Today brought two separate sets of people into the Tasting Room with careers in using helicopters to fly equipment and personnel from a base to an oil rig.
*The first two men both spoke with different accents, and thus, the beginning of our conversation about where they were from. One guy was
from Ecuador, and the other from Lake Taupo in New Zealand. In another day, or two, they will be flying a Skycrane from Helicopter Transport Services, in Corvallis, to Ecuador where they will be flying equipment and personnel in to the jungle where the oil rigs are.
HTS began flying in Baltimore, Maryland in 1993. Today HTS has additional bases in Chicago, IL, Norfolk, VA and Corvallis, OR, and close ties to HTS Canada, which has seven more bases in Ontario and Quebec. All together, we have one of the most diverse helicopter operations in North America, capable of flying nearly any mission, anywhere, at any time. Our Sikorsky Skycrane can handle a 25,000# lift
.
Sikorsky Skycrane
The second helicopter story of the day was when a black man with a Caribbean accent came up to the bar. He works for a helicopter company from Oregon but works out of his homeland of Trinidad. He works on the logistics of getting personnel hauled out to oil rigs that are offshore.
Along the lines of “It’s a small world” there was another connection to New Zealand today. We also talked to another couple who had spent two 3-month vacations, at separate times, backpacking and working in New Zealand. One job they had was working on a sheep farm, and as some of us northern-hemisphere people, they occasionally wondered “What did he just say?” Yes, it’s all English, but some is a bit more the Queen’s style than our version of the language.
