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Sep. 22nd, 2014 02:41 pmWent to bed around 10:30 last night; if the cats made any noise after that I didn't hear it. Doing MUCH better today.
Saturday's flight school lesson was pretty good. No ground training this time. My instructor told me he likes to give students a break from the area around Lawrence every five lessons or so. If I wanted, we could fly out to Boston and back. Or, since I'd already had ground training in it from him and from one of the other instructors, we could practice autorotations and I could start getting used to the idea. I wound up going with the autorotations; as cool as flying to something recognizable would be, I ultimately felt it was probably better to get back up there and start learning to handle those things before I forgot what I'd been taught. I'm going to have to be able to do one coming straight in and one with a turn in it for my check ride, and it seldom hurts to start getting an idea of what's involved early on. What's involved:
1. Be at a suitable altitude and speed for practice purposes. Emergencies will no doubt be very different but this is learning how to fly a helicopter, not learning krav maga; the school does not have a philosophy of 'throw the worst thing possible at them from the start', kthx.
2. You have one (1) second to lower the collective control all the way to the lowest position. Don't slam it in an eyeblink; you want to bring it down in the time it takes to say 'down collective'.
3. Roll the throttle towards 'off', so that the engine RPM needle on the tachometer plummets like a brick while the rotor RPM needle stays where it is. That last part is IMPORTANT.
4. Judiciously apply the right pedal to keep your nose pointing straight since you are no longer compensating for engine torque.
5. The cyclic control, the one in your right hand? Bring that aft somewhat so that your nose comes up a bit. Nose dropping is bad.
6. I hope you did all of that in the same second as bringing the collective down, because you were supposed to.
7. And now you should bring the collective back up a bit, just a bit, to check your rotor RPM.
8. Okay, great, now DON'T FUCK WITH ANYTHING.
Seriously, that's more or less how it goes; you spend the next several seconds gliding down from 1200 or so feet to 200 or so feet and you are well advised to just keep your eyes on the horizon so you maintain the correct heading and attitude. If it's falling at the correct angle and speed, don't worry too much about whether you've got exactly the right numbers or not. When you get to around 200 feet you'll be checking your airspeed, rotor RPM, and rate of descent and the horizon, but you need to keep your eyes outside a lot, so look at $GAUGE, correct any problems it may have, and move on to $NEXT_GAUGE- don't go back to the tach if you had to adjust your nose angle because your airspeed was a problem. Keep moving and keep confirming the horizon and your landing spot are in the right place.
Things change a bit at around forty feet or so but my instructor didn't want me to get too overwhelmed the first time, so instead of doing autorotations all the way into the ground (not in the sense of "SPLAT" but in the sense of "*BOMP* Okay, we landed") he had me bring my engine RPMs back up and take off again for another round of the air traffic pattern around the airport. On our last autorotation he took over the controls near the end and demonstrated what would be involved in a real one, and then we taxied back over to the flight school and he had me practice pickups and putdowns a couple of times before closing down for the day.
He said I was one of the better first-timers he'd seen in a while, which was nice, considering how much of a hard time I had with hover work at first. I'm debating exactly how much of this lesson to tell my parents about. They worry enough as it is; I don't want to give them too much extra nightmare fuel, you know?
Saturday's flight school lesson was pretty good. No ground training this time. My instructor told me he likes to give students a break from the area around Lawrence every five lessons or so. If I wanted, we could fly out to Boston and back. Or, since I'd already had ground training in it from him and from one of the other instructors, we could practice autorotations and I could start getting used to the idea. I wound up going with the autorotations; as cool as flying to something recognizable would be, I ultimately felt it was probably better to get back up there and start learning to handle those things before I forgot what I'd been taught. I'm going to have to be able to do one coming straight in and one with a turn in it for my check ride, and it seldom hurts to start getting an idea of what's involved early on. What's involved:
1. Be at a suitable altitude and speed for practice purposes. Emergencies will no doubt be very different but this is learning how to fly a helicopter, not learning krav maga; the school does not have a philosophy of 'throw the worst thing possible at them from the start', kthx.
2. You have one (1) second to lower the collective control all the way to the lowest position. Don't slam it in an eyeblink; you want to bring it down in the time it takes to say 'down collective'.
3. Roll the throttle towards 'off', so that the engine RPM needle on the tachometer plummets like a brick while the rotor RPM needle stays where it is. That last part is IMPORTANT.
4. Judiciously apply the right pedal to keep your nose pointing straight since you are no longer compensating for engine torque.
5. The cyclic control, the one in your right hand? Bring that aft somewhat so that your nose comes up a bit. Nose dropping is bad.
6. I hope you did all of that in the same second as bringing the collective down, because you were supposed to.
7. And now you should bring the collective back up a bit, just a bit, to check your rotor RPM.
8. Okay, great, now DON'T FUCK WITH ANYTHING.
Seriously, that's more or less how it goes; you spend the next several seconds gliding down from 1200 or so feet to 200 or so feet and you are well advised to just keep your eyes on the horizon so you maintain the correct heading and attitude. If it's falling at the correct angle and speed, don't worry too much about whether you've got exactly the right numbers or not. When you get to around 200 feet you'll be checking your airspeed, rotor RPM, and rate of descent and the horizon, but you need to keep your eyes outside a lot, so look at $GAUGE, correct any problems it may have, and move on to $NEXT_GAUGE- don't go back to the tach if you had to adjust your nose angle because your airspeed was a problem. Keep moving and keep confirming the horizon and your landing spot are in the right place.
Things change a bit at around forty feet or so but my instructor didn't want me to get too overwhelmed the first time, so instead of doing autorotations all the way into the ground (not in the sense of "SPLAT" but in the sense of "*BOMP* Okay, we landed") he had me bring my engine RPMs back up and take off again for another round of the air traffic pattern around the airport. On our last autorotation he took over the controls near the end and demonstrated what would be involved in a real one, and then we taxied back over to the flight school and he had me practice pickups and putdowns a couple of times before closing down for the day.
He said I was one of the better first-timers he'd seen in a while, which was nice, considering how much of a hard time I had with hover work at first. I'm debating exactly how much of this lesson to tell my parents about. They worry enough as it is; I don't want to give them too much extra nightmare fuel, you know?
