Mark Camus – Vice President of Flight Operations
Prior to co-founding Air2, LLC in September of 1998, Mr. Camus served six years in the US Army. Four of those years were spent in the former West Germany as a helicopter pilot. After separating from the service, Mr. Camus spent 13 years working for numerous Electrical Utilities in the US and abroad developing flight techniques, and training pilots to fly in a new area of operations for helicopters; energized power lines with a lineman seated on an external platform attached to the helicopter.
Mr. Camus has over 34 years of civil and military aviation experience and holds FAA Airline Transport Pilot and Flight Instructor certificates as well as a Canadian Commercial helicopter pilot certificate. He has accumulated over 14,000 total flight hours of which 12,500 hours have been flown entirely for electric utility transmission line inspection, maintenance and construction.
Mr. Camus pioneered many of the flight techniques used today with an external lineman working from a helicopter work platform on both energized and de-energized EHV transmission lines. He was the second pilot in the world to ever energize a helicopter with a work platform and lineman at 500,000 volts. He also wrote the industry’s very first flight training manual for this specialized application, and has authored Air2’s own manuals for training, safety, and FAA requirements for external load operations.
Mr. Camus has trained many of the pilots in this industry and other companies abroad in the specialized areas of helicopter platform flight techniques, insulator washing, and vertical reference sling load operations. He has worked closely with FAA offices nationwide on regulatory issues pertaining to operations, certification, and compliance. Mr. Camus continues to determine project feasibility, and establishes procedure for new applications, as well as train new pilots and flies jobs on an as-needed basis.
Mr. Camus is the inventor of U.S. Patent Number 5,072,895 pertaining to a helicopter platform design that is exclusively licensed to Air2. He also holds two other aviation-related patents.