I remember a building repair going on across the street from a place I worked. An S-58 also lifted four heavy air conditioners to the roof. Took them less than 2 hours.
The straw boss on the site was using our phone until utilities had been restore. That afternoon, he had just finished using the phone when a couple mini-hitlers from his corporate HQ showed up wanting to know why he had hired the heli for something like $600/hr instead of a hi lift crane for about $250. As normal with corporate bean counters, they had trouble with the concept that in 2 hours, the heli delivered about 48000 pounds of equipment and dropped it accurately onto the mounting pads. The cranes would have needed a couple days, and at least one of the units would have had to be lifted to the roof, then moved into place. The Helicopter had a much higher cost per hour, but the job was done for less than a quarter of the price of using a crane, and in maybe 20% of the time, cutting a couple days off the job, which was eventually recorded in the local paper as unbelievably coming in several days ahead of schedule and under budget.
The two corporate goofballs were MBAs. The site boss was proud of his almost 30 years with the company, 20 of them as a site foreman, without ever earned more than a GED. And having gotten over 300 hours of engineering accounting and business administration college courses.
Topic: Look what I got to watch this morning... (Read 1358 times)