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Hot new helicopter/rotorcraft news
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
And they were advertising FAA certification at NHA symposium last week.
Except for the overtorques, mast moment exceedances, and inability to full auto...sure.
For anybody who is about to ask what "mast moment" is, this is breaking it down Barney style... well, Barney style along with some crassness:
It's when the helicopter is doing a running landing and it stops too abruptly. Running landings in skid helicopters are like a sleigh ride in grass or whatever surface you're landing on. When you do it properly then it's smooth and routine. But if you bottom the collective pitch too soon (abruptly reduce lift) then the skids suddenly dig in and it feels like a student driver hitting the brakes (or a Pensacola driver doing every day braking). The rotor mast feels something that related to the physics of shaking a baby, i.e. it's bad for it.
The Bell 206 is fairly tolerant to this abuse. Unfortunately for the UH-72, the rotor mast is not particularly rugged. It's a nice helicopter in a lot of ways but it's the wrong machine for primary flight training. This is a bit like a driving school getting a fleet of pretty nice but not particularly rugged cars and then wondering why the students tear them up. How the Army flight school ended up with the 72s is a sorry story that had a lot to do with the Guard wanting to get rid of their 72s. That was their mistake and they're stuck with it for the next couple decades, but it doesn't have to be ours too. Hopefully the sea services aren't dumb enough to copy their mistake by paying for a bunch of brand new ones, which would make it an even dumber mistake for us.
Is that the case? It was my understanding that it has to come from the Feds - either a cert or a waiver - to operate in national airspace.
Admittedly, I'm not a NAVAIR lawyer, but if operated under PAO, then my understanding is that portions of the 14 CFR "Civil" rules don't apply. Part 91 will still apply, but much of the certification goes onto the government's (DoD) responsibility and risk. Of course, DoD (and by extension, NAVAIR) may not want to assume that risk, so in the end it ends up being something that also certified by the FAA. I didn't think that was the case with the -206, though.
Not every flight is assumed to be PAO, and it can't be for commercial purposes, but 99.9% of Navy operational flying (and by extension, TRACOM flying) is PAO.
Albeit about UAS, here's a quick synopsis of Public Aircraft Operations, as told by the FAA. There's more stuff in the NAVAIR 3710.1, as well.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/resources/e...dia/Workshop_9_Public_Aircraft_Operations.pdf
Doing full touchdown autos in a modern helicopter is a serious exercise in "this is the way we've always done it, so square peg meet round hole".
Seriously, buy a light twin IFR helo and do power recovery autos. It's not that complicated.
Seriously, buy a light twin IFR helo and do power recovery autos. It's not that complicated.
Maybe... maybe not. I don't have 100% faith in naval air, in an institutional sense, to competently teach autorotations if we only ever do power recovery autos.
Seeing the power recovery auto technique of a lot of 57C-only IPs, almost all of them came in way too high and fast until we got money for regular IP proficiency flights in the 57B. (IP proficiency flights just didn't exist in the HTs until about ten years ago.) Think about that, those were fleet-experienced IPs that were getting as many flight hours a year as most guys get in a tour nowadays.
Considering fleet helicopters with low inertia rotor heads, the consolidated autorotation instruction for the 60B/F/H/R/S wings that came out about ten years ago had significant changes to the way the Navy should do practice autos in the 60 and a decent analysis of what a full auto in a 60 would actually be like. Prior to that instruction, the way pretty much all of the 60 RAGs got a lot of basics wrong for many, many years.
So I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's just too easy to convince ourselves we're getting the maneuver right if we never have to prove that we're doing it right.
I get where you’re coming from. As a counterpoint, teaching studs to auto the -57 is teaching bad habit patterns similar to machine-gunning the trim release, and they take that to the fleet. This was hashed over years ago in this same thread.
Edit: Not to say autos as a safety of flight item in advanced isn’t important. But if something autos similar to the fleet, and we can teach proper techniques early, that’s a good thing. Building our trainer requirements out of an old training helo necessity is looking backwards.
Granted, we try to get the students to progress from the early FAM dummy-proof "pull, pause, level, cushion-cushion-cushion" flare towards a flare with more finessed control inputs that can transfer to low inertia heads. It doesn't always work out that way (which you mentioned) but that's the goal. Maybe we oughtta emphasize it more back in flight school.
I don't know who taught you to machine gun the force trim, I didn't let any of my onwings or IUTs do that
<-proud button masher (former)...clickety-click-click!Granted, we try to get the students to progress from the early FAM dummy-proof "pull, pause, level, cushion-cushion-cushion" flare towards a flare with more finessed control inputs that can transfer to low inertia heads. It doesn't always work out that way (which you mentioned) but that's the goal. Maybe we oughtta emphasize it more back in flight school.
I don't know who taught you to machine gun the force trim, I didn't let any of my onwings or IUTs do that
Except the 72 isn't good for this either. It has a ridiculously low inertia head and a highly sensitive collective control, meaning a student can over-Nr you very easily.
Hell, a USAF Major test pilot student did it to me.