KA-32A11BC HELICOPTER IN CANADA: LESSONS OF LOGGING

摘要

On January 11, 1980, the experimental helicopter, a retrofitted naval prototype, which was marked with an insignia of two polar bears on its cockpit bow, a Ka-32 emblem on its side, and electrons orbiting a nucleus on its radome, first hovered over the Ka-mov Design Bureau's airfield. Nikolai Bezdetnov, the Honored Test Pilot and Hero of the Soviet Un-ion, was at the aircraft controls. Less than three weeks later, Bezdetnov landed the helicopter on the deck of the nuclear ice-breaker Sibir to give the ship a night look-out capability on her voyage through the vast ice fields of the Arctic Ocean. This is how the model-Ka-32 helicopter came into being. The rotorcraft was conceived as a multipurpose machine for the national economy. Logging, that is, hauling harvested timber from highland sites was one of its first tasks. In 1982 during 72.5 flight hours, the experimental Ka-32 helicopter made 587 cycle runs hauling 1663 cubic meters of timber from the tree-felling plot in the Caucasian foothills. With regard to logging, the first away-from-home testing ground for the KAMOV Company's rotor-craft was Switzerland. Here, the Ka-32 participated in clearing away the trees devastated by the storm on February 23, 1990, in the Alps. Since 1990, Ka-32 helicopters had been used for transporting underslung loads in the hills of Papua New Guinea and other island states of the Pacific region.