One of the newer instructors at East Coast Aero Club asked me to fly with his student before signing the guy off for solo.
Here’s what I told the CFI and student pilot during the debrief…
Preflight: On a restart, look for leaks, snapped belts, tight fuel caps, and, if the helicopter was flown for many hours previously, oil level. Never skimp on the walk-around from a 10′ distance all around the helicopter. That’s where you will find inspection doors open, things attached to the skids, etc.
Pre-lift: Never skimp on the top-to-bottom flow check. Very few helicopters have been wrecked because of a subtle problem missed during a preflight mechanical inspection. Many have been crashed because something wasn’t set right and the pilot tried to fix the problem when in a hover or in the air.
Air taxi: The takeoff into an air taxi is the same as a takeoff to fly to New York. Hover power, nudge forward to 45 knots while holding the ship level, then reduce power to 17″ once reaching about 70′ above the ground. Keep the airspeed to 40-50 knots and the altitude 70-100′. That’s enough energy to do a reasonable autorotation while being slow enough to see and avoid obstacles such as trees and antennae and high enough to clear most obstacles at our airport.
Flying patterns: Remember that the inputs are attitude and power. Everything else on the gauges is an output. Don’t worry about the outputs. Concentrate on holding the correct inputs. (On a climb-out where the student had selected a 30-knot attitude I asked “Is this too high a pitch or too low?” and he correctly answered “too high” but wasn’t doing much about it because he was waiting to see what the airspeed indicator would do (it was showing 40 knots with a down trend).) Try to do at least one third of your practice flying with every instrument except the manifold pressure [power gauge] covered. You need to develop a mental catalog of the correct attitudes and power settings for every flight condition. (on our flight the student pilot flew a much better pattern with everything covered)
Shutting down: Watch the RPM gauge as you smoothly and slowly reduce speed from 100%. Then once you are sure that the throttle is moving in the correct direction you can move it a little faster down to 68% for the cool-down.
Overall: Download the Garmin 400/420/430W simulator and try to get it running on your Windows machine (used to be finicky about the graphics card, etc.). Download the Garmin 430W manual as a PDF and learn about all of the buttons, even the ones that are just for IFR flying. You want to make sure that you can quickly get out of any screen or situation with the Garmin confidently and quickly. Plenty of airplanes have been crashed by pilots monkeying with a GPS that they didn’t quite understand.
Try to fly that first solo with 50 or 100 lbs. of weight on the instructor’s side. Otherwise the change in hover attitude can be disconcerting. (Even after 1000+ R44 hours it feels strange to fly the machine solo; I almost want to look back to see if someone is hanging/tugging on the heels of the skids.)
Related:
- a poster from the local elementary school hallway:
Plenty of airplanes have been crashed by pilots monkeying with a GPS that they didn’t quite understand.
So, deadly usability problems are an accepted norm in aviation?
[PS – thanks for the Flight of Passage review…great book.]