This week's lesson: cross-country flight!

[camwyn]

October 12th, 2014 was my first cross-country helicopter flight, where cross-country is defined as a flight of at least 25 nautical miles terminating at a different airport than the one I departed from. We had a GoPro camera in the cockpit the whole way. No headset sound, unfortunately, just engine noises- I suggest you turn down the volume or mute the video first.

Departure was from Lawrence Municipal Airport in North Andover, MA. The first place we stopped at was Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, aka "it looks like an aircraft carrier" and "the runway is *literally* two miles long, look it up".

In all of these- I had to break the hour-plus video into four segments- I'm the one on the right.

The first twenty minutes of 12 October 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

The second twenty minutes of 12 October 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

The third part of 12 October 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

Last part of 12 Oct 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

Comments

[varadia]

Eeee flight!

Awesome!

[camwyn]

The instructor says I need to work on not porpoising- I have a tendency to let the helicopter's nose rise at the wrong times, which means I lose airspeed going around turns- but that I'm getting better at a lot of other stuff. So next time I fly I have to keep that in mind.

Also I am kind of proud of something that isn't in the video. I have to do a full pre-flight check before taking off, and the past few times I've done it, the instructor's been elsewhere while I was working on it. This past week he came up to me as I was finishing up and asked if it was all right. I told him yes, but wanted to know if certain parts had been replaced, because they were a lot tighter than I remembered and had lot numbers stamped on them and I was sure they didn't have lot numbers last time. Turned out that yes, those parts had been replaced since the last time I touched that helicopter. So I'm paying enough attention to the inspections to notice positive changes, which gives me hope that I'll spot problems if they arise, too.