Helipad Providing Heliport Services for the Largest Events in the UK
Helipad is a 40-year-old business that supports the very largest festivals and sporting events around the U.K., setting up temporary airports and predominantly supporting charter operators in the helicopter world. The company prides itself on its high-level service backed up by using the latest technology (including Icom two-way and Airband radios) and qualified and experienced air traffic controllers. As with any airport, pilots and operators can expect to refuel their helicopters and wait in VIP hospitable terminus. Each airport has fire and safety teams, restrooms and comfortable seating. Because of the nature of its clientele, the company offers slick systems to ensure that passengers and their pilots connect seamlessly and depart home safely in record time!
Nick Cox. Managing Director of
Helipad
said, ‘The company have evolved over the years. It started with a Ford Granada estate and just a few handheld radios and now provides services to the most prestigious events operating with over seventy crew. We have gone through several evolutions of our mobile Air Traffic Control Tower. We are now running with four operators in the tower, double VHF frequencies and at least half a dozen UHF frequencies running across the site. We have evolved from using mini busses and a portacabins for our clients to what is essentially a temporary airport terminus on each site with 25 Aston Martins running the clients back and forth at the events…quite a step up…quite a development.’
This year Helipad has a new setup at Cheltenham. Nick said, ‘We have provided our Air traffic and Concierge services at Cheltenham for over 35 years. It has developed from 20 aircraft landing to now over 400 landing…especially on Gold Cup Day where will be 2-3 coming in and out every minute. There are three big changes for this year:
• Our biggest change this year is our new control tower, which features the latest built-in technology and allows us to be much more self-sufficient on site.
• Using modern modular structures for the terminal.
• New improvements in our bespoke Programmable Automation Controller (PAC) software we use to run between air traffic control and the terminal…essentially dealing with everything involved with passenger movement. The software allows our operations to run seamlessly…making us look very slick.
Nick went on to say, ‘It’s a high-pressured environment. We started planning this event years’ before the year even began. I am already planning for the 2025 & 2026 Cheltenham Festivals and like everything in Aviation you don’t change too many things at once. So you stick with the core systems and processes. It is about having plans for every eventuality. Because we have built everything in house including software we know exactly how it works and how to fault find on it because everything always has problems. Radio is an important tool. Everyone on site has comms and everyone is trained to use radio properly.’
‘The headline events we provide our services to are the Cheltenham Festival, Epsom Derby, Aintree Grand National and Glastonbury Festival (across all sites). We cover Henley Regatta, the Game Fair, Newmarket Racecourse, Chester Racecourse, York Racecourse and all the smaller racecourses for jockey club races (all 15). We support every site 364/24/7 so I will get calls from customers from other racecourses when someone wants to land a helicopter there tomorrow and they are checking with us that everything is safe, legal and all the paperwork is in order…so we support all the sites all year round.
Nick said, ‘The service first and foremost is safe control of air traffic. At each event
Helipad operate in incredibly dense air traffic and can have up to 40 helicopters in the airspace at any one time. So there maybe eight to ten aircraft each on hold, three on finals, two on the runway and one on every gate and we can have up to a hundred aircraft parked in the airfield. So first and foremost, it is about safe efficient air traffic control.’
‘If you think about it we are a business to business organisation so our customers, in our view, are the aircraft operators/owners/pilots. They are looking after their charter customer that have passengers onboard and to support them we need to make the environment as hospitable as possible. Whatever we can do to support the helicopter operators and the flight crews flying them we do to take the pressure off them and thus making it safer.’
Behind the scenes,
Helipad
have employed the services of
Greg Smith from
Airway Services for over a decade. Nick said, ‘Greg has been with us a long time now and is literally a walking encyclopaedia of radio technology. I think he’s forgotten more than I will ever know about how radios work and the finer points of them. You can stand in that tower for hours with Greg and you will just absorb information as fast as you can on the intricacies of how it all works.’
‘He’s brilliant and always gets the job done even though the working environment can be a very pressured. He knows what needs to be done because of his engineering and radio communication experience especially in aviation special events and as a former ATCo. He knows exactly what it’s like to stand in that control tower and deal with that volume of aircraft. He also thinks about redundancy all the time e.g. what if this breaks, do we need standbys. His attention to details is exemplary. He puts systems in place in case of failure no matter if it is a cable, software or hardware running.’
So how are the radios used? Nick said, ‘A lot and abusively LOL. We use VHF (Airband) for comms between aircraft and our Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower. Icom
IC-A120 Airband VHF panel mount radios
are used for ATC operations and mobile and additional base station operation if required. Icom
IC-A16E Airband VHF handportables
are used in operations and as back-up for ATC etc. We are controlling several miles out and we have to do this from the limitations of a mobile vehicle but generally, I think we achieve more than adequate range from our mobile vcr masts. We have two constant VHF frequencies and they are basically in triplicate so that we can fail, fail again and still maintain operation. We also need to be able to switch over in a couple of seconds. We have the added challenge that geographically frequencies change wherever we go because you are in different proximity to different permanent stations with permanent frequencies. So, for each event we are constantly having to retune and adjust the equipment.’
Because we are running two frequencies during an event we deploy two sets of three Icom
IC-A120 VHF stations
for each frequency. So if one of them fails it will switch over to the other one. The power supplies and interfaces are custom made and that allows us to just have one cable going up to the tower. To meet the mandatory requirement to be a licensed airport and record all ATC, Aircraft and telephone activity, a Veristore solid-state recorder is on site that has redundant hardware and an interface so you can immediately play back and hear previous activity. Everything power wise revolves around redundancy so all the Icom A120 VHF units are powered by mains power supplies with batteries (charged by the power supply) providing a no-break back-up.
Nick said, ‘Our staff
IC-F4002 UHF handheld radios
are used by all the team on the ground and provide us with rapid communication between various sections of the airport, fire crew, ground handlers, the marshals and the fuelling team. We boost radio coverage from our Icom
SRP-U11 UHF repeater station. They are useful at venues such as Cheltenham where you might have drivers three miles away, the other side of the venue and need to contact them.’
He added, ‘Our comms need to be discreet. We are dealing with high-level people and they don’t want shouting, chitter chatter from a radio. Everything is done with discrete earpieces.
Maintaining this level of assurance and professionalism is important to our operation but also incredibly difficult in an airport and we use ear defenders used where advisable or essential due to noise levels. You have the challenges of gate handlers who are out under a turning rotary disk, you have fuellers out with about six aircraft turning and burning around them. You still need to know what is going on and get rapid communications out. There are multiple levels to the difficulty of making the communication work but I think it works well.’
‘Our Icom radios work really well. Our UHF IC-F4002 two-way radios often get dropped and get a good battering. We like them because they are easy to use, very clear, they do everything you want and you get decent range. They aren’t cumbersome or complicated. It is a good product for how we use them. In addition we use
IC-F6022 UHF mobiles
and these can be brought into use if another site is being brought into operation for transport co-ordination as well as the RFFS vehicles.’
He added, ‘The fact that when we don’t need to explain how the radios work is a plus. It means we only have to instruct on procedure and etiquette. In fact we have quite a few pilots working on the team and if you can get your radio etiquette sorted then it really can speed the process. It gets really busy at peak times we haven’t got the time to hear waffle on the radio, you need to keep it succinct and move on. The result of that is that every customer comes away saying you have a smooth, slick operation. That’s down to having quick communication with the radios and we keep it discrete and keep it rolling.’
Radio helps us to achieve good communication within the team helping them deal with their airport duties whether it be in the command tower, fuelling or those handling the passengers, checking them in or driving them around airside. Radio is integrated with our internal systems including our bespoke software meaning we can be aware of what is going on around us the entire time with our passengers and the aircraft. Our software provides integrated communication between the tower and the terminal so that the tower knows where the aircraft are and the terminal knows where the passengers are. The added benefit of this is that we increase efficiency, give a more VIP experience, make the passengers accustomed to following instructions about where to go, where to check in, which aircraft do they follow, which gate to they go to. The goal is to achieve the level of operation of an actual international airport in a VIP environment.
For more details about Helipad and the service they provide, please visit their website,
https://www.helipad.co.uk.
Alternatively you can phone them on +44 (0) 1202 835 385 or email:
info@helipad.co.uk.
07/11/2024
