How helicopter pilots helped build Hong Kong

Few people realise that except for scheduled flights to Macau, fire fighting and search and rescue, all helicopter work in Hong Kong is handled by one company. What's more is it's done by a team of four pilots whose assignments run the gamut from taking visitors on panoramic sweeps across the city to lifting heavy construction equipment to remote locations, even stringing up overhead power lines. So perhaps it's not entirely advertising spiel when the company's pilots claim "Heliservices built Hong Kong".

"You know every one of these power lines through the country parks have been built by us? There're 120 [transmission towers] between Castle Peak power station and Sha Tin and we built them all," Inge Baggaley, Heliservices' chief training captain, says with evident pride. "Look at every big infrastructure project in Hong Kong ... we've been part of it."

The range of projects means that the pilots face diverse challenges. There's also the flying environment in Hong Kong; because the city is so built up, pilots can rarely relax.

Winds here can also be really fierce, Baggaley says. "We have small mountains with the type of weather conditions you have on big mountains."

Winds may form a vortex when they brush up against the steep sides of local peaks, creating a lot of turbulence. That means pilots have to be especially conscious of where the wind is a help or hindrance. Conditions become trickier when winds get up to between 25 and 35 knots, typically in bad weather or before or after a typhoon, pilots say.

Baggaley is something of a trailblazer. She was 19 when she joined the Canadian air force under a trial programme for women, and went on to become its first female helicopter pilot as well as the personal pilot of its chief of staff. And when she moved to Hong Kong with her husband in 1992, she also became the city's first woman helicopter pilot.