O.O
that is insane.
There’s video from the pilot’s POV too
Was the pilot named Hoban Washburne by any chance?
I’m a little bit disappointed here. My expectation was to see some deft low flying skills leaving a swath of tree tops in its wake. It is a chopper after all.
They waste no time!
Time is money. And, after all, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?
Something tells me they don’t have insurance.
I wonder what is the mortality rate in that job…
Very efficient…and excellent skills by the helicopter pilot, placing those trees in the truck, just so.
Former Combat Pilot Finally Finds Employment Almost Worth Waking Up For
That’s awesome.
In a helicopter it certainly is.
Third party, fire and theft, sure. Insurance against pivoting the helicopter into the ground using a long cable attached to a christmas tree and a flatbed truck? Not so much
That’s Oregon.
It isn’t just Portland that likes to do things a little differently…
How are the trees being hooked up to the cable? Surely if there was a person down there doing it they would be killed by the swinging hook.
Maybe it’s not all that big a hook.
Oooooo. . . I smell a new video game in the works!
Look at the video linked in a second post from pilots point of view. You can see that there is somebody on the ground waiting with a loop in a hand and there is a big (and I hope well padded 
)target at the end of the rope under helicopter.
From the pilot’s POV, it also looks like the cable disengages automatically when the weight comes off the end - that is, there’s no-one doing the ‘un-hooking’ as the trees hit the truck bed. That suggests something a bit cleverer than just a hook-and-loop, and so possibly with some safety built in.
Disengaging automatically also means that if you accidentally bump into something with your tree bundle, they just fall off, which is what you want. Really.
It wouldn’t have to be - any hook that can to lift a bundle of trees safely has got to be at least half a kilo of metal on the end of a steel cable: plenty hefty enough that you don’t want to catch it in a squishy bit.
10 bucks says former Apache pilot. My firefighter/police friends said the local air ambulance guy was one and he would do insanely precise maneuvers close to the ground.
