On May 20, UAA hosted a one-hour webinar where Chris O’Neal, Head of Vegetation Management at SCI-REMC, walked through how his cooperative built a helicopter trimming program from the ground up.
South Central Indiana REMC is doing something most people in this industry said couldn’t be done: aerial trimming on a distribution system.
In the UAA webinar, SCI-REMC vegetation management coordinator Chris O’Neill joined Bloom Spatial CEO Pablo Fuentes to walk through the logistics, safety considerations, and real-world pros and cons of pulling it off, offering co-ops a practical starting point grounded in firsthand experience.
The challenge is real
SCI-REMC manages nearly 1,800 miles of overhead line, over 80% of it in heavily vegetated, often inaccessible terrain. Brown County hills. Off-road right of ways. Single-phase taps feeding one member across 16 to 18 spans. The kind of system where keeping up with growth cycles is genuinely hard, and where the cost of conventional trimming keeps climbing while budgets do not.
Helicopters were not the obvious answer
Like most people in distribution, Chris’s first instinct when aerial trimming came up was: that’s a transmission solution. It took a site visit to an Ohio co-op where Tri-State Vegetation Management was already doing it on distribution lines to change his mind. Seeing it in action, how controlled and precise the work actually was, opened the door.
Pre-planning is everything
The operation does not start when the helicopter shows up. Months of prep go into every session: membership notification across mail, email, social media, and phone; field teams marking down guys, taps, fences, and livestock pastures on system maps; and three separate radio channels running simultaneously during operations to keep the pilot, the traffic flagging crew, and the ground team coordinated. Chris put it simply: if you just show up, there is too much room for error.
The numbers are striking
What one in-house operation (a Kershaw, two bucket trucks, a grapple truck, and a mower) takes a full month to complete, the helicopter can cover in a day or two, and it gets the work done ground to sky, not just to bucket height. The volume of brush that comes down that fast was the one thing the team did not fully anticipate going in.
It is not for everywhere
Helicopter trimming shines in remote, heavily vegetated right of ways with low population density. Residential areas, livestock pastures, and tight urban corridors are not good fits. SCI-REMC deliberately started on the most western, most rural part of their system. Chris is clear: for more populated areas, this is not the answer.
The long game
Chris’s vision for a high-performing vegetation management program is built on three ingredients: mechanical trimming, aerial trimming, and herbicide. Get the right of way floor clean, treat it, and then bring the helicopter back on a maintenance cycle every five years. At that point, the work is fast, targeted, and cost-effective. That is when the investment really pays off.
The honest take from the field: they are still in the painful early stages. But every year they come back, it gets faster, easier, and cheaper
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