Power Line Marker Balls Get an Air Lift with Helicopter Installations

Helicopter Services - Transmission Lines

Power line marker balls are one of those things that most people probably don’t think about too much, but the FAA certainly does.

Since the 1950’s the flight regulation agency has been instructing electrical utility companies to ensure that their electrical lines in sensitive areas have these colorful marker balls installed on their cross-country lines.

These power line safety warning balls are just giant plastic spheres painted with intense colors- unfortunately also often need to be installed in places where placing them is most difficult. They’re commonly hung from electrical lines crossing open canyons, across high bluffs and hills, or on lines close to airport runways and other similarly noisy, dangerous spaces.

The reason for them is the protection of the power line itself, mainly from low-flying light planes that could just possibly smash into one of these soaring cables if they can’t see them.

Placing them is the major problem, and for decades, linemen have had to come up with numerous clever and sometimes dangerous techniques for getting dozens of these light spheres hooked into their perches along with the flimsy cables.

More recently though, some utility companies have adapted helicopters in a new deviation from the already common use of choppers for helicopter transmission line construction work. This is what Southern California Edison did recently.

SCE’s highly efficient, surprisingly safe technique was used recently by the energy utility to install 162 marker balls along a stretch of remote 500-kilovolt cross-country power lines in Southern California. The technique, dubbed the HEC method (human external cargo), involves lifting two linemen into an air rescue seat and carrying them along at the end of a 75 to 100-foot rope.

Each lineman could then manually hang the power line marker balls along a skyline wire that runs between 500kV electrical towers right above the electrical lines themselves.

Throughout the project, crew member safety was kept paramount, as would be expected when dangling human beings dozens of feet in the air while having them work near-lethal electrical charges. Everyone involved, from the linemen to the air ops crew and the helicopter pilots themselves had to coordinate and plan meticulously in advance.

Possibly the most interesting part of the entire ball installation was the process of marking off distances between each ball. Before they even began hanging their balls in the air, the SCE crews marked off the distances between each tower and the proposed distance between each ball in the space between towers.

This was done by combined use of rangefinder and digital Transit surveying tools to mark off GPS positions for each individual proposed ball. The helicopter in the air would then confirm each of these same spots with its GPS and program them into its navigation routing.

Following this, linemen would be sent up with the HEC method to mark off each ball’s position with pieces of contractor’s ribbon or with clips; fixing locations for the last part of the job in this way.

The next part of the job involved a ground crew assembling the two-part yellow, orange or white spheres of the power line markers from the SCE base camp near the installation project. As the balls were assembled, they could then be distributed to several staging areas along the length of the power line.

The helicopter being used by SCE could then fly to each of these areas as it went along, saving time and money on fuel along the way because it didn’t need to keep going back to the first camp for additional balls.

Finally, the chopper in question would haul up the linemen for their installation work, taking them to their preset spots along the power line and holding them aloft was they installed each ball one at a time.

All in all, the entire helicopter transport method adopted by SCE proved to be a success. The linemen got their work done with excellent speed and without a single accident along the way. Helicopters were used to make the skies of Southern California a little safer for other helicopters.

Government and private Helicopter transmission line construction work is commonly conducted with the help of private charter helicopter services such as Fair Lists Helicopter Services, which specializes in this kind of high precision work.

Photo Credit: Taylor Bacon/U.S. Coast Guard