Through whatever contrived scenario you care to imagine I find myself stranded on a deserted island with a typical civilian sightseeing helicopter possessing a nonfunctional radio and a nonfunctional pilot. Invent whatever reasons you like for waiting for search and rescue to not be a viable option.
Would I be able to figure it out well enough to fly 50 miles back to civilization using whatever guides and materials are normally included with such a craft?
For background, I have basic knowledge of the controls and what they do from previous entertainment reading. No experience, just the general theory of what the cyclic, collective, and pedals will do when pushed and pulled.
Would I even be able to get it started if I hadn’t been paying attention at the start of the trip?
I’m thinking that I could play with the throttle, collective, and pedals to get just enough off the ground to get a feel for the lift and be able to drop it without significant damage when it starts to go into a spin. Then when I can keep it stable, get some altitude and add the cyclic to get me headed homeward.
WAG but I think you are doomed. Going down and creating a big smoking hole. I have a number of hours in fixed wing aircraft but nothing in a copter. However I do know that a helicopter is many times more difficult to learn than fixed wing aircraft. In fact, I will go so far to say that someone with basic knowledge of fixed wing aircraft could take off and fly to a destination. The landing would be up for question, but I am positive that they could get it off the ground.
As far as a little bit of knowledge I think you would do all right in fixed wing. If you played a few hundred hours of flight sims you would know enough to do most basic things in a fixed wing aircraft. I can’t say the same about helicopters.
I tried to hover a helicopter around 20’ off of the ground, without drifting to either side.
I couldn’t do it.
It would have taken me quite a while to develop the “feel” necessary to control the craft - in the time I had, I wasn’t able to master the feedback necessary. The controls were both surprisingly “twitchy” and unresponsive at the same time.
You pull up on the cyclic and you have to compensate for the increased torque of the main rotor with the pedals otherwise you start to spin in place. While compensating, you have to move the helicopter in the right direction with the stick but that direction changes while you’re fooling around with the pedals and the cyclic. Small changes are required in all three controls, but you don’t have enough experience to make small changes in a controlled, smooth manner, but there is a slight delay between what you are doing and the helicopter responding to what you are doing. In mere moments things are oscillating wildly and you and the helicopter have tipped over. Let’s not forget the effects of being close to the ground or a cross breeze. Hell, it’s hard enough to learn to fly these things with an Instructor Pilot sitting next to you.
Then there are the myriad gotchas. Like the Huey dip. While in a Huey, if you haul up on the collective and shove the stick forward the helicopter will rise, go forward and suddenly the nose will go down, i.e., “dip.” I have no idea what kind of quirks other helicopters have, but I’ll bet they are out there.
When I was in the nuclear Navy, there was a particular watch station called “feed control” that regulated the feed water going to the steam generators.
Most of the time the flow rates were automatically controlled by an amazing Rube Goldberg machine full of levers and bellows. During low power operation there just wasn’t enough water flowing for the automatic stuff to work, so it was SOP for the guy to stand in front of three great big valves and adjust each one to keep all three steam generators with the correct level. Big pumps sent water through the valves to the three tanks, where the feed water boiled to make steam.
How hard could that be? Just dial it in, right?
The problem is that since all three valves were fed from the same pipe, whatever you did to one affected the other too. Combine this with the difficulty of getting even one exactly right—kind of like how we never really hold the steering wheel rigid, we are always drifting and correcting.
My first time at Feed Control was a humbling experience. It was hard to keep those water levels right. I tended to focus too much on one that was dropping and then ignore the other one that was rising too fast. My corrections were too crude, always over correcting.
It took me two or three four-hour watches to get the knack of using 3 valves to keep 3 tanks at the right level.
The interrelated controls of a helicopter are far more complex—you just wouldn’t have enough fuel to learn.
Small changes are required in all three controls, but you don’t have enough experience to make small changes in a controlled, smooth manner. And there is a slight delay between what you are doing and the helicopter responding to what you are doing.
As obbn says, an airplane will basically fly itself. Helicopters are inherently unstable. Upset a typical airplane like a Cessna or Piper, and it will return to stable flight. Helicopters require minute, constant control inputs in order to fly.
Hovering is the hardest part, and that’s what you have to learn first. On my first lesson the instructor brought the heli into a hover and told me to take the pedals. All I had to do is keep the nose pointed at something we chose as a marker. How hard could it be?
Very. Once I was able to keep the nose pointed more-or-less straight ahead, he gave me the cyclic. All I had to do was keep us over a spot, while also keeping the nose pointed at our mark. I was all over the place. Just as I got to the point where I could keep us within a relatively small radius, he gave me the collective and throttle. Again I was all over the place. At the end of an hour I could actually hover – for a given area of ‘hovering’. It was easier the second lesson, and of course got progressively easier. Then it was time to coordinate everything to actually lift the helicopter from the ground and into a hover.
I did do a half-hour intro lesson before I started training. I used my fixed-wing skills to attempt to control a helicopter for a few minutes. Wrong. For example, you don’t use back-pressure like you do in an airplane. For another, the controls in a helicopter are much more sensitve due to the inherent instability. On the drive home from the intro I got the idea that it was more like a video game. I used that strategy on my first actual lesson, and was able to fly a course to the practice area and back.
But being able to fly a helicopter based on fixed-wing experience is one thing. You can’t do it until you have lifted the helicopter off the ground, brought it into a hover, and performed a take-off. You might be able to get the machine started by studying the checklist and Pilot Operation Manual (which will be in the aircraft). But you’re not going to be able to teach yourself to fly it unless you’re very careful and have the reflexes to stop what you’re doing before it even begins to go bad. And you’ll need more fuel than you have to take such incremental steps.
To lift off you need to raise the collective. When you raise the collective there is more drag, so you have to increase the throttle. Whenever the engine is powering the rotor system there is torque, so you need to compensate with the anti-torque pedals. Of course counteracting torque saps some power, so you need to add a little more throttle, which increases torque. So let’s say you’re successful. The anti-torque (tail) rotor is doing its job – which means that it’s pushing you to the right. So you have to add left collective to stop the drift. You’re balancing the throttle (watch that manifold pressure and rotor RPM!), collective, cyclic, and pedals simultaneously, and changing one control affects the other. I liken it to standing on a bowling ball and trying to walk it across a floor.
It’s really not difficult once you get the hang of it, and it’s much more fun than horsing around a Skyhawk or a Cherokee. But it’s not something you can learn from a book or a video game. You need personal instruction to pull it off.
Dang it! Did I forget about the throttle?
OP: See? That’s how things go sideways. (There is an outstanding book called Chickenhawk where the author, Robert Mason, talks about learning to fly a helicopter. Maybe your library has it.)
Using currently available consumer home video game technology, would it be possible for some developer out there to create a realistic simulator for flying a helicopter, such that a newbie would have a good idea of what he was doing the first time he climbed into a cockpit? Bringing the odds down to say, only a 50-50 chance of crashing, instead of 99.9%. Clearly it’s not possible now, but could it be if there were a market for such a game?
OK, so it seems like a helicopter has to be treated like an extension of the pilot’s body/mind to a much, much greater degree than a plane. That seems obvious.
The question is: will they ever produce an “E-Z-Fly” helicopter? In other words, one where the work of balancing the helicopter is done automatically, so that flying it truly would be “easy” compared to how it is now?
Pretty much what I was expecting. Sounds like even staying at the Holiday Inn Express for a week beforehand wouldn’t help enough to save my pasty white butt.
It’s rather Zen. You fly by not flying, and become the machine.
That is, if you think about the control inputs you’re making, you’ll always be behind the machine. So don’t think about it. (Don’t ‘fly’ it.) Your body can make the proper inputs (with practice) faster and more accurately than your conscious mind can.
in the first few lessons, when I was learning to hover, I was thinking about what the helicopter was doing and making what I thought were appropriate control inputs. My instructor started asking me about my girlfriend. He thought he was being slick, but I could tell straight away that he was trying to distract me. I listened to his chatter, and I was thinking, ‘Dude! I know what you’re doing!’ – which actually accomplished what he wanted. I was distracted. And it worked. I was hovering more smoothly. Once the penny dropped I could allow my body to take are of the minute, constant inputs without having to think about them.
I told the roomie I was posting to this thread. She flew Black Hawks. She said that someone might have an easier time in a Black Hawk since it has automatic systems. I do not know of these, so I can’t comment on them. But I’ve heard that the ‘professional’ helicopters are much easier to fly than the trainers. ‘If you can fly a Robinson, you can fly anything!’
Anecdote: I was at MCAS El Toro, chatting with a Super Sea Stallion pilot. He said, ‘You fly an R22? :eek: Those things scare the shit out of me! They’re so squirrelly!’ A friend of his, a Sea Cobra pilot, walks up. The Super Sea Stallion pilot says, ‘Hey, this guy flies an R22!’ The Sea Cobra pilot says, ‘R22? I love those! They’re so nimble!’
X-Plane would probably fit the bill best. It’s pretty robust, has a lot of support for external control devices, and a variant is used to drive commercial flight sims.
My own concern, on flying the helicopter off of the island? Forget flying it—if there’s not an operator’s manual stashed onboard, I’m not entirely sure I could start the engine properly.
Hm. I appear to actually have some anecdotal data. I have a toy helicopter. It’s a bit easier in some respects in that it has two counter-rotating rotors. Once, I invited a bunch of friends to try it. Soon, I started warning people that it was much, much more difficult than it looked, and to start with, try to just lift it straight in the air, and then come back down without crashing. Some people managed this. Most didn’t. IIRC everyone had at least one serious crash before being able to make it move while hovering, and most had lots.
So, you may do a bit better if you know a bit about how it works beforehand. And I don’t know, I thought I heard modern helicopters often had computers that did some of the twitchy feedback for you? But I’m not optimistic about you being able to fly it to shore. (Straight up and down, possibly…)
AFAIR, from my stint as a contractor with Bell Helicopters, military helicopters are easier to fly because of the (I presume very expensive) fly-by-wire systems that do a lot of the adjustments for you.
Sounds like you’d be better off trying to fix the radio. Not that you’d be very likely to succeed in that either, but at least you probably wouldn’t kill yourself trying, and maybe the search party would finally show up while you were killing time.
IANAHelicopter pilot, but it seems like the stumbling block is the dangerous nature of uncontrolled learning - You could teach yourself to do it (in the sense that it’s not technically impossible - after all, someone must have done this at some point), but you’re more likely to do something catastrophic along the way - just because helicopters are brutal machines.
A (hypothetically) fully-realistic simulator should increase your chances, if such a thing existed, and you had unlimited playtime on it.