Originally Posted by
NickLappos
Since all helos of the 1st generation were teetering heads, the books and courses (and the rules of thumb) do not differentiate and so all helos are tarred with the same brush. The universal probability of dynamic rollover is perhaps one of the "myths" that perpetuate our world.
Whoa. Can't let that one go. Man, Igor is gonna be ticked off when he hears that you uttered such blasphemy, Nick. Especially coming from
you! Maybe you should have said, "With the exception of Sikorsky's R-4, since most
training helos of the 1st generation..."
Although any helicopter can snag a skid/wheel and
over she goes!, it must be said that yes, DR generally happens to birds with teetering systems with low control power. And here, I stand with Whirly: It's the tail rotor thrust that gets you, "pushing" the ship over. The hapless pilot gets the yaw trim setting wrong while lifting off...or maybe because one of the skids has sunk into the dirt a bit and he thinks everything's cool because he doesn't feel any unintended yaw when getting light-on-the-skids (which he misinterprets), then
O-S-G's!
When I first got to the GOM, I used to worry about this when taking off from wooden deck helipads:
Is one of my skids stuck between the boards? Then I learned to simply not land parallel to the boards. D'oh!
Which brings up a question: Is there a "common" side that helicopters dynamically rollover to? Because of my believe that the TR is the culprit, my guess would be that the ship would rollover to the right more than the left.
Any info on that, Shawn? Is there a trend?