Originally Posted by
Robbiee
The fuel guage on my old Saturn got me four hours on the first half, then two hours on the second, so, its not just Robinson who doesn't make perfect guages.
Robinson helicopters: "
our critical gauges work about as good as those on an old broken car".
No wait I quoted that wrong,
it actually says:
"
For more than 50 years, Robinson Helicopter has been at the forefront of the helicopter industry by delivering safety enhancing technologies"
My bad, I wonder how I could have got that confused.
,...and you must be super light, or something, 'cause I've never spent so much time under 18" that I've had to worry about fouling the plugs,...
Certain flight regimes have you well below 18" a lot, yes. Lower speed flight, such as cattle mustering, often has you sitting at 17" all day. Another example is higher altitude flight. At higher altitude, 18" does no longer indicate the same low throttle opening as it does in Torrance CA, however no guidance is given whatsoever how to deal with that, it just says "pull full below 18"."
unless maybe you're still pulling heat even though you're not in carb icing conditions?
Maybe? I don't know since I can't find a relative humidity gauge anywhere on the dash. What is the relative humidity once you're 10 miles and a few thousand feet above the airport? An hour after takeoff? There is no other helicopter type that forces you to make these kind of guesses. A simpler solution would be to just fix the damn carb air temperature gauge, but apparently that challenge is just too difficult for the company at the forefront of the helicopter industry.
Anyway, seems like these days Robinson makes all their decisions based off not wanting to get sued,..and since they haven't fixed the 22 (like they did the Raven) I'm guessing they aren't getting sued over accidents caused by this issue. So, it seems most new pilots aren't struggling with pushing that button "every sixty seconds", lmfao!
Robinson Helicopters: "
barely good enough that we still haven't been sued out of existence"