FlyGuy9k4
Old Skool
Your joking me?!?! I've been a long time DMB fan, since the early 90s, and I NEVER KNEW THAT... WOW! Would be awesome to look into this more.... lets bring him to VEGAS!!??! Doug you work on that for us??? =)
Boneyard
- Thread starter MikeD
- Start date
Your joking me?!?! I've been a long time DMB fan, since the early 90s, and I NEVER KNEW THAT... WOW! Would be awesome to look into this more.... lets bring him to VEGAS!!??! Doug you work on that for us??? =)
The Fez
Analog Millennial
Unfortunately you are correct. Apparently they've blown most of the QF-4's to tiny bits and are moving onto the A model Vipers. If the A-10 is ever finally retired, they better keep their grubby drone-making hands off of it.
They should use all the Pred's as targets.........I mean, there's no need for conversion or anything.
I've been to the one at TUS. Sucks you can't get off the bus (but understandable, it is a base and they were coyotes running about) but it was well worth the price of admission.
You used to be able to. Up until the early '90s, the second Saturday of every month was an all day walking tour, where you could spend all day walking around, snapping photos, and mingling among the aircraft. Used to do it alot back then.
GlenA
Senior Chicken Counter
Purchase it and sell blocks of 500 hours
I can hear it now "....only at <insert school name here> will you get the experience of flying a CRJ 200 JET right out of flight school! This will give you a leg up on everyone else doing it the old-fashioned boring way and allow you to jump the non-hiring line into a career in the regionals without actually learning! Only $200,000 per block of 5 hours, block time begins as soon as you shake hands with the instructor, some time is spent as a Safety FA, offer not valid if you ask questions."
The 600Ns are being retired early. There was a problem with their having problems with the mission weight being carried on them and autorotation performance. They're already a low-inertia rotor system and pretty much have tricky autorotative performance. Then add the weight of the mission equipment, and there were problems. Being a low inertia system, it doesn't build and sustain RPM well during autorotation, and hence develops a very high sink rate. And that's with quick reaction commenced with bottoming the collective once the throttle is rolled off. Compare that with a high inertia rotor system helo like the UH-1 Huey, where it builds rotor RPM very well in the autorotation and you have to keep it from overspeeding itself. On landing from an autorotation with no power, you can pick the Huey back up again without ever bringing on the throttle, turn it 180 degrees (some say 360, but I haven't done it), and settle it back down for another smooth landing; all from just the energy stored in the rotor system.
MD had a company demonstrator 600N to show that there weren't problems with it, but it wasn't until last year that the MD test pilot came out to Brown Field in San Diego for a test of the aircraft's autorotative capabilites at the weights they're flown at. This was the result in the video below. And as a result of this test as well as an earlier accident on the California coast, the decision was made to retire them for our use. They're all located at San Diego now until retirement They're still a good bird though.
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Check out this TH-1H (what I'm checked out in) autorotation for comparison, and see just how smooth it can be with all that energy stored in its high-inertia rotor system. You can see even as the blades begin slowing down as the pilot pulls in pitch to cushion (evidenced by the blade "coning" effect and noise of the blade pitch increasing), the helicopter still has more than enough lift to arrest its descent or even hover for a short bit, if desired:
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Thanks for the quick response. That's good information to know. The company I used to teach at had 2 600's sitting in the hangar but they were pretty much static displays.
I wonder why they wouldn't just try and sell them off and buy something a little more mission oriented. I guess that's the government at its finest.
And I have around 1000 hours teaching in an R-22, so I know the downfall of a low inertia system. Haha
I wonder why they wouldn't just try and sell them off and buy something a little more mission oriented. I guess that's the government at its finest.
And I have around 1000 hours teaching in an R-22, so I know the downfall of a low inertia system. Haha
I believe MD is going to buy them back and resell them, eventually. They're a good bird, just not with the weights we were operating them at.
We're now vested in the Eurocopter 350B2s/B3s/2B1s (blah...).
staplegun
Well-Known Member
Hey Mike-
I did my Navy advanced helicopter training in the Huey in 1982 at Whiting field. We had single-engine UH-1E's which had flown with the Marines in Viet Nam and TH-1L's.
Some of my instructor pilots were Marines who had flown it in Viet Nam and they showed us all the tricks - I have auto-rotated it to a landing and then picked it back up for a 360!
My On-wing instructor (Navy slang for Familiarization instructor) was Major Westling who flew in Viet Nam and then was President Nixon's VH-3 pilot. He was a character! He would chain-smoke Camel's and always brought a thermos full of iced-tea on every hop...
He rarely touched the controls; I can still picture him sitting in the left seat with a butt hanging out of his mouth and a thermos-cap cup of tea in his hand watching me go through the paces...
He related a story about clearing an LZ of small sapling-sized trees by using the UH-1E main rotor... that rotor system was very strong and had an incredible (for a helo) amount of inertia!
What a great machine - I'd love to get my hands on one today!
Kevin
scooter2525
Very well Member
That video was nutso! Is that fairly standard how the 600 autorotates?
You have to have that rate of descent in order to maintain rotor RPM, leaving a small margin for error for pulling pitch, flaring, and touching down.
Very nice! The short-fuselage Hueys you flew. The Es and Ls are still around in places like the NW, doing logging work and such.
hook_dupin
Well-Known Member
You'd be surprised how few times the drone actually gets destroyed. Most of the time, the test missile is terminated prior to impact. Only on the warhead demonstrations and the full system end to end tests does the drone even have a chance of being destroyed. Having QF-16s will be good simply due to their reliability. QF-4s end up cancelling enough times to piss me off.
///AMG
Well-Known Member
Not exactly a Huey but similar bloodline:
Was based out of the field I used to work line service at during college. Pretty impressive beast, they did a lot of mx test flights around the local area during the off-season and it was always a treat to see them beating the sky into submission. Heard they were originally built/intended for delivery to the Shah of Iran but were subsequently warehoused pre-delivery after the events of '79.....and later sold off to companies like HTSI
More often than not, the QF gets destroyed due to system or operator error. At least when I was at HMN, we lost a few for just that, before they even got to their test while airborne.
