I worked as a 'ramp monkey' at
Boise Airport (KBOI) in
Idaho for a year and a half and saw MANY different types of aircraft
all day long. From about
mid May through June '03, a 'fleet' of Bell 212s (and a lone 205) had
been parked
on the ramp. They belong to Kachina Helicopters, which is the
American side of
Alpine
Helicopters, a Canadian company. From what I'd gathered, the
212s on the ramp spend all winter
flying heli-skiers around the snowy mountains of The Great White North
and
all summer flying around the states fighting fires. Kachina
Helicopters
is based at Boise and was conducting 'pre fire season'
maintenance
on the aircraft. I had fairly detailed information on the Bell
412
and decided to build a pair of helos mixing the personal
digital photos from the 'amp-hogs' and the info I had from the 412.
One
of the results is this model. This 212 is a little harder to fly
than
the 412 because of the teetering rotor system, but it can lift more and
has
better autorotation characteristics.
DON'T SAVE THIS MODEL WITH PLANE MAKER - The skids
are custom and Plane Maker will overwrite them with the defaults.
If you do want to change the aircraft, follow the instructions in
the included text file <new skid variables.txt> to restore the
custom skids. You will need ACF2TXT with the 6.51 definition
file. Both of these are available
at
Mark Fisher's
page
under 'Misc. Files'.
