AbstractThe gravity surveys carried out in Australia by the Bureau of Mineral Resources fall into three categories. They cover small areas for detail, large areas for reconnaissance, or are used to establish control points for surveys of a lower order of accuracy. Since 1959 the Bureau has used helicopters for reconnaissance surveying and this has enabled an annual coverage of areas as large as New South Wales on a grid pattern with a seven mile spacing of stations. In order to reduce the large amounts of data collected from the surveys to gravity, height, free-air and Bouguer anomaly values for the stations and to store the data in a convenient form, computer programs have been developed. The programs are written in Fortran and are used on CDC 3600 and 3200 computers. While the programs were developed for helicopter gravity surveys they are sufficiently general to be applied to all types of gravity surveys, and height surveys using barometers and a single base system. This paper presents the methods used in carrying out the surveys and reducing the data collected.