Autorotation is Controlled Flight

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Clearing up something that might not be apparent to non-pilots.

Yesterday, I got the following tweet in my notifications from someone who had never tweeted at me before:

This was mind boggling to me. I replied:

His response came later in the day:

He was referring to one of my YouTube videos, R44 Helicopter Autorotation Practice. That video records my practice session with CFI Trevor Hale at Wenatchee Pangborn Memorial Airport early one July 2019 morning. What I’d hoped to accomplish with the video is to take some of the mystery out of autorotations for non-pilots and to take some of the fear of practicing and dealing with engine failures for helicopter pilots. The video shows the two of us sitting in the cockpit while I simulate one engine failure after another by cutting the throttle and disengaging the drive system from the rotor system. The only thing keeping the blades spinning is me doing what I’ve been trained and tested to do for the past 20 years: full (or almost full) down collective to reduce drag and pitch to maintain optimum airspeed and rotor RPM while flying to a suitable landing spot.

What I guess a lot of people still don’t get is that when a pilot performs an autorotation, she has full control of the helicopter and is flying the helicopter. The pilot does not become a passenger, as she would if she lost control. She can move the helicopter in any direction except up, steering it as necessary to make the spot.

Now let’s say a helicopter has a ballistic parachute system at the top of the rotor mast as this person on Twitter suggests. Can someone explain to me why a pilot might deploy this parachute, thus giving up control of the aircraft, in the event of an engine failure when autorotation makes it possible to stay in control all the way to the ground? I’m not seeing it.

Some of you might know that Cirrus airplanes have this a ballistic parachute system built in. It’s not designed for engine failures, however. It’s designed for situations when the pilot cannot control the plane to a safe landing. All pilots, regardless of what they fly, are trained to deal with engine failures during various stages of flight. If there’s nothing physically wrong with the aircraft’s flight controls or surfaces, there’s really no reason to rely on a parachute to get you to the ground safely. Start the appropriate emergency procedure and fly the aircraft to the ground.

And let’s be honest now: how often do engines fail? Bored one afternoon? Go to the NTSB’s web site and read a bunch of accident reports for airplanes and helicopters. It’s all there. How many of them were caused by engine failures? How many of them were caused by mechanical issues at all? And how many were caused by pilot error?

It isn’t engine failures that pilots should be fearing. It’s their own stupidity. (And yes, I’m a poster child for that.)

So I posted my response, challenging him to explain what I was apparently missing:

I hope I educated him and any others who don’t quite understand what happens if a helicopter engine quits and the pilot does what she’s trained to do.

Drones and Helicopters

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A short, engaging video from the UK CAA for drone pilots.

This morning, one of my Twitter pilot friends in the UK shared a one-minute video from the UK CAA that quickly and effectively told drone pilots to be look and listen for helicopters that might be flying at their altitude. Remember drone pilots are supposed to stay under 400 feet altitude (in both the UK and the US) and helicopters have no minimum altitude (at least not in the US). That means we share that space. Of course, if drones illegally (or with a waiver) fly higher, that’s even more space that we share.

I watched the video. It was excellent. A link in the tweet pointed to the “full version” and I clicked it. It’s only 3 minutes long and has the same basic message but includes some interesting B-roll footage of an EMS helicopter and operations. Something to keep watchers engaged while the message is shared. Here it is:

Again, I know this is a UK CAA production, but it applies in the US, too. And likely many other countries that have drone/UAV regulations.

When I retweeted this with a mention the FAA’s Twitter account, the FAA — to my surprise — immediately responded to a link to their YouTube playlist:

I took a look. What I found didn’t surprise me at all. It was the same dull FAA content I’ve been looking at for the past 20 years. Short slideshows that look like they were produced with PowerPoint 95, narrated with a boring authoritative voice. Screen captures of 30+ minute long webinars featuring a tiny talking head and the same dull slide shows. This is the FAA’s idea of continuing education: producing content that no one wants to watch.

See for yourself. Watch the video I embedded above. Then try to watch a few that the FAA linked to. Do you see the difference? I do.

When I critiqued the FAA on Twitter, they responded with this:

I looked at a few of these videos. Some of them are indeed better. One or two are actually pretty good.

Of course, leave it to the FAA to try to enlist me as a volunteer to help them. They have a lot of nerve. Their often absurd rules cost me money that lines the pockets of other businesses without increasing safety. The requirement for VFR-only aircraft to spend $10K to $20K to install a completely useless radar altimeter is one example. The requirement to have a mechanic remove and reinstall my doors when I need them off is another. But now I’m getting way off topic. And angry.

My point is, the UK CAA put together a short, interesting, and informative video (embedded above). We need more of that and we need the FAA — with or without industry partners — to step up to the plate and provide it.

The Quiet Place

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Nothing is really as quiet as it seems.

“You live in a quiet place.”

Rooster
Future dinner guest of honor.

That’s the first thing the hispanic man said when he got out of his small four-door sedan in my driveway. He took a step back and opened the back door where his young son was sitting in a booster seat. He’d come to get the pair of two month old roosters I’d advertised on Craig’s List for free just the day before.

I was surprised by his observation. Most people commented on the view, which can be breathtaking if you’ve never seen it from my property’s perspective. I thought about his words and said, “Sometimes.”

We worked as a team to catch the two roosters, which were both white with gray patches on their backs. They’d been hatched by my broody hen who preferred sitting on eggs to laying them. Two months after playing mom to these boys and their four broodmates, she was sitting on eggs again and already had two chicks.

He put the two roosters in a small pet carrier just large enough for a 20-pound dog.

“There’s another one in there, but I’m not sure which one it is,” I told him.

“It’s the brown one,” he said. We walked back to the fenced in area and he pointed it out. I thought he might be right. I went in and caught it easily. He put it in the carrier with the other two.

“Are you going to eat them?” I asked.

“Yes. But I might wait a few weeks for the brown one. He’s small.” He showed the carrier’s cage door to his son, who had remained patiently in the car. “Pollo,” he said.

Then he put them in the trunk, shut the lid, and drove off.

I was glad he’d be eating them. Better that then setting them to fight.

– o –

Much later, after spending time at the local airport watching the rapelling crew practice and having lunch with a friend and looking at a trailer for sale and checking on an AirBnB house I manage I got back home. I listened to the radio as I did chores.

His observation came back to me a while later when I was out on the deck, fetching a bedspread I’d hung out over the rail out there.

Even though the radio was off — I’d grown tired of listening to voices talk about the same old thing — it wasn’t that quiet. Out in the distance, I could hear a dirt bike revving its engine as it sped around on a dirt track in someone’s back yard. I could hear a dog barking. I could hear a motor — maybe a lawn mower? — down in the valley below me. If I listened hard enough, I could hear the cars on the road across the river.

I put the bedspread in the dryer and turned it on, then went back outside to see what else I could hear. The dryer through the vent. Rover the cat’s nails as they dug into the 8-inch square posts holding up my deck roof while he climbs the twelve feet to my perch. A single cricket starting its night song early.

You live in a quiet place.

I wondered where he lived and how much louder it was. Did he live near an orchard where there was always the sound of sprayers or mowers or work crews pruning or picking or working on irrigation? Did he live near a major road where there was always the sound of traffic rushing by? Did he live in a densely packed neighborhood where you could always hear some man shouting, some woman yelling, some kid screaming, some dog barking, some car with a bad muffler growling?

I remembered what it was like in Manhattan, on the overnight stays on 57th Street near First Avenue where my college boyfriend’s parents lived. Fourteen floors up in a building with a doorman and a guy would would fetch your car from the garage when you called on the house phone. Out on the tiny balcony or inside with the windows open even a crack, the sound of the city was a constant quiet roar, punctuated with car horns and sirens. It was never quiet there, just as it was never dark.

Even here there were times when it wasn’t quiet at all. In the late winter and early spring, when the temperature dipped down to the low 30s, the wind machines — two bladed fans on tall poles — would come to life, spinning their blades on rotating heads that sounded just like helicopters coming and going over the orchards around them. Sometimes they’d start as early as 11 PM and run all night long, finally shutting down an hour or so after the sun finally began warming the air around them. But how often did that happen? Four or five times in a whole year?

The orchard sprayers were a different story. They ran almost daily, usually in the morning, sometimes starting before dawn. I’d wake at 4 and go out onto my deck and look out to see their headlights among the trees. Pesticides, herbicides, anti-fungal chemicals, and who knew what else? During the day I’d see the spray like a cloud around the sprayer as it moved through the orchard. The chemicals didn’t bother me; they never traveled far. But it was the sound — a steady whine — that you couldn’t avoid. Even that was seasonal, though, and when the trees were picked, the sprayers were mostly silent.

You live in a quiet place.

Back in the chicken yard, my remaining rooster, father of the three that had left in the car trunk, crowed. Another cricket took up the evening song. A larger, closer dog barked. My roof clicked as it always does when the sun sets and the metal panels start to contract in the cooling air. A train rumbled by two miles away and then tooted its horn at a distant crossing as I knew it would.

The dryer finished its short fluff cycle and the vent sound faded. Inside my laundry room, The Samsung dryer would play Bach in simple tones before shutting off.

Was this quiet? I guess that depended on what you knew. It was quieter than Manhattan, but it wasn’t nearly as quiet as the 40 acres I used to own with my wasband at the top of a mesa 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon. Five miles from pavement, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of a raven’s wings flapping as it flew by. It was so quiet that one morning, when I tried to turn the radio down because it seemed so loud, I discovered that the volume level was already set to 1. That was a quiet place.

I turned and went inside to finish making the bed, leaving the door to the deck open so the sounds of this quiet place could come inside.

Helicopter Flight: A Friend’s House in Wenatchee WA to Base

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A cockpit POV video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

COME FLY WITH ME from my landing zone on a friend’s driveway back to my summer base near my home. The flight includes a pinnacle departure, the overflight of a cherry drying base with two Hueys — including the one I flew two weeks later and shared here — and my usual flyby of my home before the sharp descending turn to my base. This video is short and, at the end, it explains a little why I don’t think it’s so weird to run errands in a helicopter.

This is the third of three videos I shot and shared that day; I’ll hope you’ll check out the other ones:
Helicopter Flight: Malaga to Ellensburg WA https://youtu.be/HaPHzKBa8bc
Helicopter Flight: Ellensburg WA to a Friend’s House https://youtu.be/ktoUs_mIrRo

About Me and the Helicopter

  • I have been flying for about 20 years. My nearly 4,000 hours of flight time is in Robinson R44, Robinson R22, and Bell 206L (Long Ranger) helicopters.
  • The helicopter is a 2005 Robinson R44 Raven II — the same one that appears in the photo at the beginning of the video. You can learn more about them here: https://robinsonheli.com/r44-specifications/ I own this helicopter. It is the third helicopter I’ve owned since 2000.
  • My helicopter has ADS-B Out and is picked up by radar facilities. You can see my track for recent flights on Flightradar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n7534D This is a great site for tracking any almost any flight, including the airlines.

About the Video

  • The video was recorded with a pair of GoPro cameras, one of which is connected to the helicopter’s intercom system. (You can learn more about the video setup in this video here: https://youtu.be/0sLhvk2nIFI) Both cameras record audio, but I dialed down the helicopter sound to about 25% of normal volume so it wouldn’t be annoying. Unfortunately, because the air conditioning was on during this flight and it blows towards the camera, the sound of the air conditioning is quite noticeable in this video. (Sorry about that.)
  • The video was edited on a Macintosh using Screenflow software. Learn more about it here: https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm
  • The intro music is by Bob Levitus, famed “Dr. Mac.” You can find him here: http://www.boblevitus.com/

I try to drop cockpit POV videos every Sunday morning and “extras” with more info about owning and operating a helicopter midweek. (Some channel members get early access to some of these videos.) I also host occasional livestreams with Q&A chats. Subscribe so you don’t miss anything new! And tell your friends. The more subscribers I have, the more motivated I am to keep producing videos like this one.

Any Amazon links on my channel are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, Amazon sends me a few pennies. Enough pennies make a dollar. Enough dollars buy new equipment. It doesn’t cost you anything so I hope you’ll shop with one of those links. Thanks.

Still reading? Thanks! Maybe you’ll consider buying something from my Etsy store to help support this channel? Start here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/FlyingMAir

Or better yet, to support this channel on an ongoing basis, consider becoming a member. This link will get you started: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLGD_GbGsS6YKK_Ekx0QMqQ/join

Maria Flies a Huey Helicopter

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A cockpit POV video from the FlyingMAir YouTube Channel.

COME FLY WITH ME and Stan as I take a Huey helicopter for a spin around Malaga, WA.

The backstory
I was doing some late season cherry drying and listening in on the frequency used by the few other pilots left on contract. Two of them were flying Hueys and we’d chatter back and forth a bit. At one point, I told them I’d bring pizza to their base, which I flew over occasionally: a pair of ponds on Stemilt Hill. Sure enough, right on schedule, I turned up with the pizza. That’s when I met the two pilots: Stan and Pete. Pete offered to let me try flying the Huey he had on contract, which belongs to his son’s company. I’m not a complete idiot — I said sure! This is the video I shot during that flight. It covers seatbelts on to seatbelts off, including engine startup and shutdown.

The video has a problem: the front facing camera, which was connected to the intercom system, was not configured properly so none of the intercom audio was recorded. This isn’t a big deal at the beginning, when the helicopter was quiet, but when the engine cranked up, it became impossible to hear us talk. I filled in the gaps when editing by explaining various things that were going on. The behind-the-scenes footage I recorded while setting up and turning on the cameras tells you how important it was for me to get it right and I still managed to screw up.

The helicopter is a B model Huey. Lots of folks think it’s a C model, but checking its N-number with the FAA clearly identifies it as a B model. Stan alludes to this at the end of the video. This particular helicopter was built in 1962 and saw action in Vietnam and Nicaragua. It has patched bullet holes in the back floor. It is now used for agricultural and lift jobs.

Stan is a part-time pilot who works when needed and travels the rest of the year with his significant other. He’s a really nice guy who addressed me as “ma’am” more times than I could count.

Later that day, I helped him get the helicopter on a trailer by repositioning the trailer with my truck, which happens to have the needed gooseneck hitch. I think I still owe him for the ride.

About the Video

About me
I have been flying for about 20 years. My nearly 4,000 hours of flight time is in Robinson R44, Robinson R22, and Bell 206L (Long Ranger) helicopters. This was my first time flying a Huey.

I try to drop cockpit POV videos every Sunday morning and drop “extras” with more info about owning and operating a helicopter midweek. I also host occasional livestreams with Q&A chats. Subscribe so you don’t miss anything new! And tell your friends. The more subscribers I have, the more motivated I am to keep producing videos like this one.

Any Amazon links on my channel are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, Amazon sends me a few pennies. Enough pennies make a dollar. Enough dollars buy new equipment. It doesn’t cost you anything so I hope you’ll shop with one of those links. Thanks.

Still reading? Thanks! Maybe you’ll consider buying something from my Etsy store to help support this channel? Start here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/FlyingMAir

Or better yet, to support this channel on an ongoing basis, consider becoming a member. This link will get you started: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLGD_GbGsS6YKK_Ekx0QMqQ/join