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!
