2010-05-22
Not sure of the details surrounding this helicopter rescue, but I was woken by the helicopter dropping off the 2-person team to perform the recovery. They joined the small group of police and ambulance officers already on the scene attending to the victim. It appears they had fallen between the rocks and injured themselves sufficiently to require assistance?
The helicopter left shortly after dropping the team, but came back some time later to pick up the patient and the air ambulance team. It was the pick-up I managed to film.
My balcony is about 26 metres above sea level, and we were looking down on the helicopter. Amazing piece of flying! At one point they got so low the rotor vortices were picking up vegetation and debris from the cliff face. It was raining very heavily at the time, it is hard to see in the video, but the water shedding from the rotors was quite extraordinary. Helicopters are amazing machines, so much power, yet quite delicate control, nothing quite like them, hence their utility for such operations. The turbine noise was absolutely deafening, my ears rang for several hours post exposure. As you can hear on the video, despite AGC the microphone was being driven into clipping by the sound pressure levels.
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