You offering to go up with a whacker plate?
Shurely once the damn is emptied to 25% they'll be rebuilding it properly?
A load of bags of heavy shit dumped from a helo does not sound like a proper repair.....
So you think a few hundred builders bags of aggregate and a bit of skim concrete (finished with a wet finger?) is all that will happen?
The original dam is made of material that did not need a whacker plate, the "repair" is totally different...
So a typical "top gun wanker" helo pilot then.
Or someone who has no clue...
I'm just musing.
The bags appear to be standard one ton bags. Hundreds of them. Where are they coming from? I wonder how much they are costing. A ton of ballast is normally £35 to £40. Are they actually ballast (as commonly understood), or are some sand and some stone? What will happen afterwards? Will the bags deteriorate, making it impossible for them to be picked up by a crane? Will they be removed in fact? If so, where to?
It amazes me that blades whizzing round in the air can lift three tons. Aren't I silly?
Bill
Probably the nearest quarry... either that or all the local builder's merchants are have a good week!
Can be quite a bit cheaper loose in larger quantities.
IME the bags last a good few years without any obvious loss of integrity. Its probably just the UV that gets them in the end.
They might get washed through the village!
A Chinook could probably do a dozen of those - perhaps more in ideal conditions (i.e. not hot and high)
I doubt it's too important what's actually in the bags, just so long as they're heavy. In one shot on the TV there looked like smoke coming from a recently dropped bag, presumably dust blown up by downthrust from the rotors.
I thought much the same thing - all that weight, including the Chinook, supported by the downthrust from two sets of rotating blades
- seems verging on the impossible.
They are doing them nine at a time. Chinucks can carry guns and stuff a few bags of gravel is not a lot.
Wikipedia gives the payload as 24,000 lbs. so a bit over 10 tons. The sacks are a nominal ton.
The American Sikorsky Skycranes could lift about 9 tonnes - i.e. just about lift an empty Chinook. Allegedly still some flyable.
I read somewhere that the ballast is being donated for free. There must be a big quarry fairly near.
4500 kg for CH47A according to Wikipedia although Quora claims a special forces version CH47E can do over 11 tons in optimal conditions.
I wonder if they have load sensors on the winches? It would probably be prudent to expect a wet, overfilled "1 tonne" bag might be well over a tonne. IIRC our local supplier's bags are guaranteed to be 800 kg.
The RAF site says they can carry "up to 10 tonnes of mixed cargo". I guess there may well be operational rules that don't let you sling as much as could be carried inside, properly fastened down. Might relate to the strength of the winch fixings too.
Won't they just be left there, and subsequently concreted over?
Then you should be amazed that it lift itself - it weighs 10 or 11 tonnes empty!
That could be somewhere to put all the water ...
Owain
One added complication they probably have is the ground upthrust(or whatever it is called) being so near to the ground could affect the lifting capacity, probable even more difficult on a slope.
Our more recent ones are based on the CH47F IIUC, although with more powerful engines. Many of the yank versions they seem to rate for around
20,000 lbsMoD seem to have a habit of buying perfectly good kit, and then changing it to be "better" (and generate work for local defence contractors).
However that often means its more expensive and takes much longer to get flight qualified. Sometimes that can work well (our Apache gunships could fly with the Longbow RADAR fitted in Afganistan, whereas the US needed to remove it to get off the ground in the high temperatures and altitudes), but there was also a big fuss getting enough Chinooks into service as they had to remove a bunch of upgrades from a set of airframes just to get them into service quickly.
And having them flapping about below.
They have over 4000 hp available at each engine output shaft - so it ought to have a fair bit of grunt!
Almost certainly from the nearest quarry.
We do a lot of work for a large builders merchants in Doncaster. Their ballast arrives by truck (from a nearby quarry) and is put into their labelled bags at the merchants. I assume the quarry also sell bagged ballast.
A quick google shows the empty weight as 10,185kg and the max takeoff weight as 22,680kg (HC.2 version), but you have to subtract the weight of crew and fuel from that max to get the allowable load.
Presumably with multiple short flights and never being far from support, the could get away with a minimal fuel load and carry more bags, but that may make manouevring into place harder - or maybe, as they are releasing one at a time, they only have facilities to carry and release three?
Aha, it looks like it is a limit of having three releasable hooks! Apparently the centre hook is rated for 20,000lb and the fore and aft hooks for 10,000lb each.
SteveW
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