Originally Posted by CYHeli
IAt the end of the vid you can see other scratch marks where there had been previous autos. Or was that just an optical illusion?
We used to scratch the runway. During training, I screwed up one 180 auto and was going to end up in a pit north of the runway on the other side of the airport fence. I opinioned that I had screwed up and should do a power recovery. The instructor told me to keep it going, flare over the pit, hold 60 all the way to touchdown, and milk the collective to get us there. So, we touched down at 60, you should have seen the sparks through the chin bubble window. It felt really ugly at the end as we ground to a stop. I leaned out the door and looked backwards after we stopped, and I'll be darned if there wasn't two wisps of smoke marking the run-on. It was like something out of bugs bunny/roadrunner. That one scratched the runway pretty good. The carbides are hard so they don't wear out too fast, but that means something else is going to wear, namely the blacktop.
-- IFMU