Hello and Happy Tuesday all. Today I am up at Classic Helicopters as Sky 8 is having a maintenance inspection. We have to take it in every 150 hours so that Mechanics can service and inspect the aircraft. Unlike cars with mileage requirements for a maintenance schedule we base ours on hours flown. Many of the parts on Sky 8 have to be replaced at certain hour intervals as well. It is very expensive to fly and maintain a helicopter. When you average out the cost of fuel, maintenance, insurance, hanger fees and other unexpected expenses, it costs over one thousand dollars per hour to fly Sky8. Just fuel costs alone are very high. The cost of Jet A fuel is around $3.50 per gallon and I burn around 35-40 gallons per hour and we hold 127 gallons of fuel at a time. So as you can see it adds up fast when a fill up costs $250 plus!!

Many times viewers ask me how much we fly in a given day or week. It is all News dependent. We fly in the morning show between 6 and 7 AM for traffic coverage but if there is breaking news earlier then we put in more time to bring you the latest available coverage. Sometimes we have to fly over certain areas to get footage for a story to be used later in the evening news. Other times we are live over areas of interest or areas of an active story. Then we throw in the North West weather and we may be down for low visibility or extremely high winds waiting patiently for it to clear. I have flown as much as 12 hrs in one day for a big story and as little as an hour in a whole week. Over all we fly around 500-600 hours per year to cover the news.

Well that is a little maintenance talk for now and I will update again on Thursday. Please feel free to email me with any questions or comments on what things you would like for me to talk about or show on the Blog and I will get it out there for you all. Hope to hear your questions and comments soon. bsonnier@kgw.com Brian