John:
Any truth to the old tale that. the engineer who designed the mixing unit for the 76 ended up in deep therapy?
US after looking at the mixing unit on display at FSI WPB: “Can you explain how this all works?”
FSI Instructor of great knowledge and experience: “NO!”
We all laughed at that one.
Originally Posted by
JohnDixson
The new composite rotor with anhedral tip was tested in the 1990’s, and yes the word “ anhedral “ means that an outboard tip was tilted downward a few inches. The hover performance improvement was fairly substantial. So sure, if you hamfisted the landing, and have the stick near or on the aft stick stop while dropping the collective to hit the ground with some vertical rate, you’d have less clearance and are asking for trouble. Not to mention that if you are hot coming in, the right way to handle it is to put the tail wheel on the ground and use the rotor to kill your speed*. I should note here that for those reading that have no UH-60 background, there is a mechanical control mixing unit installed. One of several functions relates to limiting aft cyclic range with increasingly lower collective position. Can one defeat the built in protection? There were a couple of instances with the original blades in the US Army Usually related to something else going on ( my personal but limited knowledge ), but the normal ( incl.maybe a bit hotter than normal ) tactical landing isn’t a problem.
*in fact, this is the reason why there is a tail wheel on the ship in the first place.