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.