A little bit about offshore life. This will be the first of many posts on my life offshore, which took up half of my life for the past 2 years.
I work on a gas producing platform about 178 km from the shore of Bintulu. We travel about 45 mins - 1 hour via helicopter from the helibase in Miri (just beside the Miri Airport) to our platform.
The 1st time I travelled 2 years back, it was a pretty unnerving experience. Travelling on a chopper is way different from, say, in a Boeing 737. The noise and vibration, and, for the older birds, lack of air conditioning makes this experience vastly different than in a 737.
We wear life jackets with re-breather units (kinda like an emergency scuba set, but you use your own air to breathe), and the risks of the chopper ditching is pretty high - but I won't go into that. Fellow offshore travellers will know :)
You can feel yourself being lifted vertically as it takes off and hovers, then it dips its nose slightly and propels forward. Landing - you hover a while, then lose some height in increments until you bounce nicely on the landing gears.
Anyway, to share, here are a couple of photos of the new chopper (not sure why - we never call them helicopters, it's always chopper - maybe it's an offshore thing) - landing at our platform.
I work on a gas producing platform about 178 km from the shore of Bintulu. We travel about 45 mins - 1 hour via helicopter from the helibase in Miri (just beside the Miri Airport) to our platform.
The 1st time I travelled 2 years back, it was a pretty unnerving experience. Travelling on a chopper is way different from, say, in a Boeing 737. The noise and vibration, and, for the older birds, lack of air conditioning makes this experience vastly different than in a 737.
We wear life jackets with re-breather units (kinda like an emergency scuba set, but you use your own air to breathe), and the risks of the chopper ditching is pretty high - but I won't go into that. Fellow offshore travellers will know :)
You can feel yourself being lifted vertically as it takes off and hovers, then it dips its nose slightly and propels forward. Landing - you hover a while, then lose some height in increments until you bounce nicely on the landing gears.
Anyway, to share, here are a couple of photos of the new chopper (not sure why - we never call them helicopters, it's always chopper - maybe it's an offshore thing) - landing at our platform.
The chopper name is C-GOHA, or as I hear the pilots calling it - Charlie Hotel Alpha. It's a Sikorsky 92.
Approaching the helideck
About to land
Contact!
Safely landed
The guy in red - he's the HLO (Helideck Landing Officer), the other guy in navy (near the tail) is the pilot
The chopper name is C-GOHA, or as I hear the pilots calling it - Charlie Hotel Alpha. It's a Sikorsky 92.
If you're in the chopper, that means you've just arrived and you've got 2 weeks to get through. If you're about to board the chopper - that means home sweet home here I come!!
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