To: Floyd Dan
I quote,” A Japanese helicopter designer has built a control system so adaptable that it can deal with the loss of a blade in flight!
No human pilot can make those calculations and millisecond responses”.
What exactly does it do? Does it place itself in a locked in position so that it would not be dislodged or harmed as a result of the subsequent imbalance and following crash?
Many years ago I was monitoring a class on the rotor system for the CH-37. The instructor was asked what would happen if a blade came off in flight. He replied that the rotor system being fully articulated would reposition the remaining blades on their drag hinges in order to compensate for the lost blade. On that particular helicopter the centrifugal loading on each blade was somewhere around 72,000 pounds. The millisecond response of the rotor system would be to tear the helicopter apart. Although the loading on smaller helicopters is much less the result of a blade loss would be the same. To my knowledge, there was only one helicopter that successful flew with only one blade and that was a helicopter concept tested by MBB.
I also heard of a Hughes LOH that had blade damage that made it difficult to fly. The pilot landed and removed the bad blade and its’ opposite in the opposed pair and with a lot of power and a lot of pitch he was able to return to base. However if the damaged blade separated in flight the pilot and the helicopter would both be dead.