Today at Nor-Shipping Maritime Event Week, Frictape announced and showcased Frictape Circle & H Netlight, the industry’s leading solution for helideck lighting in terms of cost and flexibility of installation and maintenance.
Frictape Circle & H Netlight is a groundbreaking, CAP 437-compliant solution for providing illumination for touchdown / positioning marking (TD / PM) circle. The big difference to existing solutions on the market is that in Frictape Circle & H Netlight, lights are integrated with the landing net, making fixed light structures for Circle & H on helidecks’ surface unnecessary.
Circle & H Netlight was developed as a response to input received from numerous customers and by acknowledging the fact that there are insufficiencies in existing lighting solutions on the market.
The ‘black hole’ problem on helidecks during night operations is a well known issue for pilots, which needs to be resolved. Current solutions cause too much glare or are expensive and damaging to helidecks. Also, none of the current solutions really take into account the fact that many helidecks have a landing net installed.
Unlike current solutions on the market, Frictape Circle & H Netlight integrates light elements with helideck landing net, which delivers significant benefits to the customer: no fixed structures needed, no holes need to be drilled that can cause leakages or otherwise harm the deck’s structure.
Frictape Circle & H Netlight is also easy to handle and reposition, making helideck maintenance easy. Installation of Circle & H Netlight is also remarkably swift, taking no more than 2-3 days. And by designing light modules to fit into landing net’s mesh structure, Circle & H lights are always visible to the pilot for maximum safety. Maximum height of less than 25mm, including landing net, ensures safety of personnel on the deck.
"We developed Circle & H Netlight as a response to customer input; we heard several of our customers asking for more effective, simple, cost-efficient solution for helideck lighting and got to work," says Jaakko Uotila, CEO of Frictape.
"By integrating light modules with landing net rather than fastening them to the deck, we can deliver a solution that is much more cost-efficient, flexible, compact and lightweight – yet providing the quality, operational excellence and durability our customers expect from Frictape. And by integrating light modules with the Frictape Landing Net, the net itself continues to deliver best-in-class protection for helicopters and persons walking on helideck through its high-friction, low-profile knotless structure.
"At Frictape, we have been providing high-quality, cost-efficient, simple and flexible safety net solutions for our customers’ helidecks for more than ten years. I’m happy that we can now extend our safety engineering solutions to solve another long-term safety issue – illumination of the landing circle."
Frictape estimates first installations of Circle & H Netlight to take place in third quarter of this year and commercial installations to commence in the beginning of 2016.
For more information, please contact Frictape or visit booth D04 – 24f during Nor-Shipping.