issues with it at all on that end.