Never been in a helicopter.

 

Helicopter pilot here... looks pretty neat.

 

 

Very cool TT.

 

Me neither but always wanted to after watching TJ fly Magnum around Hawaii in one:-)

 

 

 

I attended a 'FIRST ANNUAL" car show last year at a local community college. One of the feature attractions was the attendance of the Police emergency rescue squad. The show was great the cars were awesome......Until it was time to leave. The copters were first to take off........what a debris storm they raised! The vendors complained, the car guys complained, what a dufus situation. Fortunately no real carnage except for a bunch of "P-Off" vendors whose tents and stands were a little rattled.
Not sure if there will be a "Second" annual?

 

 

I've flown in them, have family who are chopper pilots and I've loved to watch them for many years. However; as much as I love flying, I have a problem with anything that has a non-powered glide ration or zero. Not to offend any of the chopper group but give me two fixed wings with a higher safey margine. That said, they are about the coolest things in the world to watch fly!

 

No offense taken, but you are miainformed. Helicopters have a glide ratio of about 4:1. Having been in real world engine out situations in both fixed wing and rotorcraft and given the choice between the two, I'd pick neither, but at least with the helicopter, you're going to be touching down with a ground speed of zero, or close to it, and only need a patch of ground about the size of a small back yard to pull it off on. In an airplane, you have time to contemplate your life choices while you search for a suitable strip of land where you can touch down with a ground speed of at least 55 knots. You'd better hope it's smooth enough so as not to ball it up on the roll out, too.

Additionally, rotorcraft flight training stresses IFE management far more than fixed wing. When I was working on my fixed wing private, we didn't always do stall/spin recovery, but for all my rotorcraft ratings, we *always, always, always* practiced at least several auto rotations (not full downs), and other stuff like settling with power, loss of tail rotor effectiveness, and hover autos. Every. Single. Flight. Well, other than during my instrument flights.

The only birds that scare me are the Robinson R22 and these ultralight single seat things powered by two strokes. Reason: ultra low inertia rotor systems. The R22 even has its own federal air regulation (SFAR 73, if memory serves) regarding this. Basically, due to the light weight the rotor system needs to be in these small helicopters, there's very little inertial energy stored in the system. When the engine quits, you need to immediately- to the point of reflexively- enter an auto rotation. Anyway, for the R22, it's something like 1.2 seconds. This is why IFEs are practiced so much. If you don't, the rotor speed will decay below the point of recovery, and at that point, the rotors will tulip and you're dead.

These drone- style experimental machines you see people starting to experiment with are the worst... multiple rotor discs with no mechanical coupling between them in case a motor fails, and fixed pitch rotors/props, so no way to auto rotate at all. You couldn't pay me enough to take one of those above about 5'.

Coming from fixed wing, my biggest takeaway from my rotorcraft training was that for every force a helicopter produces to put itself in the air, there is a resultant force that's trying to remove it from the air, and that all the fixed wing snob jokes about rotorcraft are somewhat true. The second biggest take away was that they're really not that bad... you just can't be a lazy pilot and expect to live that long.

 

Yeah, the place I had signed up for introductory lessons uses a Robinson R22.
Just looking at pictures of it doesn't instill a lot of confidence, looks something like a child's drawing of a helicopter. From my youth, the Hughes 500, and Bell Jet Ranger, were the envy of my eye, although the Hughes looks like a swattable bumble bee. When 'Airwolf' hit the airwaves in the '80's, the Bell 222 became the 'dream machine'.

 

The R22 isn't really any less safe than any other helicopter out there... it's just that the margin of error during the most critical phase of flight you can experience in it is so narrow. Do a thorough preflight, don't ever take your hand off the cyclic, always scan your gauges... and with all forms of aviation, accept the fact that when it's your time, it's your time.

I've time in both the H500 and B206. The 500 is more of a sports car while the 206 is analogous to a GT car, and both are fun, powerful machines when unloaded. My one initial gripe about the 500 was that it doesn't have boosted controls, but you get used to it, much like non-power steering. And yes... the 222 is my go to for heli ****. Lol...

 

LOL
Now lets get a discussion going about jumping out of a perfectly good airplane with a parachute!

 

They are actually banned from use in some of our government departments:

https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/natio...afety-concerns

My first helicopter trip was my most memorable. It was a commute from Nice Airport to Cannes when I was attending a computer conference there in the late 80's. I felt like a film star!

Since then I have just done a few sight seeing flights in them, including one around the mountains of our local ski field.

 

Nope, nope me! That is, jumping out of a perfectly good plane with a parachute.
I'll drive 180 mph on the ground, but, will not travel through the air with the greatest of ease, all the while, waiting for that moment to pull a cord or even rely on an auto-chute.
That's just me.....

 

This is news to me, and all I know is what's in that article. That having been said, with the exception of about 45 hours in a Schwitzer 300C and ten or so hours in a Hughes 500, most of my 1600ish hours in rotorcraft were in semi rigid rotor system- equipped birds. IE- R22, R44, B206, UH-1.

Going solely on what's in that article, here's my hot take:

Pilot error/ lack of training.

I can't emphasize enough the amount of time we spent on safety and situations to avoid, and how to get out of them if they do occur. The amount of knowledge and breadth of subject matter that was covered during my private, instrument, commercial, CFI and CFII ratings absolutely cannot be properly conveyed to someone that hasn't at least obtained a private. The depth of detail would be akin to needing to know how roads are constructed, their load capacity, angle for proper drainage and how many GPM they need to drain to remain clear, and their coarseness of texture for a given coefficient of friction in order to get a drivers license. Flying cars? No damn way... 99% of drivers are too stupid or not interested enough to maintain that knowledge base.

Anyway, that's off topic... I can't comment on the level of training they get in NZ, but I do know that down there, an instructor job isn't held by a low time pilot fresh out of flight school like it is here. Perhaps there, the knowledge and nuances that were trained in flight school fade after so many years of not having to constantly repeat them to students and the memories fade? But as for mast bumping- here in the US, it's just common knowledge that you don't get into low G situations with a semi- rigid rotor system much in the same way you don't drive down the wrong side of the highway, and doing so is just plain willful ignorance. The fact that, according to that article, there have been the same number of mast bumping accidents in the US and NZ since 2000, despite the US having nine times the number of Robbies is telling. Does gravity work backwards down there or something? I know they're upside down compared to us, but the helicopters should still be operating in a positive G environment, so I'd wager it's not a design flaw.

Mast bumping has nothing to do with a low inertia rotor system, which is what scares me about the R22; it has everything to do with pilot error due to various reasons. I'll give you an example: In a helicopter, there are two levers you manipulate with your hands- a center stick in front of you called the cyclic, wich makes the helicopter move forward and back and left and right, and a lever to your left that looks like a big parking brake lever called the collective that's moved up and down to make the helicopter rise and fall. While in forward flight, the cyclic operates much in the same way that the stick or yoke of an airplane does- push forward to go down, pull back to go up, push left to roll left, push right to roll right. However, in a helicopter with a semi- rigid rotor system, if you want to go down, YOU DO NOT PUSH FORWARD ON THE CYCLIC! You lower the collective. If you're hovering and want to move forward, you push forward, but never, ever during forward flight without also moving the cyclic. If you're in turbulence, you pull back on the cyclic, lower the collective and SLOW THE EFF DOWN. Never, ever, ever push forward on the cyclic to correct for any ballooning that occurs during turbulence. The only situation during forward flight where it's OK to push forward is when you want to go faster, in which case you also lift up on the collective, maintaining positive rotor disc loading. But you never, never use forward cyclic to descend or otherwise control your altitude. I cannot over emphasize this.

I'm leaving a lot out for the sake of brevity and there are other situations where it can occur, ie- taking off from a slope. If you want me to go into more detail about the dynamics of those situations and what actually happens during a mast bumping event, I can. This is just a glossed over general gist of what I was taught and part of the curriculum I taught my students, and for a pilot- even a student that hasn't soloed yet (under 15 hours, minimum)- to not know, be aware of, and heed this is just inexcusable.