What Every Airplane Pilot Should Know about Helicopters

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What You'll Learn Today

• How to co-exist with helicopters at a busy fixed-wing airport
• How do helicopters operate in Boston Class B airspace
• What is interesting about helicopters
• How helicopters fly
• Helicopter Maneuvers
• Adding a helicopter rating
• Show and Tell with a Robinson helicopter

How to co-exist with helicopters at a busy fixed-wing airport

• the AIM requires helicopters to "avoid the flow of fixed-wing traffic"
• at an uncontrolled airport, the helicopters may fly right traffic and a 500' AGL pattern
• at a towered airport that isn't busy, the controllers may ask a helicopter to behave like an airplane
• at a busy towered airport, the helicopter will try to land into the wind, somewhere away from the runway in use by airplanes

How do helicopters operate in Boston Class B airspace

• the Skyway frequency (124.725)
• the helicopter chart and the routes plus "city tour"
• "at or below 1000' and west of Logan Airport"
• Fenway Park and LNG tanker TFRs

What is Interesting About Helicopters?

• fly low and slow with great visibility (no requirement to stay 500' and 1000' above obstacles)
• impress friends; take off and land at an airport and they think you're a hero
• cheat gravity; fly in arbitrary directions
• land off-airport without ending up on the NTSB Web site

How Helicopters Fly

• a wing is a wing is a wing; a stalling angle of attack is a stall
• airspeed + angle of attack leads to lift
• helicopter in a hover relies on the rotation to generate airspeed
• pull up on the collective to add angle of attack and the helicopter goes up (explain the swashplate and pitch links here)
• move the cyclic and the helicopter translates forward, backwards, or sideways
• the anti-torque rotor

Show and Tell

• tail rotor and ingress/egress safety
• blades, swash plate, move the collective and cyclic
• tail rotor design
• cleaning the bubble (no paper towels!)
• tieing down the blades in gusty conditions

Helicopter Maneuvers

• pickup (good time to close your airplane's doors if you are parked nearby)
• hover
• takeoff (why we don't simply lift straight up)
• Vy and Vx
• landing (why it is nice to have a runway)
• autorotation (landing smoothly without a running engine)

Regulatory Differences

• obstacle clearance, altitude above densely populated areas
• fuel reserves
• flight visibility
• special VFR: any time of day or night, even if you don't have an instrument rating or equipment (only $2+ million helicopters are typically IFR-equipped; an autopilot is required)

Adding a helicopter rating

• fixed wing experience is a huge help, especially instrument-rated fixed wing pilots: more finely attuned to attitude changes; no need to try to learn airspace and radio comm. while keeping an unstable aircraft until control
• learning helicopters is just like learning airplanes... if you asked students to do a landing flare on their first lesson; students need to learn the hover early on because you pick up, take off, and land into hovers
• hovering is difficult because of lag in the helicopter's response; don't hold a control input; take out an input before you think you need to; be very relaxed and make very small inputs as soon as you see the attitude change; focus as far away as possible so that attitude changes lead to big changes in your peripheral vision (BED is a great airport for helicopter training due to the long sight lines)
• the formal requirements are minimal for an add-on rating: 20 hours of dual, 10 hours of solo, no written test; 50 hours of total time for a Commercial add-on, but you need 35 hours of PIC, so it makes sense to get a Private first so that future lessons can be logged as PIC
• becoming a helicopter CFI just became a lot easier; the FAA eliminated the touch-down autorotation requirement from the CFI practical test