Interview with 'FlyingLineman', the man who flies over the electric lines

The helicoter flies in a silent morning and hovers over a high voltage electric line, 30 meters high. Following the pilot's signal, Timothy walks out through the side door and lets himself down over the lines, equiped only with his special suit and his tools. "Don't look down, at how far the ground is below you", he thinks, "keep your eyes instead on the task you're there to complete"

His job is one of the most dangareous ones around. He works repairing the electric lines in the most innaccesible places, reaching the spot in which the line has been damaged and fixing it while he is hanging from a wire as if he was an actual acrobat.

- In pictures: Flyinglineman, the man who flies over the electric lines (Gallery)

Thousands of volts flow through each of the lines he's reparing, enough to kill a human being.   "When in a hot suit (special suit made from 25% stainless steel and 75% nomex)", Timothy says, " the current is flowing around your outside, not through you". In other words, the suit is working as a Faraday cage. "While the lineman is on the wire, inside his Faraday cage, he has electrical potential - but so long as he doesn't touch or contact a source to ground  there is no electrical flow".

In the last ten years, Timothy has been traveling across the United States and some parts of Canada fixing electric lines. He has requested that his identity, and the name of the company for which he works, to remain unveiled in order to avoid further problems at his current job.

On the Internet his nickname is "FlyingLineman" but, after watching his footage, we prefer to call him "the man who flies over the electric lines". He usually uploads videos where we can see how he and his colleagues work and risk their lives.

A touch of wand

There is a three man team in every helicopter: pilot, inspector and data recorder. They  use gyro-stabilized binoculars to view the smallest details and find the breakdown. According to Timothy, common sources of problems include lightning strikes, vibration damage, rust/age deterioration and gun-shot damage, as it's fairly common in rural areas for bored hunters to take sights on porcelain insulators or the conductors.

"Working in the spring/summer/fall is delightful" he says. "Winter months can be brutal; take a 2 degree day and add a 60 knot wind chill..." 

A working day starts in a hotel room - they spend many months every year living in hotels. "Some mornings", Timothy says, "I wake up in the dark and am unsure where the door is - sometimes we move so often, I forget where I am". After 30 minutes of washing and preparing, they watch the forecast to determine how many layers to wear, and leave for a hard working day. They prefer to work through 'lunch', because stopping means loosing momentum, and it's easier to just get the days work completed, then head back to the hotel.

Once the helicopter lets them down over the lines, the first thing they do is to get a grab of a metal rod they carry with themselves. They use it to raise the helicopter/linemen to the electrical potential of the energized wires and produces an amazing array of electric beams as they near it to the wires. "We use the wand to do this so it's not the lineman that absorbs the brief instant where zero potential is raised to line potential", Timothy explains.

Living through your mistakes

As they start their work on the lines,  the risk of falling or suffering a helicopter collision is ever present. "Flying next to the lines is very risky", says Timothy. "In the past 11 years there have been a handful of accidents and two fatalities...  one young man, 21 years old, fell to his death because he clipped his safety onto an unapproved anchor point. One lapse in judgement, one little mistake, one small choice... and a good man was lost. I've had my share of close calls, stupid oversights and moments of drifting focus". "I lived through my mistakes", he addes, "while others died".

Some accidents are due to the pressure of finishing a work in time. "If the wind gusts get too strong, if it's beyond safe working conditions... shut the dang job down!", Timothy says, " An old lineman once said "those towers may have legs but they ain't going to get up and walk away," meaning that the work will be there tomorrow.

According to his experience, pushing an iffy situation, due to ego, production or profit motives, makes the flying the most risky. "Hitting the wire with either main or tail rotor is an almost certainty of ending with a very bad crash. It is amazing to really 'feel' how tissue-paper fragile a helicopter really is - has to be light to fly. Combine this fact with the rotational speeds/torques involved and it doesn't take much to make them into a pile of debris".

Trust the pilot

Under these circumstances, one has to trust the plot who flies trhe helicopter so close to the electric lines. "They do receive special training... A pilot could have thousands of flight hours, all from a straight and level job (like flying to and from the off shore platforms) but not have any time flying with a 100' long line or holding a steady hover in gusting cross winds".

During his long working experience, Timothy has seen pilots who don't seem to have the necessary skills for this kind of  flying, or even workers who decide to work in freezing rain; totally unsafe and just because "they can only see dollar signs". But, how much do these linemen earn with this risky job?

Timothy doesn't want to talk about figures. "The money isn't bad, I guess...", he says, "but not nearly as much as people might think. What I will say is that for a job where I can expect to have off at least 3 months every year, sometimes up to 4 months, for me the money is good enough. Does it compensate for all the risks we take? Probably not. But then there are no for sures in life. I'm reminded of people that live through catastrophic accidents but then die 5 years later crossing the street. When it's your time, it's your time... it doesn't matter if I work 'safely' behind a desk or 'dangerously' on the side of a helicopter".

After all these years risking his life, Timothy still has a great deal of respect for what he does for a living. "I firmly believe that only the ignorant ever say they have 'no fear.' Fear is the healthy part of experience that can keep you alive". " Early in my career", Timothy adds, "I did have feelings of 'vertigo' when high up on the lines or on a tower... but I learned to keep my focus right in front of me, on the work at hand".

Anyway, experience has given Timothy some advantages. For instance, "after 10 years of riding the platform", he says, "always with my nose into the wind, we went to Disneyland and I found the rides there to be almost boring"!

- In pictures: Flyinglineman, the man who flies over the electric lines (Gallery)