Operation Blackhawk

Location
Melbourne Docklands
Equipment
Zoom F4
Sennheiser MKH 60
Tripod Mount
and R09 handheld

What do you do when the army decides to spend hours flying around the city chasing each other in helicopters? Set up your equipment of course! The Australian Defence Force had announced recently that there would be various military training exercises occurring over Melbourne in the near future. The first of these took place today and consisted of what appeared to be two Squirrel Class helicopters being pursued by up to four Blackhawk helicopters over the Melbourne city area. A lot of the time the helicopters where flying without running lights on in what I assume was a tactic to approach each other unnoticed. I am also assuming that the air traffic over Melbourne was completely cleared for this exercise as it would have been bloody dangerous otherwise. Because of the completely unpredictable nature of their movements I thought it would be pointless to try and find a “perfect” position to record them and just set up my gear on our balcony. It was more an opportunistic session than a planned one, but I did get a few good passes, most notably when the Blackhawk’s went past in close formation. Having a large memory card in my recorders means I can just switch them on and leave them for several hours just in case something good happens. This was the best approach as the helicopters would often fly off for quite sometime before returning.