How Do You Mow Steep Slopes Safely Without Risking Staff Injury?
You take the person off the slope. That's the short answer, and it's the reason Fulton Hogan, the contractor responsible for grounds maintenance at Sydney Airport, replaced whipper snippers with a remote-controlled electric mower on the steepest sections of the site.
For years, the only real option on a steep embankment was a person, a brush cutter, and a lot of trust in their footing. Ride-on mowers roll on grades brush cutters can handle. Whipper snippers keep both feet on the ground, but ask someone to stand at an angle for hours at a time, breathing two-stroke fumes, and you've traded a rollover risk for a slips-and-falls one. Neither option is good. Both have been standard practice for decades because there wasn't a third option.
There is now.
What Fulton Hogan Was Dealing With
Bruce Gray is workshop manager at Fulton Hogan and has worked at Sydney Airport for 46 years. In his words: "Some hills inside the airport were so steep that all that could be done was a whipper snipper."
That's not a minor inconvenience on a site like Sydney Airport. Steep, awkward terrain sits alongside active runways and restricted movement areas, so every hour a worker spends on a slope with a brush cutter is an hour of exposure to slip and trip risk, in a location where you can't just close it off and come back later.
Fulton Hogan reached out to Robot Mowers Australia about 12 months ago for a demo of the Raymo, a remote-controlled, battery-powered slope mower. The turnaround from demo to order was fast. Once they saw it handle the ground their crews had been fighting with whipper snippers, the decision wasn't complicated.
What Changed
Bruce Gray again, on camera: "This is undoubtedly the best piece of gear the airport has ever bought."
The specifics behind that statement:
The operator runs the mower from a safe distance on flat, solid ground, instead of standing on the slope itself. That's the entire point of remote control here. It's not a productivity gimmick, it's the mechanism that removes the injury risk.
There's no two-stroke fuel to mix or carry. Battery-powered, zero emissions on site.
Crews aren't standing at an awkward angle for hours. The physical toll of a full day on a slope with a brush cutter disappears.
It handles restricted zones near plane movement areas without putting a person in that space. On an active airport site, that matters as much as the slope itself.
Bruce's summary of dealing with Robot Mowers Australia: "There was no issues at all."
The Machine Fulton Hogan Runs
Their setup is the Raymo Torpedo tool carrier fitted with the R48CRAFT deck, a 48-inch rough-cut deck built for overgrown grass and demanding vegetation, running a 150Ah battery. Currently $61,490 inc GST from Robot Mowers Australia.
The R48CRAFT deck is the right call for airport terrain specifically. It's built with a steel frame, suspended caster wheels for vibration absorption, and nylon bumpers, and it's designed for rough municipal mowing rather than manicured turf. If your slopes are closer to fine turf than rough vegetation, the R42FLEX or R52TURF decks are better matched, but for the kind of overgrown embankment Fulton Hogan was dealing with, R48CRAFT is the deck to spec.
The operator controls it from up to 100m away with an industrial-grade radio remote. In practice, most operators work much closer than that, somewhere between 10 and 50 metres, because eyesight and precision matter more than maximum range. The point was never distance for its own sake. It's keeping the operator off the hazard while staying close enough to work accurately.
It's Not Just Airports
Sydney Airport is a high-stakes example because of the restricted zones and the safety scrutiny that comes with any active airport site, but the underlying problem, steep terrain that's traditionally only manageable with a brush cutter, shows up everywhere. Councils use the same setup on roadside embankments and fire trails. Solar farm operators run it under and around panel arrays where a ride-on won't fit and manual brushcutting under thousands of panels isn't a serious option. Utility companies use it for vegetation management around transmission lines on grades a ride-on can't hold.
Anywhere the current answer is "we put someone on the slope with a brush cutter because there's no other way," there's now another way.
If Your Crew Is Still on the Slope
If you're currently sending staff up steep ground with a brush cutter, or worse, a ride-on that's one wet patch away from a rollover, it's worth seeing this in person rather than taking our word for it. Book a demo and we'll bring the Raymo out to your site and run it on your actual terrain.
Watch the Fulton Hogan / Sydney Airport testimonial: