Hi there.
New to this forum, but I've read every posting in one long sit-through
Short backstory. I'm a Swede living in London. Used to have a Swedish PPL (A) in Sweden (that I'm renewing as we speak to a JAR) and started training on choppers. Did 23 hours of training and solo flying on Hughes 269's between 1994 and 1995 until the following story kind of put me off a bit. Bare with me:
One late autumn day in 1995 my instructor calls me up and ask me if I want to fly an old 269 to its operator across the pond free of charge. It's about a 45min ride and of course I jump at this. We pre-flight and take-off, chit chat and whatnot. Haven't flown that prticular ship before, and it feels less 'firm' and responsive than the ones I'm used to.
Anyway, the route takes us over the archipelago in the Stockholm area and I'm doing my best at flying a straight line. Instructor says I should try to keep within autorotational distance of the all the litle islets we pass, in case something would go wrong. I think he is being overly cautious, but I do as he suggests. So we start to zig-zag between all the little islets.
Obviously, the second after we've passed out over a stretch of open water after just having left a small island, the engine starts to sound really strange. We look at eachother and I can see my instructors hands coming up from their restful position on his laps and starting to grab the cyclic.. BANG! Motor quits violently (seized up - as we later got to know - due to valve lodging into cylinder), aircraft yaws heavily to the right. We're at 1500ft and my instructor yells to me that he's got control and that I should call a mayday on the radio. I'm sh***ing myself and am probably calling a mayday on every radio frequency there is but the right one. He's managed to turn the aircraft around towards the little island. We narrowly miss a power line (I recall screaming "Do you see it? Do you see the line??!!" to which he responds "got it!"). We settle in a horse field - hard, but alive.
I remember just sitting there for the longest period of time in complete silence. Finally the horses start to come up to the heli and throw curious glances at the strange arrivals. We finally start to make our way to the nearest house on shaky legs.
Would I have managed if I've been on my own? Who knows - I had done lots of autorotation training, but I doubt I'd have gotten all of it right in such a short time. But it's impossible to tell. All I can say is that I am very grateful that he was with me that particular day.
Anyway, after this I took one more helicopter lesson and then quit. I was afraid, I was spooked. I was also broke and thought that the only way to continue was on turbines. And I simply couldn't afford that at the time.
Fast forward to 11 years later. Today I can afford it (just barely). And I've always had a love for flying helis - it was so much more joyful to me compared to fixed wing, and I've missed it. So, I've decided to take it up again. But my credo still stands - no piston powered helis. They're just not built for flying, as far as I'm concerned. And all you get today is heli schools training on the one machine that has to be the worst trainer ever - the R22. No leeway there, if you get into trouble.
To make a long story short (are you still awake?): Since I'm spending the money, I want to train on my fav turbine - the Hughes/MD 500 or the 520N. Always loved them and from what I've heard, they're a dream to fly. That leaves me with two training options in the London area (as far as I know) - Fast Helicopters in Brighton and HeliAir at Denham. And now finally to my questions:
Has anybody got any info about these schools and first hand experience? Has anybody flown the 520N out of Fast?
Also, is there anyway I could somehow use the 23 hrs I logged over 11 years ago for my new PPL (H), or are they just 'lost', so to speak?
Thanks for listening.
