Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
During my fixed wing to rotor wing training the notion of being high to enable greater choice for forced landing areas was balanced off with the concept of not being needlessly high if something goes wrong - less time to get to the ground. If there are no good landing area choices anyway, then being lower is better, 'cause you're going down anyway! While ferrying an MD500 back near the Canadian arctic, I went up to 8000 feet for the spectacular mountain view. The [very experienced] rotorwing pilot I was flying with was really squeamish that high, and asked me to get back down close to the ground as soon as I'd had my look around!
Yes, there is an uncomfortable feeling of flying high AGL, with all that glass around and the down angle field of vision, it’s not like an airplane looking forward at the horizon. The blades also have a “drier” flapping sound in the thinner air, only experienced with the sight of mountains above the tree line, making another anomaly in your mind.
- In case of power plant failure, autorotation from 8000ft gives you almost 5 minutes of autorotation glide time, and a possible landing spot up to 6 or 7 miles away.
- In case of a catastrophic failure, a body in free fall will reach maximum vertical velocity in 1500ft, so 200ft might be better chance to arrive there slower and maybe right side up, especially if that failure is developing in the next 10sec, with heavy vibration and all those high emergency signs...