It may be the helicopter from the popular TV show SAS Australia, but the chopper is in Tamworth to serve a very different emergency service.
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Pilots from Crown Lands will spend the next three weeks using the helicopter to inspect more than 1,400 kilometres of fire trails across NSW.
The crew operated out of Tamworth on Wednesday.
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Heli Surveys pilot Ken Jakobi said the Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel was configured perfectly for both jobs.
"The pilot himself has got an untold amount of experience doing that kind of work, that's why he gets all the approvals. This is the machine," he said.
Crown Lands senior bushfire officer Dan Cross said the helicopter is perfectly suited for the task, calling it a "very nimble, quick, powerful machine".
"In comparison, if we were to do this on the ground, it would take many vehicles, many people, over many months," he said.
"Aerial inspection cuts that down to a few weeks, so it's very efficient, very effective."
Several different crews will swap in and out of the helicopter over the next three and a half weeks, but it's the only vehicle that will be needed to complete the job for the entire state.
Most days start at about 6am for coronavirus protocols, then about seven hours of flying time, plus lunch breaks and refuelling.
Fire trails are used by firefighting teams to get in and out of the wooded areas where bushfires usually start. A poorly maintained trail can cost lives in an emergency.
The helicopter crews have already identified 30 trails that require urgent work, including several in remote places that haven't been inspected for years, Mr Cross said.
Nine times out of ten, it's "surprisingly easy" to identify whether a trail is in good condition from the air, he said.
But occasionally they have to check out areas of thicker forest.
It's almost like craning your neck to see into a tiny crevice in the couch.
"We just have to slow the machine down and try and look through peepholes [in the canopy]," he said.
"But that's very unusual. It's really surprising how just much you can see through the canopy. You've got oblique angles, you can look forward, you can look straight down, and you can look behind you."
The crew will either rate the trail good, in need of urgent maintenance or recommend it be scheduled for maintenance. The crew can order a ground crew to "ground truth" an assessment if they're not sure, but the helicopter drastically cuts down the number of trails that need to be checked that way.
It's the third year the aerial inspections have been conducted by Crown Lands in collaboration with the Rural Fire Service and Soil Conservation Service.
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