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Old 14th Feb 2011, 18:31
  #45 (permalink)  
n5296s
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
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15-20 kts shouldn't give too many problems around mountains
My one rotor experience - which was extremely unpleasant - was in winds of this magnitude, and I was a couple of thousand feet above the highest point of the ridge. Luckily the horizontal extent of the rotor was fairly small and I flew through it before it smacked me into the ground - which by this point was a lot further down on the leeward side of the ridge.

The absence of forward airspeed in this incident is really strange. It is SO hard to get an airplane to stop! About the only ways I know are a hammerhead (stall turn) and a flat spin. But there is no apparent rotational deformation of the airframe either, as you'd expect if it was in a flat spin. (No idea how fast a Baron would turn in a flat spin but the Pitts is going round about once per second).
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