Ask a helicopter pilot anything

[take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey]

Siko said:

Hi Mabbs!

It can be very tiring - I once did a 45min solo wet winching sortie in Anglesey harbour (30 mins hovering or so) was really hard work! I also used to fly a surveillance task on the Puma which involved long periods in a very high hover with extra fuel tanks fitted - think the longest I was in a high hover at night was circa 2 hours and yes that was bloody knackering!

Thankfully most modern helicopters (particularly SAR ones like you saw) have hover modes which help to alleviate the job but they don’t always work perfectly…..

Surprised they didn't have auto hover. Even the H2s had passable auto hover... H3s really good by all accounts.

[Mabbs9]

For us fixed-wing bods the autopilot assistance sounds most appealing! Thanks for your answers once again.

[Siko]

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey said:

Surprised they didn't have auto hover. Even the H2s had passable auto hover... H3s really good by all accounts.

Puma autopilot was essentially 1960/70s technology for the most part. Basic height hold and balanced turns (iirc), I almost never used the height hold as it was cr**.

The Merlin could hover on automatics very well but generally speaking you’d never use the automatics for regular flying. I suspect the Navy anti-submarine Merlins use it routinely although I honestly don’t know, but I can’t imagine it’s much fun sitting in the hover at night over the sea manually

The S92 I fly has no auto hover although I think the SAR model does have that capability. We can only maintain coupled flight down to 55kts on my variant, meaning we have to manually fly every takeoff and landing. Other aircraft types use different techniques and I was told by an EC225 (Super Puma) pilot that they would double click their autopilot as they established a hover and it would be automatically maintained.

[Siko]

Mabbs9 said:

For us fixed-wing bods the autopilot assistance sounds most appealing! Thanks for your answers once again.

No worries! I guess I’m a bit of a Luddite but the way I was trained to do military flying (and my basic SAR course all pilots had to do - 25 hrs iirc) was to put an aircraft (if required) into situations that needed instant and constant corrections based on voice marshalling from the crewman/winch operator. I don’t know how modern SAR is done compared to what I learnt back in 1999 (last millennium ), so it may be used all the time by modern SAR crews but since I got my wings and 6500hrs later I’ve probably used an auto-hover facility at best for a mere handful of those hours.

As an aside, the night surveillance task we did was incredibly difficult to do and some of the most challenging flying I have ever done. As I mentioned the Puma had no auto hover and we were usually asked to maintain an accurate GPS location/height/heading for anything upto 2-2:30hrs or so. We used to put the gps waypoint into our very basic FMS and then make an approach into the high hover (always at night!) where we switched over to a Doppler hover meter. This worked in the opposite sense to our ILS which was mega confusing at times, showing where you are going as opposed to where you want to be. It was all often slow to show movement and as it was pitch black you only noticed you were losing the hover when you glanced down at the FMS and saw your waypoint rapidly accelerating away……

I fell asleep once in the hover….or at least nodded off for a few seconds and waking up as the helicopter wobbled out of the hover (with my navigator still fast asleep too) was not an experience I ever want to repeat

[Chuck328]

What's your approach minima in one of these? I know ABZ and INV are both Cat 1 ILS. I assume you can fly that to system mins?

[take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey]

Siko said:

Puma autopilot was essentially 1960/70s technology for the most part. Basic height hold and balanced turns (iirc), I almost never used the height hold as it was cr**.

The Merlin could hover on automatics very well but generally speaking you’d never use the automatics for regular flying. I suspect the Navy anti-submarine Merlins use it routinely although I honestly don’t know, but I can’t imagine it’s much fun sitting in the hover at night over the sea manually

The S92 I fly has no auto hover although I think the SAR model does have that capability. We can only maintain coupled flight down to 55kts on my variant, meaning we have to manually fly every takeoff and landing. Other aircraft types use different techniques and I was told by an EC225 (Super Puma) pilot that they would double click their autopilot as they established a hover and it would be automatically maintained.

Thanks. My context was SAR... I suppose this and ASW is the only use where it's worth the expense.

[Siko]

Chuck328 said:

What's your approach minima in one of these? I know ABZ and INV are both Cat 1 ILS. I assume you can fly that to system mins?

500m rvr is our minima for a destination ils. An alternate has to have +200 ft cloud base over the minima (normally 200ft, so weather actual and forecast suitable for 400ft) and +200m rvr, so for an alternate airfield typically 400ft cloudbase/700m rvr. Offshore it’s 1400m visibility.

[Geneve]

Lost ranger said:

Years ago the met police helicopters of the time (Bell 222s?) always seemed to have the undercarriage down when hovering, even hundreds of feet up. Did the wheels come down automatically at slow speed or was there some other reason?

The other reason for having gear down in a high hover (out of ground effect) is that, in the the event of engine(s) failure and the need for a rapid autorotation, the helicopter is already equipped for landing.

As an aside there are YouTube videos where the retractable gear has stuck (up) and the pilot has descended to a low hover, to allow pax to disembark, and then landed the fuselage of the Heli on carefully stacked tyres. All much less dramatic than a fixed-wing undercarriage failure.

[Speed 3]

Siko said:

The S92 I fly has no auto hover although I think the SAR model does have that capability. We can only maintain coupled flight down to 55kts on my variant, meaning we have to manually fly every takeoff and landing. Other aircraft types use different techniques and I was told by an EC225 (Super Puma) pilot that they would double click their autopilot as they established a hover and it would be automatically maintained.

The EC225 had a far superior AP set up compared to the S92, unfortunately the EC225 was hampered by other legacy issues of a design developed beyond its sell-by date (a la 737). Americans like functional, French like sophisticated. I did have the pleasure of a rig trip with our Chief Test Pilot on an EC225 (ex-Empire Test Flight School guy MP - as good as they get who may have overlapped with you in ABZ) just before I left - and it was later grounded of course.

[Siko]

Speed 3 said:

The EC225 had a far superior AP set up compared to the S92, unfortunately the EC225 was hampered by other legacy issues of a design developed beyond its sell-by date (a la 737). Americans like functional, French like sophisticated. I did have the pleasure of a rig trip with our Chief Test Pilot on an EC225 (ex-Empire Test Flight School guy MP - as good as they get who may have overlapped with you in ABZ) just before I left - and it was later grounded of course.

Hi mate - yes I know MP well. Lovely chap with a gentle stutter and brain the size of a planet. I met him when I was 'holding' at Boscombe Down waiting to start helicopter flying training and he was one of the Test Pilots, he took me flying a few times and despite being a lowly unwinged trainee pilot he treated me exactly like a fellow helicopter pilot.

I have flown the 225 Simulator and it was very nice indeed - in fact as part of my application to my current employer I had to jump into the 225 Simulator for a brief assessment. It was mega twitchy compared to the aircraft I flew at the time but obviously got me through the door as I didn't do too badly! In the military world you have dedicated Sim instructors who are normally ex-military retired types, normally fairly chilled out and not on a career push just happy to do the hours and top up the pension. When I jumped in the 225 Simulator for my assessment an older guy got in and set it all up and I assumed it was the same sort of retired pilot type as in the military, we had a nice friendly gas about stuff and even during the flight it was very informal and I just assumed he would give a yes/no to the HR team. Come the interview the same guy was sitting opposite me and turned out to be the head of training for the whole company! He was a genuinely nice guy though and obviously I got the job, I wish I'd known who he was first as I would have treated him very differently

[Siko]

Geneve said:

The other reason for having gear down in a high hover (out of ground effect) is that, in the the event of engine(s) failure and the need for a rapid autorotation, the helicopter is already equipped for landing.

As an aside there are YouTube videos where the retractable gear has stuck (up) and the pilot has descended to a low hover, to allow pax to disembark, and then landed the fuselage of the Heli on carefully stacked tyres. All much less dramatic than a fixed-wing undercarriage failure.

Spot on

The S92 has a fully castoring nosewheel which is unpowered, there is no issue with it unless you have completed a tight turn just prior to take off when the wheel could be 90 degrees out to the side....it should rotate back into line with the undercarriage bay but has been known not to do so and when the gear has been raised it can jam. Hence we have to do a short straight taxi to line up the wheel if we have completed a tight turn, which should sort it out. The Merlin had a fully powered, castering nosewheel which was just amazing as it could turn in it's own length, which was quite a cool party trick. You pulled a little bit of power to lighten the aircraft, pressed the nosewheel button (which turned it 90 degrees to the aircraft heading) and lowered the lever again, then just used yaw pedal to spin the helicopter around on the spot. It really was amazing how tightly you could turn a 70' long helicopter around without moving off your spot

[swampy442]

Groundcrew - Another nose wheel change.....

[swampy442]

Anyway, the RPG pictures. You could speculate it was a dud round, which is possible, but reality also says that 3 or 4 inches to the left or down could have set it off. The frame below the window, thats roughly inline with where the seats fit.
There were a number of people on board too, I seem to remember 11 but that might not be true.

[take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey]

Bloody hell. Lot of lucky folks on that helo that day.

[Siko]

That’s absolutely amazing and thanks for posting. I know why it didn’t go off (well at least what I was told at the time) but all I’ll say is there was a huge dollop of luck involved.

[Mercdriver]

Wow, would it have detonated if it hit a soft target, like a body?

I would have gone out and bought a lottery ticket if I had been on board.

[take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey]

Out of interest, how would that be repaired?

[swampy442]

Siko said:

That’s absolutely amazing and thanks for posting. I know why it didn’t go off (well at least what I was told at the time) but all I’ll say is there was a huge dollop of luck involved.

Absolutely, as you know the seat backs were a couple of inches below that, no doubt if it hit that it would have gone off. Incredibly lucky

[swampy442]

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey said:

Out of interest, how would that be repaired?

I cant remember, as you can see its a honeycomb laminate, normally you'd plug repair it and fibreglass patch on top, but I assume it would be a scab patch

[jamiem555]

swampy442 said:

take-good-care-of-the-forest-dewey said:

Out of interest, how would that be repaired?

I cant remember, as you can see its a honeycomb laminate, normally you'd plug repair it and fibreglass patch on top, but I assume it would be a scab patch

In a war zone, probably dress out the sharp bits and plug it with araldite and speed tape. Fix it properly when it gets back to the uk. Pretty amazing pics though.