Whilst reading some of Ray Prouty's articles I downloaded off the internet I came across this passage regarding the entry into autorotation:
There is an alternate procedure, however, that can work if the power failure has occurred at a moderately high forward speed. In this situation, the pilot can take advantage of the kinetic energy associated with forward speed by doing a mild cyclic flare before lowering the collective pitch. This puts the rotor into a nose-up attitude that reduces the decelerating torque and maintains thrust and altitude until the forward speed is decreased to the best autorotational speed. At that point the collective pitch is reduced for entry into autorotation.
I know of one test pilot who developed this technique on a UH-1 to the point where he could delay dropping the collective for nine seconds after the power chop. (I also know of one test pilot who takes exception to this alternative procedure. Bob Ferry, who worked for Hughes, says, " lower the collective pitch the very first thing! I know of several dead pilots who didn'" Bob also makes the point that messing up the autorotative landing flare is usually not fatal, but messing up the autorotative entry almost always is.
I have often heard people advocate a slight cyclic flare
at the same time of lowering the collective, but never *instead of* (well, at least initially instead of)
Does anyone actually adopt this theory in practice, or is it generally considered too risky for the benefit it brings?
NB the preceding paragraph had discussed how controlling the rotor speed by collective resulted in a substantial loss of altitude as potential energy is sacrificed to put kinetic energy back into the rotor. This was the alternative