dously with your material handling — because you’re able to reach over obstacles, over a ditch or a wet spot or something that you don’t want to cross, grab the work and pick it up and float it over the air.” His crew uses their chainsaw dra- matically less than before. They pick up whole logs instead of bucking them into sections first. They load bigger material and transport bigger material. “It’s just so much more efficient,” he said. Asked what makes a good knuck- le-boom operator, Anderson answered without hesitation: “Take suggestions. Willing to learn. Humbles themselves.” He paused. “When you stop your brain from being open to listening to suggestions and advice, an accident is right around the corner.” Pipitone put it a different way, de- scribing the operator his machine had found in his own crew: a person who had done tree work by hand for ten years before the crane arrived, who understood tree dynamics deep- ly, and who also happened to have grown up with remote-control equip- ment — race boats, model aircraft, the kind of precision hand-eye coordina- tion that transfers directly to a crane remote. “He was like a duck to water with that machine,” Pepitone said. “He could just make the crane do what he wanted.” On Aquidneck Island the bark kept rolling. The picks got smaller. The tree came down.
The best time to replace a hydraulic hose is before it reminds you why you should have.
simply unacceptable.
verged on the same larger argument: the knuckle-boom crane doesn’t just change how tree work gets done. It changes who can do it, for how long, and at what physical cost to the people doing it. “With the knuckle-boom cranes and telehandlers, you just increased your longevity,” Anderson said. “Whenever you want to be done — you can retire easily.” The context was a conversation about experienced climbers whose bodies had been the limiting factor for de- cades. Mechanization doesn’t replace skill. It relocates it — from the tree to the remote, from the climber’s hands to the operator’s judgment. “Look at how much work is getting done here, but how little labor is occur- ring,” Pipitone said, watching his oper- ator process material from the remote. “I’m not sweating. In the olden days, we would have never got this much true work done in a day. I’d be dead. My feet would be screaming.” Pipitone also pointed to an efficiency the machine delivers that extends well beyond the tree itself. “The grapple cranes don’t just help aid in efficiency for taking the tree down,” he said. “They help with your logistics, and they help tremen-
“You know, it costs a little bit,” he said. “But the small things like that go a long way.” Both Savadyga and Anderson described similar inspection disciplines on their respective machines. The common thread: when one person owns and op- erates the machine, the familiarity that makes early problem detection possible is total. “If you know your machine, you’ll pick up on it,” Savadyga said. “You’ll hear some- thing instantly if you’re in tune to it.” There is also the risk in larger opera- tions where multiple operators share a crane without any single person taking primary ownership. When that intima- cy is absent, the early warning signs get attributed to normal variation. The grinding that should have been caught as a minor adjustment becomes some- thing structural. “They look beyond things,” Savady- ga said, “and then something starts crunching and grinding and they just keep running it.”
That’s the job.
Tchukki Andersen is an ISA Board Cer- tified Master Arborist, Certified Treecare Safety Professional, FAA Certified Drone Pilot and Operator of Uppinda Air Drone Services, based in Kittery Point, Maine.
WHAT THE MACHINE ACTUALLY CHANGES
Step back from the operational de- tails, and all three conversations con-
40 | Summer 2026 ArborTIMES ™
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