Show notes
Allen and Joel speak with Michael Tosi, founder and CEO of HeliService USA, which is providing helicopter transportation for the offshore wind industry. HeliService USA provides efficient, safe, and environmentally-friendly transport for technicians and equipment to offshore wind farms, providing an advantage over marine vessels. With the highest safety standards, cost-effectiveness, and speed, HeliService is making offshore wind travel better.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. As offshore wind continues to develop in the U. S., transportation of technicians and equipment is becoming a big issue for developers and operators to tackle. HeliService USA provides helicopter transportation and support services for the offshore wind industry in the U.
S. Based in Rhode Island, the company is utilizing the unique capabilities of helicopters to deliver personnel, cargo, and equipment. and conduct maintenance operations efficiently. Our guest is Michael Tosi, founder and CEO of HeliService USA. Michael is a helicopter pilot and also served in the U S air force.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Tosi: Thank you, Allen. Really appreciate you having me today and look forward to chatting more.
Allen Hall: You're in a really busy place right now because the pace of construction on U. S. offshore projects has really picked up. And you're flying technicians back and forth. How many flights are you conducting right now a week?
Michael Tosi: So it, it varies. There's two big scopes that we cover. So the first scope we cover is actually the construction of the wind farm. For the construction of the wind farm, we're typically flying offshore workers who are going to be on vessels for, two, three, four, five, six weeks, depending on what their shift schedule is.
So that involves flying out to an installation vessel, a heavy lift vessel S. O. V. potentially, depositing those passengers we usually bring folks back to the other direction. And so those flights go on per vessel, sometimes once a week, twice a week, per vessel in the field. And now, of course, because they have several turbines up, more than several at this stage we're also helping with operations and maintenance even prior to the wind farms being completed.
We are actually going to be commissioning flights as well. To certain turbines. I think that's the first time at least that I'm familiar with that certainly has probably occurred in Europe. But at least from what our customers tell us that some of the first times they've used helicopters for commissioning were as well on the turbine.
It can be a bit cyclical on the demand, depending on when the vessels are here or not. But just for some numbers, I think it's a good thing. We've been in operation for about a year and transported over 6, 000 people offshore during that time. To my knowledge, I think we transported certainly more than any other with just 16 folks offshore.
So it's been a busy year.
Joel Saxum: Let me ask you a question, Michael. What does it look like for a technician that's going to go Fly out to a turbine for work. Do they arrive at your facility with all their gear ready to go? And five minutes later, they're in a helicopter or how, what does that look like?
Michael Tosi: It's a pretty quick process. It's a little bit different for the folks who go offshore to construction vessels. They're they use helicopters, not necessarily less, but there's less flights. So a technician may go out every single day of his hitch. So if he has a 14 day schedule, you may go offshore with the helicopter 14 times out 14 times back.
Plus sometimes intra field work, so turbine to turbine, or SOV to turbine, you name it. So they may do, in a 14 day span, they could do over 30 flights, over 40 flights, depending on how you look at it. So they get very accustomed to working with our crews. I don't want to say they're part of the crew, they're not technically part of the crew, but a lot of rapport builds up between our hoist operators, our pilots, the technicians, because they're working with them intimately every single day which is pretty neat.
So when they show up Especially for the folks who fly with us all the time, who've been breathed and are ready, they have to watch a briefing video, but really, they just throw on their harness do the briefing video, which is a legality at that point, because of course, they've seen that many times before, but by FAA regulation, they have to watch it, get that video, head out to the helicopter, and they're airborne pretty quick, so from the start of their day to, on a turbine is an hour or mass.
You're talking a second team, an hour and 20 minutes or less to get them offshore. So it is extraordinarily quick from the point where they take off to the turbine depending on the project for at least the ones we serve now is about 13 minutes. So it's an astonishingly quick. Can you, and if you're on the helicopter, that goes really fast.
Allen Hall: And the big question, obviously, between CTVs and helicopters that always comes up is emissions and emissions are a big topic in the wind industry at the moment. Are helicopters more efficient from an emission standpoint than ship transports?
Michael Tosi: Drastically it's not one of those things in the margins.
It's not single digit percentages. You're talking to orders of magnitude. The easiest way to think about it is assume exactly the same fuel burn rate, which is not necessarily the case. But assuming the exact same fuel burn rate, you're taking 8 to 10 times as longer to do the same exact transportation.
So even if we burn twice, which we don't, depending on the CTV, my understanding is we burn the same or less per hour of operation. And that CTV is out there potentially 24 7, certainly 12 hours that it's running. Whereas for us, 13 minutes out, 13 minutes back. At the end of the day you're talking collectively that helicopter rarely is going to fly for more than a couple hours a day.
Certainly not 12 depending on the busyness. So overall drastically more efficient. We expect to see as they start getting worked into bids and proposals, having to account for your missions and your O& M means is that helicopters will start to see a massive step up.
Allen Hall: There are some other training besides throwing your harness on that has to happen.
So you can go offshore. You want to describe what some of that is?
Michael Tosi: Yeah, certainly. So one of the biggest concerns that we see from folks who aren't familiar with helicopter operations, helicopter hoist operations, it looks pretty dramatic. And you think military, you think search and rescue, you think Coast Guard.
What they do and what I've done in the military and what I continue to do part time in the Air Guard as a search and rescue pilot is drastically different than this kind of hoisting. This is, I don't want to say vanilla per se, but it's intended to be repeatable. It's intended to be done. One of our customers looked across their entire fleet.
All of their operators do 20, 000 plus waste a year without incident. So it's designed to work incredibly well and incredibly safely. And it does have the highest safety record or none in terms of access means to a turbine. That includes SOVs, Amplements, and CTVs. And with that, though, it is not tremendously complex to train a technician.
Even if they've never seen a helicopter before, they require one day of underwater egress training. So that's if lord forbid, a helicopter were ever to ditch, how to get out of it from being upside down, anyone who's ever worked in the Gulf. It's probably done that before. Some people love it, some people hate it.
I will say that. Generally, 80 percent of the class thinks it's one of the coolest things they've done. 20 percent never want to see that thing ever again. It can break either way, depending on your familiarity and comfort in water. I really enjoy it. The only thing I don't enjoy is my sinuses after being upside down in a pool all day.
So that's about one day. Very easy class to get through. Again, there's almost no attrition in that. The next thing you need is a one day hoist course. So you come to our facility you go through the hoist course. You spend about three to four hours in the classroom. Then you go out and we hoisted the aircraft in the hangar.
So on level ground, basically, without an airborne. We then go out to a nice open area. So like a little grassy field or a taxiway, you do our voice there about three per. And then we go to, we have a little mock turban. It sounds very fancy. It's really a context container with a turban, a nacelle basket or a hoist basket welded onto it.
Pretty basic, but it does the job really. Accurately simulates the turbine and that's another maybe four hours. So you're talking two days to become a hoist trained and qualified technician, at least in terms of helicopter operations. It was very basic.
Allen Hall: I had the privilege of visiting your facility in Rhode Island and watching that training happen.
It is impressive. And the consistency of which you move people around and drop them on top of the simulated turbine top. That is amazing to see because it would just as an outsider,