This is pretty cool. Watch this chinook pilot carefully maneuver his chopper into position in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan to pick up some troops. Look how close the rotors are to the ground and look how he finally decides how to best put himself into position to load up the soldiers!
:eek:
Not that I’m criticizing the cameraman or anything (he probably had a lot more important things on his mind), but you can’t even really tell what horizontal is in that clip. It looks like the ground is mostly flat (at least, on any given terrace) and that the helicopter is tilted back about 30 degrees, but if that were the case, it wouldn’t be hard at all. I’m guessing that the heli actually stays horizontal?
It looks like the pilot had no choice but to land the copter in a depression in the land, and that in order to keep the rotors from chopping turf, he had to tilt the rear end of the thing down while keeping the nose in the air so the soldiers could enter through the back door.
I think the Chinook can change its attitude. The rotors have independent collective controls to account for changes in the center of gravity, and independent cyclic controls that can counteract torque differences in the rotor. So it could be tilted down a fair amount, and there isn’t a way to tell what horizontal is in the video. Still some pretty good piloting skills there.
Helicopter pilots are really amazing.
I agree. 
Just watched this with my 14 year old boy who has been fascinated with flight for as long as I can remember. I am so impressed! I loved this! Glad it was caught on video. While we were watching, my boy told me more about Chinook Helicopters than I thought I would ever know. These guys rock. At the end of the video my son said proudly and with conviction, “Yep! That’s how we do it.”
Thank you for posting this. My son is putting the link on his facebook page 
. It made my night. I know people in my neck of the woods that are so anti anything to do with the military forces. Always bitching about it. I can’t stand it. I see something like this and I just think to myself…these guys are truly talented , and I’m grateful for them. Every single one of them.
It looks to me like the terrain was more or less bowl shaped and he hovered inside the bowl and set down the rear wheels on the ground, and never completely landed.
I wonder why he couldn’t do the same planting the rear wheels at the top of the bowl. Wind?
and i’m guessing elevation? that was some slope he was flying over. these guys have ice water in their veins.
if anyone’s seen the f-35 untintentional loopover off a carrier deck vid that’s been ‘flying’ around the internet, you know what i mean.
i once saw a medivac pilot land his chopper between **power lines and trees **in an ordinary CUL-DE-SAC across from my house. a car had struck and nearly killed a pedestrian, and the guy was beyond critical, so they’d called in for wings.
i was a newspaper reporter back then, and, utterly blown away by what was one hell of a spectacular show of the pilot putting that medivac dead quare center in the circle, i pursued that angle for a story. i wanted to know who this guy was.
turned out that he was a former viet nam chopper jockey - and beyond good at what he did. he held some kind of world-class military record for successful dustoffs in 'nam. whole lotta guys are alive today because of him.
these guys not only rock, they roll, baby!
Especially when the rotors go back and forth or stop moving completely, or even reverse direction. How do you maintain lift like that? You MUST be amazing! 
Pfft. Try it in a hot air balloon.
You know that video is from a video game, right?
(Funny thing: I was tipped off not because there’s a tag floating above the F-35, but because I happen to know that the F-35B hasn’t done shipboard testing yet.)
:eek: no, i didn’t. a friend sent me the link. details, please?
video here. In addition to Ravenman’s hints, notice the health/speed/ammo indicator gauges at the bottom of the screen.
Also, given that it’s not yet operational, the flight in the video would be a test flight; it seems unlikely they would have other aircraft on the deck anywhere near the F-35 during test flights (as opposed to ordinary operational flights).
I didn’t even notice those. :o
Also note that the extremely flexible rotor blades of the parked helicopter don’t move or quiver by the slightest amount - not even a single camera pixel - despite the massive jet blast that would be spreading out from beneath the nearby F-35.
Sometimes, even Chinook pilots screw up.
While searching for this one I came across several others that were very cool. Try searching youtube for “chinook water landing”.
That sucks. His left rear wheel got caught in the netting at the edge of the deck, transforming a liftoff into a rollover. 
“Chinook water landing” gets another sim video, but “chinook water extraction” gets you something far cooler. 
I like this one. No screw ups here.
