A Talon helicopter with a LiDAR scanner mounted on the front.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Talon Helicopters

You might hear the familiar whirring of a helicopter and see a one flying lower than they normally do over the next few weeks in Thompson-Okanagan region, but now you won’t have to guess what it’s up to.

FortisBC is doing regular, annual maintenance for gas transmission lines all around the province starting this week so folks can expect to see some low-flying helicopters from Sept. 23 until mid- to late-October. They’re going to be using lasers to look for leaks in gas lines, don’t worry they aren’t giant beams like in science fiction it’s a system called LiDAR.

Kelsey Wheeler is the operations manager and a pilot for Talon Helicopters, the company contracted to fly the inspections.

“It's just a routine inspection that's accomplished every year. We do a lot of this type of different stuff like the equipment that's used is LiDAR so it's basically lasers,” he said.

A device that gets mounted to the front of a helicopter which is then flown around to all the gas lines that need inspection.

“We employ aerial LiDAR leak detection with a laser tuned to the main absorption band of the hydrocarbon of interest. Sounds complicated but it's actually quite simple. LaSen has developed a payload that employs lasers tuned to the absorption bands of methane and other hydrocarbons. The system is mounted to an airborne platform: helicopter, airplane, or UAV,” LaSen wrote on its website.

Wheeler said some helicopters are going to leave from the Lower Mainland, head up north and come back down through Kamloops, Kelowna and South Okanagan. The schedule for the choppers is weather dependent so it’s tough to say exactly which day each area is going to be inspected.

Pilots check the weather ahead of take-off and make sure everything is ready before taking to the skies.

“It is lower than a regular helicopter would be permitted to fly so that's why we have to have a special authorization to do it and so in turn we also use a twin-engine helicopter to accomplish it to have an equivalent level of safety,” he said. “For us we just follow the corridor and the map that it's given to us and they do all the science on the back end.”

Inspecting gas lines or power lines is a common task for Talon’s pilots but they also help fight wildfires, search and rescue and appear in movies like The Final Destination, The Interview and Elf.

Wheeler said he wanted to be a pilot since he saw helicopters and planes landing near his backyard as a kid.

“My dad was in the RCMP and where we lived in Hopedale, Labrador. . .the helicopters basically landed in our backyard; there was no airport,” he said. “When we lived up in the Yukon I would jump in with the RCMP pilots flying the fixed wing plane and go fly with them and I always enjoyed flying.”

Wheeler has been a pilot for more than 20 years, and he said having so much variety is great but sometimes the uncertainty that comes along with life as a helicopter pilot is challenging.

“The variety, that is great, is also sometimes the downfall,” he said. “We do emergency and on-call services, it can be tough because the phone rings at any time. . . the toughest part is the family side of things when you're about to go to a barbecue and then you're not.”

Talon has a base of operations in Vancouver where many of its employees can live and work from, but Wheeler said a lot of pilots live a migratory lifestyle where they end up away from home for big stretches.

“If you're working for other companies you're away for two or three weeks or a month at a time especially through the summer,” he said.

One of the best parts about being a pilot for Wheeler is the simplest; getting to take people into the sky.

“I still really enjoy flying around Vancouver on a nice day with people who really haven't gotten to see it before,” he said.

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