Teaching Tip
Polishing Up Your Hover
By Gail F. Thompson
When I was learning to fly helicopters, I played a game with my instructor: Take an empty, plastic (square) gallon milk carton and fill it halfway with sand—or enough so it won’t blow away from the rotor blast. Find a quiet, hard surface location with a painted line where you won’t have to keep moving to allow traffic to pass. Since our home base was an uncontrolled rural field, we used the centerline of one of the taxiways.
You’ll need your chopper fitted with skids unless you really want a challenge, and you’ll need good “below you” visibility.
Put the bottle side down on the line. With the skid, push the bottle along the centerline. To keep it from rolling over, you have to be within two or three inches off the ground (below the bottle’s CG), without the skid touching the ground. Make sure your tail rotor has plenty of clearance.As you can imagine, control of all moving parameters around the lateral axis has to be exacting.
If you are training a helicopter instructor, exchange seats to get experience with this from both sides. When I suggested to my instructor that I try flying from the other seat, he didn’t think I would be able to do it. With all my CFI time in both seats of fixed-wing planes, I thought I’d at least try. I had no problems and it gave the instructor practice also.
Objective: see who can keep the bottle on the line the farthest. The goal is distance, not speed. Rolling the bottle gets you disqualified.
