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How to avoid crashing your helicopter if the engine quits

submitted by calvados

1 decade 7 years 1 month 2 weeks ago

Planes have aerodynamics on their side: they can glide pretty far to a safe landing spot if the fan stops turning for some reason. Helicopters don't glide, but there's one thing they can do: something called autorotation. They dive, get the main rotor freewheeling faster and faster, and then use that kinetic energy to bite the blades into the air just before touchdown and soften the landing. Not foolproof though -- you need at least 1000' of altitude to make it happen, and if your timing is off, you'll botch the landing in a painful perishable way.

13 Comments

we could really do with an "air & space" channel. I think I'm going to start hijacking the *spacy channel that way.

Adding video to channels (Spacy) - requested by calvados.

That was ace. I have done this in a helicopter game/simulator and it is damn hard to do.

I flew backseat in H-2's in the Navy. Auto-rotations were standard practice, I've sat in on 20-30 of them in a single day... they can be gut-wrenching with a cherry pilot.

@enzo: cool, thanks for that

*findthumb

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - findthumb requested by calvados.

dag

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Seemed like he still had a lot of forward motion by the time he got to the runway. Would that not tear off the skids?

I'm no chopper pilot, but I think they're built pretty sturdy. I've heard of heavily loaded choppers being intentionally bounced the length of a runway on their skids in order to get forward speed to help with liftoff.

I'm glad I watched that video. It saved my life last night.

And I've told you, I don't like you flying your helicopter at night.

*wings

Adding video to channels (Wings) - requested by Issykitty.

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