Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
Funny this should come up. During my training, I asked my instructor how often a helicopter suffered a stuck pedal. He said he'd never heard of it in 21,000 hours of his flying. I asked then why so much focus on yaw control failures. He said he'd asked the same question during instructor training, and why no training for stuck cyclic or collective (also apparently extremely rare. There was no good answer to the question. The stuck pedal training seems a solutions looking for a problem. It's fun training though! 'Builds skills!
Not quite.
When you are dealing with servos and hydraulic fluids some odd things can happen.
For example, on the UH-60 Black Hawk there is a cable/pulley/spring tensioning lash up in the Tail Rotor Servo Assembly that, if it fails, leads the TR Blades to neutral pitch. (I read up on a rare case of this occurring a few years ago. The commentary from the Blackhawk experts did note that it was very rare, and an internal bit failed ...). I am trying to recall if there was a tail servo hardover in a Seahawk back in the distant past that led to a "stuck pedals" approach ... but memory is fading there.
There were some mechanical conditions I vaguely recall that would lead to flat pitch or stuck pitch in the Huey ages ago when I went through flight training (TH-1E and TH-1L models, I don't have the manuals for them anymore).
It may be that your instructor was being "model specific" in his observations.