A ton of flying

Well if you look at my first post to my most recent, you'll notice that the entries are getting much more spaced out. I'm no longer going to be naming my post by day, because to be honest I have lost track of how many times I have gone in. This is a good thing; I've been flying quite a bit lately. However, the flights in this stage are fairly repetitive, with a lot of pattern work (meaning we takeoff, fly around the runway, and land again). Most of the maneuvers I need to learn at this stage can be done with in the pattern. I'll list some of the things I've gone over here:

Auto-rotations: I may have already mentioned this one, but an autorotation is what you go in to when you have an engine failure. The technique is simple, but it needs to become a reflex due to those first precious seconds where the correct inputs will help ensure or ruin a safe landing. Basically you lower the collective (the lever that controls up and down movement) and the pitch angle will decrease, causing the blades to spin faster on their own. See those leafs to the left? You ever notice how they spin to the ground? Auto's kinda work the same way, and surprisingly when you keep the rotor speed up you can float to the ground at a safe speed, as long as you keep some forward motion that you trade for some stopping power once you get to the ground.

Hovering Autorotations: Same concept as a normal auto, it just happens during a hover. You perform a few quick motions which creates a cushion of air right before you touch down, thus slowing you down, and then you land softly. Once again, it's not too hard to perform, it just takes some quick thinking to perform the actions in time.

Settling with power: This happens when you are high up in the air at a slow speed, and the pitch angle is too high, thus creating too much drag on the the rotors and you lose altitude. Naturally when you start losing altitude, you want to pull the collective control up so you can start climbing again. However, if you do that in this situation, you will create even more drag and drop a lot faster, and soon you will face the danger of stalling the blades. That's a bad day. To get out of it is simple too, you just dive a little bit until your airspeed gets back up, and then you can start climbing again. As usual, it's not too hard, you just need to make it a second nature reaction to be safe.

Low Rotor RPM stall: This was a much bigger problem years ago when there was not an electronic governor that automatically keeps your RPM's up, however we still need to be aware of it and not every helicopter has a governor. All you have to do is lower the collective and it will shoot back up. The safe place is at 104% Rotor RPM, and the alarm goes off at 97%. The trick is to catch it before the alarm, and my instructor is constantly adjusting it to catch me off guard.

Quick Stops: This is not an emergency procedure, and it's exactly what it sounds like. While Air taxing around the airport (which is hovering at about 25ft while doing around 40 knots) you pull back on the cyclic and come to a quick stop. Simple enough, making it look pretty is a bit harder :)

Maximum performance takeoff: A normal takeoff is where you get some speed and then start gaining altitude. This kind of take off involves going straight up until your skids have enough clearance to clear whatever obstacle is in your way, like a tree or something.

That's it for now. Otherwise I'm just fine tuning on what I already know. To date I have around 17 hours of flight time logged, and my first solo should be around 20-30 hours of flight time. I'm looking to post my next update then!

Day 8: The good, the bad, and the redemption.

First of all, I apologize for the lengthy delay in getting a post up. A big reason is I didn't have my medical certificate until sometime in January, and I had a bunch of ground lessons since last November. I also had a bunch of flights cancelled due to the crazy weather we've been having, but now that is finally changing!

Oh one more thing to note: I won't be posting much on ground school anymore unless it's really interesting, because quite honestly those entries will tend to be quite boring and dry to most people. Besides, the actually flying is the fun part.

So on that note, let me just say that I have flow three times in the past week. Last Tuesday I flew with my primary instructor, Mark Pearson, and much to my surprise he informed me that it was his last time flying to me. Turns out, he just landed a job in Vegas where he will be doing flight tours of the Grand Canyon! How sweet is that?! Unfortunately, that put me in a spot where all the lessons I had scheduled for March were suddenly null and void, and on top of that I had to learn under a new instructor.

Either way, my lesson with him went pretty well all things considered. We just did the usual pattern work with a little bit of hovering practice, and overall I felt pretty comfortable.

Then came the next day where I completely sucked.

Now I really only have myself to blame, but to be fair the odds were against me. I had a brand new instructor, the winds were a bit up that day, we flew to a different airport for the first time, and we were at it for almost two hours non stop. Not a good combo for a guy with only three flights under his belt. Needless to say, I just wasn't feeling it that day and I couldn't even hold a hover, or even have a prayer at a smooth landing (Don't worry, although I wasn't landing well my instructor was taking over the controls constantly, that's how that game works). Anyway, I simply wasn't clicking with his style, and I never felt that whole time like I truly was in control. That's a terrible feeling.

That brings us to today, where I had yet another instructor named Bobby Lucas. I'm not going to say that he is a better instructor then the last guy, because they both know their stuff, but I just absolutely had much more control and clicked a lot better with him. Today I even took off from the tarmac almost completely unassisted into a nice hover, and his method of teaching takeoffs just made perfect sense to me. Other then that, it was a pretty standard day with a lot of pattern work, but we also did some hovering taxi work, where I would hover at about a jogging pace while trying stay a few feet above this yellow line. This is harder then it sounds. The trick is
to let your feet do the work while using the cyclic only to control your forward movement, much like riding a bike at slow speeds where you do less leaning and more steering (makes sense right?).

I will say, he does stretch me and demand more of me then my original instructor did, but as you guess that's a good thing. Hard is good. I have another flight tomorrow bright and early at 8 am, and I hope it goes as well as today.

Day 5, 6 & 7: Grounded!

That little model became my new best friend over the past three lessons.

So you know what happens when you get to fly a lot? You have to catch up on ground lessons. My last three trips to American Helicopters resulted in just that. Lot's of ground school.

I'm not going to go into an incredible amount of detail here, but I'll touch on the topics. Basically I learned about every mechanical and electrical component of the R22 helicopter, and the various physics that act upon it at different parts of flight. Today we shifted gears and we starting talking about different flight patterns and airspace restrictions. 

Needless to say, it's been a while since I've been fully engaged and intrigued in what I'm learning, mostly because the Coast Guard has dozens of "Mandated training" that has been going on lately, so it was quite refreshing!

Okay before I wrap this up, there's one super cool thing I learned that pilots can do when they fly to an uncontrolled airstrip after hours. Many of these airports have something called pilot controlled lights, which means that when a pilot is trying to find the runway, they key up the radio to the frequency of that airport, and press the send button either 3, 5, or 7 times. Depending on how many times you hit that button, turns the airport lights to either low, medium or high. Sweet right?!

Just think of the possibilities. If you live next to one of those type of airports, you could get a VHF radio in your house and turn on those lights whenever you please. Pretty much the ultimate party trick.

Okay that's all for now, below is a picture of the trailer with the extra classrooms in it that we were in. Notice that it is INSIDE that hanger. That just makes me laugh for some reason.

Day 4: Pre-flight checklists are important. Hovering still hard, but getting there!

So I had a two and a half hour block this time around, so we got to take more time to go through a more in depth pre-flight checklist. Those things are pretty in depth! There's literally 50+ items that you have to look over in order to be fully satisfied that the aircraft is ready to fly.

I just thought to myself how amusing it would be if we did the same kind of checklist on our cars before driving anywhere. People would end up walking more.

Anyway, this was a great flight, and I got to do a bit of everything. Hovering is really the last big step I have to get the hang of in order to not require much assistance while flying. I got a big more of the hang of the cyclic, but the other two controls need a bit of work for sure.

I didn't get a chance to get any really good pictures, so you'll have to wait until I get airborne again to get one. Ground school this Sunday!

Day 3: Much, much better than day 2

My mother will appreciate this more than anyone 

So this was a later lesson then the last one, and it ended up being a half day flight and half night flight. This time my instructors name was Mark. Like the last time, we quickly went through the preflight checklist so we can spend as much time flying as possible. 

Tonight ended up being half a day flight and half a night flight, so I got to experience the best of that sunset plus some night flying, which is really cool...especially if you could see the way they light up the runway for you. There is literally a giant white arrow blinking towards the longer of the two runways. You'd have to be blind to not see which runway you were supposed to land at.

For flight school, you basically run the same rectangular pattern over and over again. You take off, and once you reach about 50 knots you start to ascend to roughly 900ft and hold that altitude for the duration, while maintaining at least 60 knots. 

One kind of funny observation I noticed was on the second to last turn, there is a Target store on the ground that you can see quite clearly at night. I found myself aiming for the Target symbol as a reference point for roughly the right heading I was supposed to maintain, which ended up being pretty accurate!

Now while I didn't get to practice any hovering this time, I will fortunately say that the cyclic control made oh so much more sense to me this time around. I really felt like the commands I gave produced the results I wanted this time around. Granted, I have a ton of fine tuning to learn, but at least the movements I made on the stick made more sense to me.

Landing is another thing. I won't go into too much detail, but there is a lot more movements to landing a helicopter then you would think, so I'll more than likely be working on that the next time around.

I leave tomorrow for a week in Tampa, so I won't get any flying in until probably another week and a half. More to come then!

Day 2: Hovering is HARD

So to start, I'm currently in the middle of my night shift at the NAVCEN, so please excuse any typo's, and I'll do my best not to spill any mountain dew on the keyboard, for that drink is always present as I enter the long hours after midnight.

Anyway, I fought through traffic and got there about 9 AM today, and I was under instruction of Jeff today (He's the chief flight instructor).

Even though today was more or less an introductory day, I still feel like we went over a TON of stuff. All in all, I had about 4 hours today of ground school alone, talking about everything from the aerodynamics of the R-22 to how it flys and manuevers and what forces are acting upon, to some of the very key things not to do...which are obviously very important.

For example, did you know a preferred takeoff of a helicopter is actually taking off much like an airplane does? If you're like me, you may have thought all helicopters just take off and land straight up and straight down all the time. While they are perfectly capable of doing this, it's much safer to do this with forward motion.

Basically, without going into much detail to get confusing, if the engine were to cease and you have to forward motion, you would drop pretty fast and have no other means of slowing down besides the natural autorotation of the blades. However, with a bit of motion, you can drift to the ground and when you're about 20 ft or so above the ground, you can pull back on the stick and slow yourself down drastically and land nice and smoothly. Cool huh?

That situation I just discribed is called autorotation, and it's one of the maneuvers we did today. I have to say...it's one of my favorites. You know how a bird quickly flaps its wings right before touchdown? Well that's exactly how it felt, with a bit of a whoosh to it and everything. Cool stuff. And did I mention helicopters can land while still moving and skid to a stop all action movie style? Yeah we did that too.

Moving on, the last part of my lesson involved learning how to hover. This is much more difficult than I anticipated. Imagine standing on a basketball with one foot while balancing a stick with a plate on your nose. Not a simple feat, and just slightly over doing it on the controls will send you everywhere like a pendulum with rockets. There's a lot of fine movements with your feet and hands that allow you to stablilize the R-22, and it's going to take more than 20 minutes for me to get the feeling of it.

So that's a pretty good amount for one day, and I'm pretty wiped now. I was a bit frusterated in the end because I was starting to get a bit nauseous, but I'll take some medicine next time until I'm finally good enough to actually anticipate the motion, and then I think I won't feel sick anymore. Makes sense right? I'll be pretty ticked if I feel sick next time.

Here's a couple of the R-22s, I got to fly the one on the right.

Here's Jeff trying to finish the preflight checklist (Which is pretty lengthy by the way, which is good) before the storm came through. We were too slow and it absolutely poured for an hour before we got to fly.

That's it for now, time to stock up at CVS for the next run! I'm determined to get that hovering perfect asap.

Day 1: The Journey begins

So after months and months of carefully planning, I've FINALLY started the helicopter training process, beginning with getting my private helicopter pilot's license. I've created this blog to document the experience from start to finish...from absolutely no experience to full professional pilot (Lord willing)!

I searched the internet many times over for some sort of documentation of someone like me getting all their qualifications from start to finish, but I could not really find any, so I figured I would make one of my own. There's no sense in complaining about something that you're not willing to fix yourself if you have the option to do so. Anyway, let me start with a quick paragraph about who I am and what my intentions are.

My name is Jonathan, and I'm 24 currently serving in the USCG in Alexandria, VA. I just paid for a prepaid package that allows me to get my private helicopter pilots license, and I'll be training at a place called American Helicopters which is based out of Mannasas, VA (www.americanheli.com). For those of you wondering about how the military comes in to play, they basically cover 60% of all expenses past private helo license under the most currect MGIB bill. Basically, this first stage (my private license) is all on me.

Simple enough right? I'm quite anxious to get started, and my first lesson is tomorrow if the weather holds up. More to come!