Many people have dreams about flying; for years I've dreamed about flying helicopters. In this dream, I walk out of my home into the front yard, climb into a small rotorcraft with a huge bubble, and lift straight into the sky.
Helicopters have always attracted their share of devotees. And I'm one of them. I've wanted to learn to fly helicopters for years. Finally, my time has come. Last summer, a new company, Rotors of the Rockies, moved into Jeffco Airport in Broomfield, Colorado, a short drive from my home.
Learning to fly a helicopter is a serious commitment of both time and money. Plan on spending from $200 to $250 an hour for the average light-helicopter rental; this makes the minimum 50 hours of helicopter time rather dear — easily $12,000 to $15,000 — but for the truly helicopter-blinded, that's money well spent. Expect the training to take a couple of months of concerted effort, whether you are adding a rating to your existing certificate or you are starting from scratch.
Helicopters are amazing to fly, but they are not easy to master. More is achieved by finesse and feel than by procedure and force. And that's a big part of the attraction. There's nothing quite like hover taxiing around the ramp or shoehorning into a tight clearing to make you appreciate a helicopter's special qualities.
My instructor at Rotors of the Rockies, Mike Fyola, is an experienced military helicopter aviator, having flown Hueys, Cobras, and Black Hawks. He's a methodical, careful instructor who's highly motivated to turn out helicopter pilots who know much more than the practical test standards.
The little Schweizer 300C used for instruction is a great training helicopter. The type began life 30 years and 16 million flight hours ago as the Hughes 269; in fact, many helicopter pilots still call this type a "Hughes." It's a well-designed, simple, sturdy helicopter with a great safety record. The normally aspirated 190-horsepower Lycoming is rather performance-challenged at Colorado's mile-high elevations. In fact, during the warmer months with typical density altitudes in the 8,000-foot to 9,000-foot range, the little helo is incapable of hovering in ground effect at maximum gross weight. This forces the student to pay close attention to weight — critical in most helicopters — and to use power, wind, and ground effect to maximum benefit. This awareness will make you a much better pilot in the long run because you will learn to think and finesse through problems rather than bully your way with power, as you might do in more capable choppers.
Weight and balance in light helicopters is critical. The difference between hovering and not hovering at our high-altitude airports can be as little as 20 pounds when it's hot. And the difference between flying with my 235-lb instructor and flying alone was tremendous. This also marked the first time I flew anything that has lateral center-of-gravity limits. These limits can be as modest as one inch to the left of centerline and three inches to the right. The longitudinal CG range is only six inches, much more restrictive than that of most airplanes.
The most difficult challenge I had during the course was unlearning many tried-and-true habits that have kept me alive in more than 36 years of flying airplanes. On one of my first flights in the helicopter, I was given the controls by my instructor and asked to keep the Schweizer somewhere in the same county. I'd actually flown helicopters a bit before and could keep it roughly within the confines of the practice area. But when the helicopter began to settle in the hover, I instinctively pulled slight aft pressure on the "stick" — called a cyclic in helicopterspeak — to stop the downward movement. Wrong! Instead of stopping the descent, I caused the recalcitrant whirlybird to back up, instantly drawing my instructor's attention and hands to the controls. Aft sinking movements at low altitudes can cause you to dig the blunt end of the chopper's skids into the dirt. No wonder it takes 50 hours to add the rotorcraft-helicopter rating to a commercial certificate!
Something that pilots quickly learn about helicopter flying is that everything is connected. When you make a change to any control, all other controls �re affected too. For example, when you add power, you must add left pedal to counter the additional torque; this increases the tail rotor's angle of attack, which causes the power to sag because the tail rotor uses the same power source as the main rotor. Thus you must add even more throttle and collective (that's the lever at your left side that primarily controls altitude). All of these changes require coordination of the cyclic, as well.
There are many things that we fixed-wing pilots must shed on the way to becoming rotorheads. For example, fixed-wing pilots tend to fly high. Helo pilots fly low. Landing sites for airplanes are long and free of wires; helicopter landing sites can be as small as a parking space or two. We tend to think horizontal in airplanes; rotorcraft can go vertical into ramps and confined landing places. It's a whole new mindset — one that takes time to develop.
Steep turns are very different in helicopters. In fixed-wing aircraft, you pull the stick aft to maintain altitude in a steep turn; in the helicopter, pulling aft mostly slows the helicopter. The collective is the primary altitude control for turns. This new experience requires the coordination of a new flight control to maintain level flight.
There are other "unnatural" things for fixed-wing pilots learning to fly helicopters: The throttle, located on the collective, moves the "wrong" way. Being an old motorcyclist, I've always increased throttle by twisting inward; in the helicopter, you mus� twist it outward as you raise the collective. I found myself moving the throttle the wrong way many times in the first 10 to 15 hours, sometimes with dramatic results. As my patient teacher knows, it takes lightning-quick reflexes and constant awareness to live very long as a helicopter instructor.
Many who have learned to fly helicopters list hovering as the most difficult part. I didn't find that to be true. That's not to say that hovering is easy to learn; just that I seemed to pick up the concept easier because of my previous exposure. The concentration and precision required to hover a helicopter accurately is attractive. I found myself hovering a lot in the first hours, and I loved the short feedback loop involved in making the helicopter do exactly what I asked it to do.
One part of a helicopter's performance envelope that is critical — and one that every helicopter pilot learns early on — is the area inside the height/velocity graph. This diagram clearly shows the speed and altitude combinations in which the helicopter cannot successfully autorotate during takeoff and landing. The surprising thing to new helicopter students is that helicopters cannot make a true vertical takeoff or landing without significantly increasing risk in the event of an engine failure. But every helicopter pilot must learn to balance that risk with the unique utility of the helicopter.
Flying cross-country in a helicopter is similar to flying my Piper J�3 Cub; speeds and the altitudes flown are pretty comparable. But that's where the similarity ends. Cross-country in a light helicopter like�the Schweizer 300C is difficult because of its inherent instability. Most light helicopters have negative stability and respond to every little change, every little gust. Without natural stability, the helicopter pitches forward with you each time you �ean forward to change the radio frequency or reach into your chart case. For a fixed-wing pilot, this instability is a foreign, uncomfortable feeling. Increasing control frictions on the cyclic can provide some relief, but with friction tightened, the helicopter is even less likely to return to straight and level when displaced by a gust or speed change.
Since you never let go of the collective when you fly a light helicopter, you find yourself learning to do everything one-handed. That includes something as easy as tuning radios or as difficult as folding a sectional chart — or removing and folding your eyeglasses and placing them into your glasses case. You learn to do these things in stages: look around � change frequencies � recover from the unusual attitude � look out again � fold the map�recover from the unusual attitude. At night it's even more challenging since you lose many of the visual cues that you depend on to maintain a level attitude. This can make a student helicopter cross-country look like Patty Wagstaff practicing her airshow routine.
Thirty-five of the 50 hours required for the commercial add-on helicopter rating are devoted to solo work. My first solo in the helicopter was approached with much of the same trepidation that I faced on my first airplane solo at age 16. There was none of the comfort I often feel when soloing a new airplane type. This time I knew that many more things could go wrong, including autorotations.
Autorotations are the scariest things you can do with a light helicopter like the Schweizer. This is partly because the Schweizer has very little stored inertia in the 27-foot-diameter main rotor. The concept seems simple: When the engine quits, you smoothly but expeditiously move the collective down to disengage the sprag clutch between the rotor and engine, thus allowing air blowing up through the rotor from below to maintain rotor rpm, much like a pinwheel. Schweizers have pretty enthusiastic rates of descent in autorotation — in the neighborhood of 1,400 to 1,700 feet per minute. When you're sitting inside a bubble with a nearly unrestricted view below your feet, that descent is a real attention-getter.
As the ground rushes up, all my thousands of hours of self-preservation instincts say, "You'd better do something now if you want to live through this." But those instincts must be ignored. A moment later, with the ground still coming up at a spine-shortening rush, my experienced eyes say, "OK, now do something." But that plea too must be ignored. Finally, at about 50 feet, long past the time when I know that it's too late to survive the impending impact with the Earth and I'm convinced that I'm about to bury the little chopper under the runway, I make an exaggerated flare to stop the earthward plunge, wait for the sink rate to nearly stop, then as the nose begins to "fall through" and the skids return to a level attitude, I pull the collective up to cushion the landing. Whew! There's really nothing to autorotations; it's a lot like practicing dying.
During my training, Fyola and I added power each time we got within a few feet of the runway instead of doing full touchdown autorotations. The risk of getting the touchdown wrong is high, if you look at statistics, and practicing "full down" autos is kind of like burning down your house just to see if the fire department will respond in time.
My flight-test was performed with a designated examiner named Bill Spencer, a high-time rotor pilot with experience in both Vietnam and Desert Storm. He now flies a new Bell 407 for a medevac unit on Colorado's Front Range.
The oral was about an hour and a half, thoroughly covering airspace, regulations, and helicopter maintenance. Spencer especially wanted to be sure that I knew Class E and G airspace, where most helicopter flying is done.
After the oral, we finished the paperwork and flew. The helicopter felt like a part of me as I lifted off and headed northeast for a brief cross-country segment. Spencer then asked me to fly to and land on a pinnacle of my choice, and then to do the same in a confined area on a sandy riverbed. He simply checked each box from the commercial practical test standards guide, then asked for something else. My autorotation wasn't my best effort but it was within tolerances. I violated a longstanding rule by trying something a little different on this flight-test — lowering the collective more rapidly than usual — but this destabilized my airspeed and caused me to work harder to get things back into tolerance.
The whole ride took less than an hour. It was a pleasure flying with Spencer, and I felt that he had administered a good checkride and I had shown him no reason to deny me the rotorcraft rating. Finally, I had a license to fly helicopters.
After my flight-test, I flew the chopper home alone, down low, enjoying the fruits of my efforts. On the way back to Jeffco, I landed in my yard at the airpark to have lunch with my wife.
I still dream of flying helicopters, but now there is another person in these dreams. With my wife at my side, I walk out of the house, climb into a small rotorcraft with a huge bubble, and then raise the collective for a max performance climb from our yard. The feeling is fabulous.
Michael Maya Charles is a McDonnell Douglas DC�10 captain for a major airline and owns a Cessna 185 and a Piper J�3 Cub. Visit his Web site ( www.airsafetyexperts.com).
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