CF Sea King Pilot
Well, if you say that no other CF Sea King pilot has jumped in, that saves me reading all the posts. I just read the first page and this last page.
We did receive good training on putting the bird in the water and also taking off from the water. In most cases of ditchings, the reason that put you down there, meant you were going to stay on the water. However, I can recall that one crew did have a ditching and then a take-off sequence but after all these years, I can't remember what caused them to go in. However, they managed to take off and fly to shore.
The Sea King is great for taking off and landing on water - at relatively low sea states. But in most North Atlantic sea states, once you were in the water, if at least one engine could keep the rotor still turning, you might have some chance of keeping it upright in low enough sea states and if you still had enough outside visual reference (depending on day/night wx) to know which way was up. I remember a lot of our missions being at night and in higher sea states. Even with the rotor turning and flying rpm, the Sea King had a limited range of off-level before it was beyond the range at which it could be levelled, even at full power.
If both engines quit or were shut down, all bets were off. Being so top heavy meant it was likely to turn turtle pretty quick. But even then, the combination of the airframe float design and the inflatable bags would keep it floating for some time - in some cases hours, and in some cases a couple of days before slow leaks took their effect.
I was never more greatful than when I was given the privilege of taking the Underwater Egress training or whatever that course was called. It included being strapped in a fuselage, turning turtle and escaping, first in daylight, then blindfolded (night), then finding doors jammed requiring alternate exit, then having to work back into the cabin and removing an immobile patient out the door before exiting yourself. And it was good clean fun!
Another posting to follow . . .
Shipborne ops were conducted on rough water. The hauldown system locked the aircraft on the deck. That meant that you could handle ship motion up to something like nine or ten degrees of pitch and up to 31 degrees of roll while locked in. The landing gear wheel on the "upside" of a high roll would actually come off the deck but the hauldown probe in the belly had you securely locked into the beartrap so the bird could not roll right off the ship's deck. It didn't feel too comfortable though.
You would only experience that until the ship took a steadier course in preparation for engine and rotor start-up. Then the pitch and roll had to be quite a bit less - I can't remember the numbers now. There has been some discussion about blade movement, precession and all that. In practical terms, we had to do a rapid rotor engagement and the same for braking the rotor on shutdown. We would start one engine while it remained disengaged from the rotor. When aircraft and systems checks were done, we started the second engine and ran up the rotor together. The Sea King had droop stops to prevent the blades from drooping too low when at low rpm, until the rpm could be increased to normal. One of the things the deck crew had to watch for when we disengaged the rotor was to see if all the droop stops were working. If not, we had to quickly wind the rotor up again and try another disengagement.
There was a posting that mentioned floats were only used on smaller helicopters.
The CF used floats on Twin Hueys (Bell 212). They were huge ungainly looking things - big, black, long cigar shaped, inflated bladder type floats, with the bows tapered upwards.
They also used similar looking things on the Kiowa (Jet Ranger). If the situation required start-up/shut-down on the water, you had to paddle away from shore so that you could spin around doing a 360 until the tail rotor became effective. In flight you had to anticipate slowing your roll rate in a turn because of the weight and momentum created by the floats being heavy and at a distance from the longitudinal centre line of the aircraft. On shut down it would turn as well when the rotor lost effectiveness.