What went wrong

[bc2209]

Hello my rotor flying brethren. Please tell me what went wrong here. Also being a fixed wing guy myself I can't help but notice a stall horn going off? Do helicopters have stall horns?

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Would have not enjoyed this ride.

 

[hammerhat]

That's the low rotor RPM horn. Basically yes rotor equivalent of a stall warning horn. A big deal in low intertia ships like the r44 because if the RPM decays beyond certain point it generally unrecoverable.

My guess is he was overpitching, i.e. trying to pull more power than the engine was capable of producing. And at the end it looks like complete loss of control. Hard to say without being there but at one point it looked to me that he was low enough to just chop the throttle and settle down. Of course there is always a possibility of a mechanical failure.

 

[dustoff17]

Hot and heavy are a bad combination! Looks to me like he was to heavy, he "milked" the approach right at the bottom edge of the low rotor range. Then it appears he snatched in a handful of collective and got in to an LTE situation.

Looks like they all walked away...that's good.

 

[MikeD]

Low inertia birds lose Nr quick and don't recover it well. High inertia birds like the Huey.....you can fly all over the place with an engine failure.

In a bird like an AS-350 or Robbie, in an engine failure, the area you're going to autorotate to is somewhere in your chin bubble. In a UH-1, the area you're going to auto to is somewhere out your front windscreen. And in the Huey, once you get down into the flare, you still have a bit of time to maneuver around to select an actual touchdown point, with all that high inertia.

 

[Roger Roger]

Low inertia birds lose Nr quick and don't recover it well. High inertia birds like the Huey.....you can fly all over the place with an engine failure.

In a bird like an AS-350 or Robbie, in an engine failure, the area you're going to autorotate to is somewhere in your chin bubble. In a UH-1, the area you're going to auto to is somewhere out your front windscreen. And in the Huey, once you get down into the flare, you still have a bit of time to maneuver around to select an actual touchdown point, with all that high inertia.

That's counterintuitive to a fixed wing pilot.

 

[xargos]

That's counterintuitive to a fixed wing pilot.

Inertia has to do with mass.
Next time you dance compare the lighter and heavier ladies. The lighter ones need leading, the heavier ones have a life of their own.
In a glider competition you'd take water with you even if the conditions didn't call for it (weak).
On release you have had accumulated additional energy and would have been been able to pull up higher after a dive on the starting gate.
I understand the rotor phenomenon the same way, heavy, rotating blade has more incentive to continue than a light one, so it provides more time to unwind and has more energy stored for the moment of flare.

 

[FEtoDX]

Looked like loss of tail rotor to me, either it clipped something or Nr dropped low enough that it lost control authority