Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.
After another deep dive into my raw footage archives, I found this short video I shot after fueling at the airport. It has in-cockpit narration, but there’s no helicopter sound because it was shot with just one camera. I left the airport but instead of flying straight back to base, I made a detour to overfly a friend’s house, so it’s a bit longer than the normal 3-4 minute flight.
Another video from the Flying M Air YouTube channel.
Here’s something completely different. I decided to experiment with the GoPro Hero 8’s “hyperspeed” feature. It’s basically a smoothed out automated timelapse. I had the camera set up in the nosecam position and went flying. It was late in the day and a huge rainstorm had rolled through. All of my clients wanted service. The three of us took off, intending to get it all done. But the wind was howling. Turns out that another thunderstorm had formed behind the one that had just passed. Between the lightning and high winds, it was too much to fly in. We all set down to wait it out. The nosecam caught the lightning stikes.
Although I set down over an orchard almost immediately, I had to pick up and move away. My phone kept ringing and there’s no way I could answer it while hovering over the trees. To make matters worse, there’s no cell signal in the canyon I was flying in so I had to come out to the mouth of the canyon each time I answered a call. I finally got back over the trees and managed to dry one whole block before the lightning spooked me enough to land.
I landed at another orchard. One of my crew landed where he was flying and the other landed with me. We waited it out, then departed to dry one more block each before it got too dark to fly. Overall, the mission was pretty much a failure, but I know my clients understood. I got no complaints. We wound up flying the next day, too.
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Note: This is the 1080 FHD version of this video. An ad-free 4K UHD version is available to channel Members and Patrons at the Access Premium Content level. It’s my way of thanking them for their financial support to this channel.
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Why I check the weather multiple times a day every day all summer long.
My main business — my bread and butter and steak and potatoes — is using my helicopter to dry cherries. I’ve written about this numerous places and even have YouTube videos about it, so I’m not going to go into detail here. You can find some of my blog posts about it by clicking the cherry drying tag.
Being a serious cherry drying pilot means watching the weather incessantly so you can be close to the helicopter when called out to fly. I watch the weather three ways:
The forecast icons make it easy to see the weather at a glance.
Of course, there’s nothing on radar now, but if there was, this image would be full of gray, green, yellow, orange, or even red shading to show storm severity.
Weather Radar. Again, I use a NOAA product to check the radar for the area. In this case, it’s the RadarUS app on my iPhone or iPad. When there’s rain in the area, I want to know where it is, how heavy it is, and which way it’s moving. This app can give me all of that information. I can even zoom in with a satellite image overlay to see how close it’s coming to the orchards I’m under contract to cover.
This is the view from my house. I have a mostly unobstructed view from the southwest to the northeast so I can literally see the weather coming — unless it’s coming from the south. The view in this shot is looking mostly northwest.
The crazy thing is that the short term forecast changes every day. For example, last night, when I went to bed, the forecast showed a 20% chance of rain after 11 AM today (Tuesday). But this morning, as you can see in the above forecast image, that rain prediction is completely gone.
But it can just as easily come back.
Or rain without rain being in the forecast.
That’s what I call the Weather Game. You do everything you can to stay on top of the weather and the forecast is neither consistent nor reliable. I sometimes wonder why I bother.
In any case, this is part of my life until August when I’m done with cherry drying season. And even then, it’s hard to turn off the habit of checking the weather so often — I’m usually checking it regularly well into September.