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 underground car park