It is my personal opinion that the Robinson safety course is designed to protect Robinson helicopters and not the people that fly Robinson Helicopters. They tell you about mast bumping and how to avoid it. They tell you about low rotor RPM conditions and how to avoid them and they tell you to avoid zero G conditions and how to recover from them yet they do not address the basic design deficiencies of the helicopter that will allow you to get into these hazardous conditions. Zero G is a given in a single rotor design so there is no problem there. However the recovery from this conditions requires that you recover in a way that could get into further trouble assuming there is a relation to the 18-degree offset on the head. If when a Robinson crashes as a result of mast bumping nobody discusses the design deficiencies that led to the failure it is always the pilots fault because he/she disregarded the POH or even worse, what he/she was taught in the safety course.
It has been discussed elsewhere on these threads that one particular instructor in the safety course (Tim Tucker) indicated to his students that in recovering from a zero G situation that in bringing the cyclic back it should be displaced a tad to the left. Being a test pilot for Robinson in the development of the R22 he must have been aware of the problem that if the cyclic were moved straight back it would add to the right roll which could cause loss of the helicopter. Yet, if you look at the instructions in the POH it does not address this tad movement to the left. In fact, it states that if you move the cyclic to the left in recovering from zero G you could increase the flapping loads causing mast bumping and resultant loss of the rotor system. Assuming Tim Tucker was correct and, I do there must be an acceptable amount of left displacement before it becomes excessive and results in mast bumping. It seems to me that there is an inconsistency between the teachings of Tim Tucker and the other course instructors and an inconsistency between what Tim Tucker teaches and what is in the POH. This means that in theory individuals taught by Tim Tucker have a higher probability of surviving a zero G incident than those students taught by other instructors.
Jiff in his posting above indicated that he was not favorably impressed with the course mainly because of two things (my opinion). He has an engineering background and he asked questions that I had posed in my other postings. He also questioned their holier than thou attitude. If you remember in some of my more vitriolic postings I stated that Frank Robinson is not God (nor are his employees) and just because he/they state something it is not necessarily true.
Why don’t you (those that attended the course) revisit it in your thoughts and see if some of your opinions change? Don’t let this thread die.
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