Glide slopes angles
Are Heli glide slopes significantly different from air-plane glide slopes ?
From most Approach charts one infers an average slope of 5%.
If it is steeper then most charts will make a special note.
A Heli VFR approach will probably be steeper, but how much ?
A 90 Knts / 500 fpm is also about 5%.
Doing standard ILS approaches seems to be a bit boaring in a Heli, but making this much steeper may speed up things too much (times to stabilize etc...)
An ideal Heli IFR angle, how much would that be ??
One of the reasons I am asking this is
- I am building a VITANS (=Intertial digital platform), based 3-dimensional approach assistant (looks like flying 3-D tubes on a simulator), and I am wondering what reasonable slopes are (this is a design parameter when designing the approach tunnels)
- my personal experience is that Plane like slopes give you sufficient time to get things under control, (much) steeper and shorter seems to make things more difficult (ILS/IFR)
- I have a personal feeling that two A109E crashes (nothing against the machine, perhaps just a coincidence) I know of (in SPIFR) are probaly due to VRS (sorry Nick), provoqued by slight tails winds combined with a too slow/steep final approach (could be a wild guess no formal proof of that)
d3