Disguise Delimit

They vary. Usually there will be a warning light in red, high on the coaming, and a sound through the headset, often a repeated beep. If rotor RPM get low there is another light and a different sound, like the rising beep you hear from a car alarm. Newer aircraft might have a female voice telling you what the problem is - "bitching Betty".

Hmmm. A rock descending from above would more likely hit the rotor before the window. The rock would need to be horizontal to miss the rotor, but that sort of speed might not be possible from a volcano. A birdstrike, however, is a horizontal entry to a window, and in the past has incapacitated many aircrew. I only know of one case of a bird killing a pilot, it was an F-111 doing 450kt. A chopper would be doing maybe 125-150kt when hitting a bird.

The callsign is usually displayed on a label on the instrument panel - when we hop from one machine to another, it is easy to forget which one you are in. Why is your aircraft crashing? Don't worry about describing it, plenty of pilots are not as touchy as Hobie, and will give you some sensible advice. That video is interesting - the first water landing was from an engine failure in the hover, and the second engine only had enough power to cushion the water landing. After landing on the water, the pilot lowered the landing gear to make the cg lower down and give a bit of stability in the water. But nobody expected him to try a single-engine takeoff by moving forward to gain translational lift and fly away on one engine. Especially with the gear down - lots of drag, and low down, making the nose dip too far. Not sure why the pilot didn't stop the exercise when the nose first dipped, but he persisted and the machine was wrecked.

I've got 15,000 hrs rotary wing, what are the chances of me getting a fixed wing slot with 40 hrs F/W? Zot. zilch. You will probably have to build time considerably, at your expense, before they will talk to you. But your Plank stories will go down well in the coffee room.

My previous boss had 3 choppers, one of which was an S-76, and the budget for it was $4500 an hour, based on 250 hrs a year. One time it flew for 2 hrs to convey only 12 meat pies to where the boss wanted to eat them.

I hated being in the Enstrom from the first second. It rattled, shook, and tried to remove the fillings from my head. The engine was so dismal that it needed 30"MAP to fly S&L, which meant that if the turbo failed, it couldn't even hold height. The inside layout reminded me of a 1973 car. It refused to re-start when hot, and needed to cool off for 20 minutes before it would fire again. I ended up with 10 hours on the rotten things, and went back to the pleasant little R22. And I already had 7000 hrs in turbine B206 and UH-1, so I wasn't a beginner.

The problem was that the front of the blade, as it rotated, was going down with the main rotor downwash, and was losing efficiency - the back blade was in clearer air, but the loss from the front blade was substantial. When Bell flipped the whole thing to the other side, the front blade now rotated up into the downwash, gaining a lot of extra relative airflow. A simple fix and very worthwhile, known as the flip-flop tail rotor.

No, they operate at constant pitch, so as the weight goes up, the RRPM must also rise. Heavy weight, loud screams. Not more efficient. A real helicopter is able to run at constant RRPM by increasing the pitch with increasing weight. What can these do that a small helicopter could not? The dream of pilotless is only a dream. The regulations have not changed to allow door-to-door passenger ops. despite the posts from 2017 saying "in 3-5 years it will happen." The range is still too small to have any passenger purpose. There appears to be no space for pax to put suitcases to get to the airport. Keep dreaming.

Adam, feathering of the main rotor is only going to happen if the cyclic is moved, (or collective raised) so I have covered that eventuality. (The tail rotor is able to feather itself via the Delta 3 hinge)

Actually it is to counter tail rotor drift. Flapping and feathering takes care of lift dissymmetry.

Dude, our air force apparently ran a different flight school from yours. (Though I left the service in 1982 after 15 years).The functions of the bleed valve and its effects if it didn't work were in the 3 months of ground school before the students got their backsides off the ground. But even in our civil school in 2009, teaching military students from a sandy country, we still taught the basics and the details. Whether they retained this knowledge after returning to the sand, is highly unlikely, but these days I don't care. For Mr Buzzkill, yes I have a pile of stories but not hugely relevant to this US Army-centric website.

Well please enlighten me. How would YOU do it? Do you consider that recognising a bleed valve, knowing what it does and how it operates, is showing a lack of understanding of what they are looking at?

" I read the checklist, went through the motions, but honestly had no idea what I was looking for." Whole E. Katz, Buzzy, if my student didn't know what piece of aircraft he was looking at by the second flight, he was on the ground until he could. We had detailed photo presentations and videos of the full preflight, and then the students were walked through it twice on the day before their first flight.

As Wally says, look out the front, do things slowly, react to what you see. Muscle memory can be a hindrance, but if it starts to yaw, stop it. If it wants to roll, stop it. I jumped from S76 to B47 to Huey in one day, no problems, as long as I reacted to what I saw. The R22 is twitchy, just squeeze the pedals with toe pressure, heels on the floor. Never lift your heels, or you will overcontrol and fight the other leg.

The drive shaft is rotating in the wrong direction for a tail rotor on the other side, perhaps?