Bankstown - That's January

[Grahame Hutchison]

I dropped out early this morning for a few circuits only to find out everyone else had the same idea. When I reached the warm up bay there were six in the circuit, one at the holding point and one ahead of me. The tower gave me the option of listen out on the ground frequency or shutdown and wait for a light from the tower. I kept things running for about 10 to 15 minutes, with a couple of bursts of power to keep the plugs clear, and another three aircraft joined the queue. I finally moved up to the holding point, still on ground frequency, then finally a clearance.

With the queue on the ground I thought three curcuits was enough for my turn so I headed back in, there were at least 8 aircraft in the run up bays, several had shut down. Taxiing back past the 29R holding point and run up bays there were another 6 aircraft waiting there, and it was duck and weave back through the line to the parking bay. The training curcuit was closing from 1030 to 1130 and 1630 to 1730 I believe, and will be this way for several months because of the ATC issues at present. I was listening to the tower while I was photographing, and the one ATC guy had his hands full, calling plenty of go arounds and an alert with two aircraft heading close to each other, one at the others 11 o'clock and close. This will make things very interesting for training.

With the aircraft secure I headed down to check out the 3 Air-Cranes, Clancy, Malcolm and Delilah. Fotunately I met Clancy's pilot on the way down, and had a great discussion on the Air-Cranes, including the differences between each one. He invited me to have a look inside Clancy, the cockpit has plenty of glass area and he said he has had the temp at 50 degrees in Arizona (the visibility is great however). They have no air conditioning, only a couple of small strategically located fans.

The long flexible pipe is for fresh water refills and the solid drop boom is for salt water. With the solid boom they use a radio altimeter mounted on top of the dash with a marked green area for the optimum height off the water. They make the refill pass at 30 knots and it is mainly pilot judgement, and the left seat looking back at the main wheels to guide the distance off the water (sounds like a lot more fun than hovering and dropping the pipe). The radio altimeter display is a vertical strip of different coloured lights, with a green band being the optimal height above the water for the fixed boom refilling of the water tank (10,000ltrs).

Delilah is a true E model, Malcolm a hybrid as it has the F model double wheel main undercarriage, and Clancy is a full F model. The F model also has slightly more powerful JFTD12A SER engines (JFTD12A-4A on the E model) and a different rotor head. Malcolm has a mixed traditional and glass cockpit.

Thank you to the Air-Crane team for a good look around this morning.

Popped my head into the hanger where they are restoring the DC-3, the ailerons are being worked on and stencils in place for some USAF markings. There is still a lot of work to do.

During a quick wander around the rest of the airport I picked up a few other interesting aircraft including the Cessna 208 floatplane.


N178AC "Clancy" cockpit, plenty of visibility but very hot as well with no airconditioning.


N178AC "Clancy" cockpit from the ground up.


N217AC E Model "Malcolm" rotor head.


N178AC F Model "Clancy" rotor head.


N217AC E Model "Malcolm" main gear.


N178AC F Model "Clancy" main gear.


Kawasaki BK117 B-2 CH-FHF operated by Trecked Pty Ltd


Vangrusv VAN'S RV-6 Amateur Built Aircraft VH-XPB (2001)


Cessna 208 VH-SXF operated by Sydney Seaplanes, a beautiful big beast.


Cessna 208 VH-SXF operated by Sydney Seaplanes, the nose wheel and double rear main undercarriage retract into the
floats.