Heli crash

[Baconzoo]

http://media.skoopy.com/vids/vid_00360.wmv

They all lived.

[kush1]

678910

[Sublime]

Pretty rad. I wonder what went wrong with the heli to make it spin out of control.

True fact a heli can loose power and safely glide back to the ground. I wonder why he didn't kill the engine and coast to the ground?

[PrankMonkey]

True fact a heli can loose power and safely glide back to the ground. I wonder why he didn't kill the engine and coast to the ground?

If I'm not mistaken, a helo needs to be moving forward at a decent enough clip that the air moving across the blades generates enough lift (a la gyrocopter) If its in a hover or moving slowly it has no place to go but down. As per the video....i mean gad DAAMN! if it were me in there my shorts definitely would need to get replaced after that. Glad everyone made it, kudos to the pilot.

[ak_powder_monkey]

Pretty rad. I wonder what went wrong with the heli to make it spin out of control.

True fact a heli can loose power and safely glide back to the ground. I wonder why he didn't kill the engine and coast to the ground?

helis can glide down unless they are between 20 and 200 feet or something like that

[Svengali]

True fact a heli can loose power and safely glide back to the ground. I wonder why he didn't kill the engine and coast to the ground?[/QUOTE]


While this is true, apparently it only works around 20% of the time(and only with a loss of power and not some other mech.problem--I'm sure the pilot in the vid. was trying to save his ship

[bdog]

From the looks of the video there was not much available for a flat landing. Helis can autorotate when power is lost. The rotorhead can be disconnected from the main drive which allows the rotor to spin freely giving some lift and allowing a survivable landing. The aircraft in the video appeared to have power but had lost lift. In the best of situations helis don't glide all that well.

[L7]

I've taken great interest in this and have several friends who fly. A while back I sat on the beach with one pilot friend after a long ride and watched students practise auto rotations at a mountian heli flying school next to the beach. Here's the rundown as I understand it.

They call the main rotor the interia disk because it's all about how much momentum is in that rotor to keep it spinning. The hydraulics that run the controls and pitch on the blades as well as the tail rotor do not run directly off of the motor but instead off of the momentum in the main rotor. That way if power is lost as long as the main rotor keeps spinning then all the other controls and tail rotor are still functional.

The rotor generally spins to push air through and downward to keep lift. If power is lost the pilot has 20 seconds or something to change the pitch of the blades for air to start going through the blades the other way and keep the rotor spinning from that force instead of the motor.

At that point the machine can be taken down in a radius of 1000 feet for every 1500 feet of elevation or something like that. There is actually enough energy in the rotors (inertia disc) if done right the pilot can put it down fairly softly and pick it up and move it over 10 feet or so.

I think this whole concept is very cool and hopefully not too boring to others.

The problem is without elevation they're screwed as there isn't enough time to drop enough to get enough air through the rotors. Loosing power 1000' off the deck is much different then 200' off the deck. They also can be screwed if they loose hydraulic pressure or loose the tail rotor. Pure engine failure at enough height can be survived though.

That crash is wild and it's hard to say if they had another problem or just not enough height to retain control.

[FigureEleven]

That was a fantastic little viddy! Amazing that all survived.

[Baconzoo]

When I was in NZ flying with Waren Millers group, we did an auto rotate. We were way up there 3000+ feet and it felt like an amusement park ride. A big drop to a controlled decent. When he finally pulled up on the collective bar, our stomachs went to the floor. It was fricken balls!