PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Vuichard again
Thread: Vuichard again
View Single Post
Old 5th Apr 2022, 04:04
  #49 (permalink)  
SLFMS
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Australia
Posts: 118
Received 28 Likes on 18 Posts
Originally Posted by Rotorbee
All right. Since nobody came up with some horrible numbers of VRS-accidents, I searched again. Pumas and Cougars are apparently not very benign in this regime. Apart from the one we already discussed, there is another Cougar accident in France that had VRS as a main factor. All in all I found 7 accidents where contributed to VRS, and two more where it was a factor. Most of them happened close to the ground, as was expected and something else also happened almost always. Most of the pilots tried to add power to stop the sink rate and in some cases that led to a loss of RPM.
But anyway, reading the accident reports makes something painfully clear, the problem is not getting out of it. What should be the emphasis of the training, is not getting into it. Most pilots only realised afterwards, what was going on. Some of them were already under stress and that lowers your mental capacity significantly.
All the one, two, three rules are very nice, but as pilots, we should train to be capable to plan our approaches in a better way, to avoid what is lurking there. Also going around is not a shame and crashing is way more dangerous.
I still prefer the classic method, because it is natural just to go around. In my experience, in the very early incipient state, lowering the collective isn't even necessary (but still a good idea), speeding up is mandatory.
Two of the pilots landed hard (bad back injuries in one case). If they where flying sideways and still had crashed, that would have been quite the bigger mess. Again, as Bob Hoover always said, fly the plane into the crash as long as possible. I would not want to go cross control in that situation.

That is what I could find, but it seems, VRS isn't the oh so deadly thing some people want us believe, because they are very rare and by far most of them ended without fatalities. It will take at least a few hundred years to safe a thousand people.
I think we have other things killing us, who are far more important.

Vuichard's claim to have a place in the Smithsonian might not become reality so fast.
A few links:
French Cougar

Mixing VRS and SWP
https://www.accidents.app/summaries/...20121015X91617
https://www.accidents.app/summaries/...0627X00938Some more accident identifications:
NYC06LA062
DEN02GA085
ERA16LA159

HAI paper about VRS
HAI for Vuichard

We can probably just let this thread die in peace now.
Well said Rotorbee. I’d give you a like if there was the option.

Everything else aside with the technique that is one thing I never understood. People generally get VRS at very low levels. Introducing sideways flight makes no sense.
SLFMS is offline