Taking to the skies

Replacing air handling units might not sound like such an exciting job, unless you use... a helicopter to do the work! And this is exactly what two developers have done in James Bond style recently: Apsys for the 3 Stawy shopping centre in Katowice and Reinhold for its Lipiński Passage office building in Warsaw.An Mi-8 transport helicopter was used for both escapades – a machine that uses 800 litres of fuel per hour. Piotr  Karbowy, the technical director at Apsys Poland, reveals that the Slovakian company the helicopter belongs to – ATE Air Transport Europe – estimated the cost of the helicopter service to be PLN 80,000. This is the price of the two-week stay of the ten-people team and the helicopter itself in Poland. “Our shopping centre in Katowice has a more-or-less square shape, so the arm of a normal crane would not be able to move these air handling units to the middle of the roof. And don’t forget that each load like this weighs two tonnes. The u