Originally Posted by
helimutt
I guess this comes from the offshore world teaching inexperienced pilots how to be gentle on the controls but what else do people think of the following type of approach? More a Heli deck type of landing I suppose.
0.5 miles, 50kts, 500’, 0.4 miles, 40kts, 400’, 0.3 miles, 30kts, 300’ which pretty much brings you to your decision point at around 30kts for moving across and down to a landing on the deck. No big collective movements required, no big speed changes required. But I guess it can often be very type specific.
That used to be the RAF taught technique for the Puma HC1, especially when night flying to a field using a basic NATO “T”. Flaring too hard on that type of helicopter could result in the engines backing right off and because they had no collective anticipators, fail to respond in time to prevent a big Nr loss and possibly a heavy landing (as some discovered). The problem became more acute when the draggy old metal blades were replaced with more “slippery” composite ones.