Not Your Ordinary Helicopter Ride

Yeah, that stuff's fun. When we were being trained in air assault operations by the 82d at Bragg back in '84, we did some nap of the earth flights in the 60's. I could swear that if I reached out the door I would brush the leaves on the tree tops. It wasn't that close of course, but it felt that way. Coming into the LZ the pilots just about stood these birds up on end to slow down before dropping the nose down to put the wheels down. Better than any amusement park ride for sure.

That beats my experiences in Singapore with Helicopters, there we were used as "self moving cargo load" (we had legs!) as the Helicopter pilots were practicing on how to land a Helicopter with a failed engine(s).......we went from Helicopter to Helicopter.....after 2 or 3, your stomach got quite used to it.....after you had usually lost your breakfast!!!

I asked why we had to be in the 'copter, the answer being that they had to have a full load and as we had legs, we could go from chopper to chopper under our own steam! It saved time.....

As an 18 year old I was always ready to do anything like that. As I got older, I got more careful......now you know why!!!!

Self moving cargo load. I gotta love that. If that ain't the Army, then nothing is.

That's better than the expression, "It ain't training, if ain't raining."

Were they really doing autorotation? That's not an elegant way to land, but it can save your life if nothing else.

YUP!!!

I don't know if any other methods were in use in the RN in 1964 or not for when an engine failed, I was just dumb cargo....

We still had many single engined Copters at that time.....it could happen. Even twin engined copters could theoretically suffer from the same problem I am informed.....

SMCL doesn't make a good acronym. Being the army, I'm surprised that they didn't have a better acronym than that...

I was a Chinook flight engineer in Vietnam 1969-1970. Most of our flying was either nap of the earth or above 3000' AGL. Anything in between at that time was considered a helicopter kill zone from ground fire.

There were many times we'd come home at night and clean the branches out of our aft landing gear. Once I came home with a couple hundred yards of commo wire trailing behind. Those were super adrenaline raising days.

All that said, my experiences in the "Fat Lady" pale compared to scout and attack helicopters.

Hookerdude

A/R in any helicopter is a blast. Use to fly Brantley B2B's for most of my flight training. Very low inertia in the rotors due to the weight of the unit. Had to be Johnny on the spot with collective for A/R or you could loose lift to pull unit out of crash. 50' stands out as a very good number to remember to start pulling the collective back at. thats 50' AGL

Seems we were constantly practicing A/R's to the ground in our Hooks. At least anywhere we could find a reasonably hard packed or paved runway. Fortunately, for helicopters with wheels, little mistakes in the process could usually be resolved with running landings. And prematurely losing inertia in the Chinook's rotor heads never seemed to be a problem, as long as the pilot stayed with the red line rotor rpm on the way down.

That said, I've never been in a helicopter that had to perform a real emergency A/R.

Hooker

I've never rode down in a bird using A/R either practice or for real. Either way, it would be a sphincter tightening experience for me !

It is, the first couple of times anyway.

But as the engines were only switched off, was it a "real" A/R?