PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Why do military helicopters crash rather than autorotate?
Old 10th Mar 2011, 19:22
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Fareastdriver
 
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There are a lot of things around a tail rotor that can cause enormous trouble if the get damaged. A drive failiure is the standard emergency procedure but that is easy. More important things that can go wrong are:

Severe blade damage. This can cause the a tailrotor blade to fly so far out of track it hits the pylon or causes such an imbalance that the tail rotor assembly is torn from its mountings. Whether it is restrained by the controls or not it will just be a chunk of metal thrashing around the back and a conventional autorotation will be unlikely.
Control wire damage. The control cables on all aircraft are tensioned so to avoid any slack in their operation. 2nd World War gun cine film demonstrates an untold number of aircraft that suddenly go into an uncontrollable roll when one of the aileron cables is severed. The same effect will cause a helicopter to spin uncontrollably if a tail rotor cable is cut. Some helicopters have a centering device to prevent this if this happens;---- unless the device itself is hit.
Ground Proximity. I know of one case with a Puma where they had a tail rotor failiure in the hover and managed to shut down the engines and carry out a controllable landing. However, that manoeuver had been practised in a simulator; without that training they would have be unlikely to get the same result.
Low level with high speed you have a multitude of problems where you may just, if you are lucky, get away with it.

That cannot be forcast.
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