Folk typically do not fantasize over buying second-hand used vehicles, least of all a chopper. However, sometimes needs must. Such will be the case in any situation where limiting cash-flow or cost-efficiency are driving parameters. In the mineral resource recovery sector, such is likely to be the case in exploration projects.

In highly profitable production situations, aircraft services, as part of a logistic support framework, are effectively a tax-deductible accessory. In exploration they are not – they are a ‘lost’ expense that could be better spent on the main aim of the project they are supporting. So, for the former, the newest and best, with all bells & whistles, can be considered: for the latter cost-efficiency should be a main driver.  

Also, in production situations, demand for air support is typically high due to the need to move large numbers of personnel and support equipment. In Exploration, personnel numbers are usually lower and the operations more self-contained. The former thus tends to high flight hours predicating the best equipment: for the latter, flight hours are generally low with air support mostly on immediate standby for emergency response, again predicating cost-efficiency as the main driver.  So, for the former ‘brand-new’ is a feasible option but the latter necessitates older, cheaper, aircraft. But ‘old’ need not mean ‘clapped-out’: as explained below, old helicopters can readily (i.e., over a few months) be refurbished to an ‘as-new’ condition.

Ball Park costings (per. Chopper) for the two options are along the lines indicated in the table below – in this regard, an ‘as-new’ aircraft is assumed to be more than 10 years old (as such, typically fully amortised and depreciated). The table shows that, while the operating costs of an older chopper may be some 35% higher than its new counterpart, the fixed financial charges – the more significant element – are some 60+% lower. As a result, overall, an ‘As-new’ aircraft has the capability to achieve the required project air support function with equal safety & equal reliability (as explained hereafter) but at some half the overall cost.

That said, bottom line (literally in the above table), while in monthly cashflow terms the Brand-new Chopper represents a very much higher financial outlay, in production situations, the total operational cost makes this fully justifiable as, with the utilization typically being twice that in an exploration environment, the total cost per flight hour (pfh) in each case is similar. If then, in addition, tax due on highly profitable production operations are taken into account, at least a third of the cost of the brand-new production chopper cost can be offset against tax that would otherwise be paid on said profits, thus making the net cost significantly less than that of the exploration team’s ‘As-new’ chopper. So, the highly profitable production world can treat themselves to the best which, in terms of net value, is still highly cost-effective.

But in the exploration environment, where profits are less certain, this argument does not hold, and cash-flow becomes the driving consideration. But does lower cost predicate lower quality & safety? We all know that in life, generally one gets what one pays for – as such, it is typically expected that expensive vehicles will not only be more luxurious but also more reliable and safer. The thesis of this article is to demonstrate that for helicopters, while high expenditure will buy (marginally) more comfort in brand-new types, with regard to reliability and safety there is no difference – indeed, as explained below, the older aircraft may even have an edge in this regard.

Helicopters (indeed, any unpressurised aircraft) over a period of a ‘couple’ of weeks, can be stripped down to a bare skeleton so that every frame can be readily inspected for corrosion or damage and replaced as necessary – effectively making its refurbishment more-or-less the same process by which a brand-new unit is built. Hull sections displaying weakness can be strengthened or replaced and any showing corrosion can not just be replaced but provided with additional corrosion protection to prevent reoccurrence. External panelling is taken down to bare metal (in older choppers with several layers of paintwork being removed, based on previous experience, weighing as much as 80kg!). Any badly corroded panelling is replaced with brand-new units from the OEM and the entire hull is covered with several layers anti-corrosion paint.

New lamps from old – how aging helicopters can be reborn ‘As-new’ with analogue cockpits digitized

With the helicopter thus stripped down to bare frames, ageing wiring looms, anyway, made by specialist companies not by the aircraft OEM, can now be readily replaced. At the same time, the installation of the automated wonders of digital early warning of critical systems’ failure, can be easily installed. Similar to HUMS in brand-new helicopter types, these systems comprise a couple of dozen sensors feeding data into a similar AVMS (Automatic Vibration Monitoring System) computer. At the same time analogue cockpit instrumentation (as shown above) can be readily upgraded to a digital computerised ‘Glass Cockpit’ standard.

The helicopter ‘Roteables’ – principally the engines, gearbox and landing gear (the rotors are a (very expensive) lifed consumable) – are actually not integral to the aircraft, each being designed and built by separate OEMs and each with its own maintenance schedules and documentation. If nearing their TBOs (time before overhaul) they too can be sent back to their respective OEMs (not the aircraft manufacturer) to be zero-houred (ie. also, to be rebuilt to an ‘as-new’ condition) – in passing, it is worth noting that all these items, if properly maintained, can have very long lives measured in dozens of years.

So, after some six months of work and an expenditure typically of some $3m, any aging helicopter, however poor its initial condition, can be bought back to an ‘as-new’ condition, typically with similar technical guarantees as a brand new one. In addition, there are a couple of big (and positive) differences between as new and Brand-new types.

• The first is the quality of engineering on each of these aircraft types. Brand-new aircraft are built on factory production lines, partially robotically, supported by ‘lightly’ qualified personnel essentially taken off the street and given a ‘couple’ of months training to do a single specific task. On each factory shift, typically, there are only a couple of licensed engineers (LAME) with quality control oversight over a score of aircraft.

An As-new unit, however, is hand-crafted with the same number of LAMEs on EACH aircraft overseeing technicians each normally with many years engineering experience. It is worth noting that a LAME is rather more qualified than a doctor in that it takes some 10 years to be awarded the generic licence (a doctor is 8 years). They then have to attend certificated courses on each aircraft type on which they wish to work (another 3+ months).

THEN they need to work on the type (if new to them) for a further 6 months, effectively as an unlicenced technician, in order to be awarded certification approval by the national Aviation Authority and subsequently by the AOC company for which they work. So, unlike OEM factory personnel, they know the aircraft inside-out, its strengths, weaknesses and piquilloes. In short, an As-new helicopter is a hand-crafted product, not ‘spat-out’ from a production line. I will let you draw your own subjective conclusion as to which is likely to be the ‘better’ quality product…….

• The second difference is an ‘As-new’ aircraft is a known quantity – a specification supported by some million hours flight time globally with each unit itself will have flown many thousands of hours. So, an ‘As-new’ product has no secrets. A brand-new production build however, while benefiting from the same proven specification, will only have flown a very few hours flight test before being put to work. As a very complex piece of electro-mechanical engineering, typically there will typically be teething troubles galore as the systems bed themselves in.

Worse still, a newly developed, brand-new helicopter type will add to these teething issues, the surprises inherent in an unproven specification – unproven because during the new type certification process, each prototype only flies a few hundred hours. As such, no one knows what the future holds as early in-service units rack-up a few thousand hours (in case you missed it, you can get a lot of additional information on this in PFT-7 ‘Aircraft Certification – an uncertain compromise’).

So, not only is an ‘As-new’ helicopter type easier on cashflow, but typically, it will also be more reliable (if a bit less capable) than Brand-new and, in that there are no ‘known unknowns’, arguably a little bit safer than its glossy counterpart. OK, with respect to a corporate image and individual passenger appeal, a glossy, brand-new aircraft has its attractions. And there is merit in the argument that in a high-utilization environment, brand-new is better. But, similarly, for all the reasons stated, in a low utilization environment, ‘as new’ is certainly optimum. As such, taken overall, if you want to get a job done predictably, cost-effiently and in a trouble-free fashion, an ‘as-new’, proven work horse, is still likely the better bet.

Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) is about as dull a subject as one can imagine writing about and for you, my one reader, to read. But the hype and quality of the ‘BS’ generated over it is more interesting. In elucidating on that subject, the scope of the discussion inevitably must expand into a wider environmental context and risk ecological excommunication. So here we go………

The Tropopause (the bit we breathe and fly in) is just 12 miles thick – the distance of a healthy walk. So, to keep this fearfully thin, life-giving gas veneer of the planet ‘clean’ is just simply good husbandry. So how bad is pollution today? The short answer is, that 99% of the atmosphere comprises good clean, largely inert Nitrogen (78%) and live-giving Oxygen (21%) – the other 1% is all other gases and pollutants most of which is harmless hydrogen: the greenhouse gas cocktail (CO2 / Methane / Nitrous Oxide) is less than 0.04% of that 1% comprises 25% Methane, a trace of poisonous nitrates (<0.5%) with a smidgeon of trace gases: most of that 0.04% of the 1% is the harmless human-generated exhaust gas CO2 – rather less than 400 parts per million (or 0.004% – statistically speaking not a significant number). So, in short, the air we breathe (taken overall) appears to be in good shape.

So, what are the environmentalists screaming about? Based on the above, it would appear that they live in a self-inflating bubble, apparently headed in social media by an articulate teenage Jeanne d’Ark battling the Barons of industry knowing little of the messey realities of this world. From within the security of an upper-middle class Nordic family, this environmental heroine rallies her virtual green army of well-meaning lap-top environmentalists – a vociferous media-friendly amateur among hard-bitten but no less shrill professionals – all creating a lot of noise signifying nothing that holds deductive reason. But like during the Covid pandemic, the multi-media cacophony makes it hard for politicians to think straight. That one is an environmental cynic is a function of the apparent self-serving nature of these practitioners. Their cultivation of the concept of ‘Global Warming’ – that element due to mankind’s impact – appears to be more of a carefully nurtured hypothesis, now not so different to a religion – developed by men of faith, stating fiction as fact, and making a good living from it.  

That said, climate change is an indisputable fact: there is absolutely no doubt that planet earth is warming.  It is a singular and undisputed FACT that there is a 100,000-year sun-cycle due to the elliptic path of the planet’s solar orbit. Today we are some 15,000 years into the warming phase after the last Ice Age – the so-called Inter-Glacial period – as the planet slowly gets closer to the sun. This makes it very likely that the principal cause of this planet’s warming is astronomical not chemical. The graphic below on the right shows the change in concentration of CO2 in atmospheric air bubbles over the last million years taken from ice cores in the Artic and Antarctic regions: this is clearly cyclical and sinusoid. The changing concentration is a function of Dalton’s Law of partial pressures. In this, the concentration of the cocktail of gasses that make up the 1% of the atmosphere that is not Nitrogen or Oxygen, increases with temperature – the graphic below is just the CO2 element.

The figures showing the CO2 concentration in the left margin of the graphic appear enormous until you read the small print and see they are parts per million: so that massive spike right at the end on the right-hand side, that is causing such angst in the environmentalist community, represents an increase of 200 parts per million or 0.002% – so don’t panic!!! And, with a 100,000-year spacing on the horizontal axis of this graphic being barely one centimeter, inevitably a 50–100-year timeframe will appear vertical and, possibly (ok, not surely), might be an aberration that would, in such circumstances, disappear when smoothed-out over the 100,000-year cycle.

The Environmental lobby talks in billions of tonnes of CO2 pollution in the atmosphere which sounds terrifyingly impressive, until one realizes that all those billions represent less than 0.004% – a statistical non-entity. And, as explained in the next paragraph, there is surprisingly little science to demonstrate that a trace substance in such a minute quantity (in percentage terms), can have any impact on anything.

That greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere by absorbing Infrared energy is not in dispute – recent experimentation at the Max Plank Institute has clearly shown that, as does the above graphic of the CO2 density cycle. What is more doubtful is the impact of CO2 as an atmospheric trace gas at 0.004%. Making an AI-BOT research on the experimental evidence for this, produced information on observations made with respect to the Pliocene era (3-5 million years ago) when CO2 was at similar or greater concentrations. A further input into the AI-BOT that his was an observation, not experimental, the AI-BOT ‘agreed’ and could only find a single experiment, recently conducted at Harvard in 2015 which showed that even at that low concentration, ‘significant’ quantities of IR radiation are indeed absorbed causing the gaseous mix to warm. The experiment does not appear to have specified or quantified the degree, merely confirming the common experience that in sunny climes, IR radiation warms anything in its path. As to the former observation, with the Pliocene predating mankind altogether, this simply demonstrates the wholly natural character of the increase in CO2 density in the atmosphere that is being experienced right now.

Yet, 10 billion is a very large number and in tonnes of anything such is huge but let us put that in perspective. Each of us, through respiration, on average produces about 1kg of CO2 per day. There are now 8 billion of us. So that equates to some 3 billion tonnes of gas each year – almost the same as all the powered motion machinery on the planet, of which the high-profile aviation element is, in truth, only a relatively small part. But, in bowing to multi-media pressure, would the use of SAF in place of Kerosene have any impact on the issue of limiting greenhouse gases or the pragmatics of atmospheric husbandry.?  The short answer is ‘No’.

It is claimed by the environmental clerics (…. sorry, lobbyists) that SAF offers – and here I am quoting BP – an 80% reduction in ‘lifecycle’ carbon emissions as compared to jet fuel (which I reiterate is but a small element of a minute portion of the greenhouse gas problem).  The important word here is “lifecycle”.  Being drawn from the green of pleasant lands and human waste, SAF is still a hydrocarbon so, like kerosene, its exhaust will still flood the atmosphere with CO2, water, and noxious nitrates – that is by the very nature of the natural components from which it originates. It’s just a question of vintage. Those in kerosene are of a several million-year-old vintage – that in SAF is ‘benzene nouveau’. They are essentially the same, the younger vintage perhaps being cleaner and ‘fresher’ (like Beaujolais Nouveau wine, a question of taste if you will) in that, as stated, it is produced from current environmentally friendly vegetation and human waste (admittedly the latter element being particularly good news).

The energy-heavy processes that get SAF from ‘waste to wingtip’ (a great marketing lyric that!) and the associated energy outlay, are similar to those pertaining from ‘crude to kerosene’ (my factual lyric!). So, the science supporting said 80% reduction is likely more related to the math of carbon credit calculations (with electrical production from sustainable sources) than the nature of the polluting chemicals released in the jet efflux from the useful generation of energy from SAF. In short it appears to be little more than a clever, if harmless, ploy to keep the crusading hordes of the environmentalist army at bay until hydrocarbon power sources in aircraft can be replaced with hydrogen and (maybe) electricity. This is reflected in the aviation industry itself in that no serious R&D has been allocated to optimize the production of SAF or its conversion to energy in engines. This is in part evidenced by a recent report in the Air transport Digest (an Aviation Week magazine) that the US government Audit Office (GAO) has discretely recovered some $200m set aside by the Pentagon to assist in the general development of SAF production facilities.

Instead, the industry R&D focus is on the more worthy zero-emission hydrogen and electrical propulsion systems in the next generation aircraft.  And this will happen, likely in a 15-year timeframe. ‘Green’ Hydrogen, electrolyzed from water or other sources, is designated thus because the electricity to extract it, is sourced naturally from Hydro, solar/wind, or geothermal power.  In that, unlike SAF, the fuel efflux comprises only clean water, this will, in an environmental context, truly be a fundamental game-changer and therefore worthy of such focus.  One challenge with hydrogen is its high volatility – storage is mildly challenging but the crash case in the aircraft that it is powering, is more thought-provoking. Counter-intuitively, initial studies show that hydrogen fuel is less dangerous than kerosene. For while very much more volatile, being the lightest of elements (Atomic Weight – 2) it is also very much less dense. Being stored at high pressure, in the event of tank rupture, the massive jet of the gas that will shoot out will always be in the vertical. It has been shown that this vertical sheet of flame, while very hot, immediately dissipates. As such, its impact is very much less than that of a pool of burning viscous liquid fuel typically emanating from the ruptured wing tanks of a conventional aircraft accident – be it kerosene or SAF. For all these reasons, the environmental impact of using SAF in place of kerosene is negligeable while that of ‘green’ Hydrogen will be considerable.

Returning to a more general environmental context, the negative raving in this piece is not to say that climate change should be ignored. Of course not! It is rapidly topping and tailing the planetary ice caps which, whatever else, will raise global sea levels by a meter or more, which is an existential threat to, maybe, a billion people. What has changed in this, our current sun cycle, is that, the last time around, mankind was numbered in millions and, like every other species with which they shared the planet, they were nomadic, hence upwardly mobile.  So, as water levels slowly rose over a few generations in some areas and desertification occurred due to drought in others, all could easily migrate to greener pastures. Today the issue is that, as a function of numbers and our technological advances, the fixtures of our metropolitan civilization and the associated agrarian infrastructure has made us all – man and beast alike – more or less immobile. Hence, faced with the fact of climate change, the emphasis should logically be on protection from its effects rather than futile ‘Canuteian’ attempts at its prevention.

But, given the current latter focus, what can be done to prevent the snail-paced inevitability of this environmental tsunami? Sustainable energy from renewable sources, while largely an irrelevance in this specific context, in the perspective of good husbandry with respect to the thin veneer of the planet’s atmosphere, it is surely worth pursuing. Of more significance is Nuclear Fusion which is now expected to start powering the grid by 2050 thus providing a perfect, sustainable, and unlimited power resource. Taken together, the imminence of these two, deeply green sources of energy, reduces global warming from an existential matter to one of a serious short-term safety issue. Given the imminence of a truly effective fusion solution, like all safety matters, controls and mitigation should meet ALARP (as low as reasonably practical) criteria.  The commercialization of renewables surely meets that criterion: but tinkering with aviation fuels, while a harmless distraction, is essentially a wasted effort and anyway, a total irrelevance.

In passing it is worth highlighting the imminence of fusion power. For more than a generation such has been 10 years away – this may now finally be the case. An outfit in California (Tri Alpha Energy – TAE) expects to have a prototype system capable of producing net electrical power in 2025, with a production prototype in 2035 and OEM supply connected to the grid five years later producing unlimited, (eventually) inexpensive, emission-free (truly green) power source to drive the planet. Such will solve the whole greenhouse gas issue, clean up the planet’s atmospheric veneer and finally put my environmental lobbyist nemeses out of work.

Tinkering with greenhouse gases (should such, at a density of 0.004%, actually be a problem at all!) won’t change that. A measure of the futility of such ventures has been demonstrated by the Shell petroleum company (hence possibly not without some bias) which has shown that carbon capture through current methods of sequestration of the CO2 produced by the hydrocarbon sector alone each year would require some 66 exajoules (that’s 18 zeros!) of energy – or enough to heat/cool all the world’s homes). While such a comparison lacks indisputable clarity, it clearly shows the futility of such politically correct ventures and, unless this associated electrical power is sourced solely from green energy, it will anyway only be exacerbating the problem!