6 June 2022
How To Be a Heavy-Lifting CAD Hero, Without Breaking a Sweat
How do you go from hating certain repetitive CAD/BIM tasks to being a heavy-lifting hero who never breaks a sweat? Your answer may lie within the story of a man who saved the US military tens of millions of dollars, simply by having a “bring-it-on” attitude.
Get the Job Done
In the spring of 2002, a young American far from home, Chuck Jarnot, then a lieutenant colonel of the US Army, found himself in a bit of a pickle in the Middle East. Jarnot was tasked with cleaning up after Operation Anaconda, an attempt to drive al Qaeda and Taliban fighters out of the Shahi-Kot Valley and the surrounding Arma mountains.
Jarnot knew that the only way they were ever going to bring that deserted Chinook home was by locating a Halo Heavycopter they could borrow.
The problem? One of Chuck’s jobs was to retrieve two damaged Special Forces 47E Chinook helicopters that were stranded on the mountainside in eastern Afghanistan at 8,500 and 10,300 feet respectively. The most obvious solution was to airlift the choppers off the mountainside and fly them to Kabul for repairs.
Armed with a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, Jarnot calculated that with the fuel drained, and the rotor blades and all non-essentials removed, the Chinooks each weighed about 26,500 pounds. Flying in another Chinook or Sikorsky CH-53E Sea Stallion was futile, since each of those helicopters could only lift around 20,000 pounds at 8,500 feet, and less at higher elevations.
Although the helicopter at 10,300 feet turned out to be too badly damaged to be salvageable, Jarnot figured out a solution for the chopper at 8,500 feet. He needed to get his hands on a Mi-26 helicopter, known by NATO as the Halo Heavycopter. Capable of lifting up to 44,000 pounds, Jarnot knew that the only way they were ever going to bring that deserted Chinook home was by locating a Halo they could borrow since the US Army didn’t own one.
Through the internet, Chuck was able to find a Toronto-based outfit that had access to a Heavycopter that was currently doing construction and firefighting work in Tajikistan but could be flown to Afghanistan to get the stranded Chinook off the mountain for around $300,000. That may sound steep but compared to the $22 million price tag of a Chinook back in 2002, it was a pittance. Six weeks after Jarnot’s call to Toronto, the Halo showed up and plucked the Chinook from the mountainside. Jarnot said the flight crew literally “snatched it with a hook” and ultimately flew it to Bagram Air Base in Parvan, Afghanistan, for shipment to Fort Campbell in Kentucky for repairs.
Six months later, Jarnot, now the security force task manager at Bagram Air Base, attended a meeting where Army officials mentioned having to dissect, load and transport another CH-47 Chinook that had made a hard landing about 100 miles north of the base, at a 4,000-foot elevation. Although airlifting the Chinook had been considered, the base lacked a craft capable of the lift and so was looking at an expensive, labor-intensive job.
Compared to the $22 million price tag of a Chinook back in 2002, a recovery fee of $300,000 was a pittance.
“Why not use an Mi-26?” Jarnot asked during the meeting. His question was initially met with laughter and snickers. Then he quietly added, “We did this six months ago, General,” and the room fell silent. Soon after, using Jarnot’s contacts in Canada, the Army welcomed another Mi-26 Halo Heavycopter to Bagram.
We reckon Chuck Jarnot is one of those guys who simply does whatever it takes to get the job done, and we thank him for his service.
Heavy Lifting Headaches for CAD/BIM Users, and How to Prevent Them
So, what is the heavy lifting that CAD/BIM professionals typically get stuck with? Well, that depends largely on your platform, although there is some common ground. Shall we talk imports? We know the process of importing into MicroStation® isn’t as tough as it is for Revit® and AutoCAD® users, but the resultant lousy formatting appears to be a universal nightmare. One of Axiom’s tools, Microsoft Office Importer™, gives you control of your project standards such as font, text size and more when importing data from Word or Excel spreadsheets. Plus, it can link to your source data and automatically update if any changes are made to that data. It eliminates annoying, repetitive, labor-intensive steps that would otherwise drain the amount of time you get to spend designing.
For more information about any of Axiom’s stable of products, MicroStation tools are here, Revit tools are here, and AutoCAD tools are here. As a CAD/BIM professional, any one of these tools is the equivalent of a Halo Heavycopter when it comes to getting your heavy lifting done without breaking a sweat.
Go ahead and ask yourself why you should do the heavy lifting when there are tools specifically designed to do it for you?
