RHC Training Manual: NOT worth getting!
Forgive my rant--but RHC did the industry, and themselves, a disservice by preparing that manual many years ago and THEN NOT IMPROVING IT! A small example: If you read this undated, unrevised factory giveaway carefully, you will detect that it does not provide for governor-equipped R22 control use--and governors have been mandatory on all R22's for over a decade!
The lesson plans are superficial and inconsistent. The maneuvers guide leaves far too many elements up to pilot/flight instructor guesswork. The writing style is careless, frequently failing to specify clearly how flight and control elements interrelate--that is, written BY already-qualified helicopter pilots FOR the same group, not lending itself to the newcomer (nor the new CFI, either).
That said, it is also true that the prevalent standards of Pilot Examiners usually approve of the manual as a bare-bones basis for CFI practical preparation on lesson plans and the like. So it's not so much WRONG as it is woefully superficial and misleading.
We desperately need a quality, carefully-written primary helicopter instructional manual. Currently, the closest one might come would be to cut and paste a skeletal maneuvers manual out of Coyle's Cyclic and Collective, then fill in the omissions with your own writing.
But a) there's too small a market for good-quality (expensive) textbooks in the tiny helicopter market, and b) the examiners and schools have become complacent and accepting of the shortfalls of current texts, so mediocrity becomes self-perpetuating . . .
Dave Smith
Chief Flight Instructor
Last edited by Heliport; 29th January 2006 at 10:59.