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Old 25th Jan 2012, 13:47
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Fareastdriver
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
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As ab idea as to the punishment an S55/Whirlwind can take WITHOUT chopping the boom I repeat a part of a thread about the dearly departed Chunky Lord.

The beginning of August 1967, 230 Sqn morning prayers. Dave Todd, the boss used to give a question to one of the pilots and today it was Eric Smart's turn.
'You are flying back from the Plain at 200 ft downwind and the engine stops. What do you do?
'Easy,' says Eric, 'do a full flare until about 45 knots, wrack it around into wind and do a constant attitude engine off landing.'
'You can't do that,' says the boss.
'Of course you can, chorused the crowd in the briefing room.
225 and 230 Squadrons had both gone out to Borneo from Germany and practised this procedure. Dave Todd was ex FEAF in Singapore who did not.
'Right. says Chunky (ex 225).' He rubs out the days flying programme and puts everybody in the room on a 20 minute LL EOLs training sortie with him.

I am about No3. I climb in the RHS with Chunky in the LHS. We take off and Chunky knows that I can do them so we go straight into the first one. Downwind in the middle of Odiham airfield, 200ft, 90 knots. He asks me if I am ready, I say OK and he pulls the speed select. I do it as previously descibed and on the ground he announces that he is going to do one.

Off we go, not quite 200ft (180), not quite 90 knots and he tells me to pull the lever. There is, as far as I am concerned, no problem, I had done them from lower than that. He was pattering, as QHIs do until we reached 45 knots and then he turned. Left. A Whirlwind in that position will only let you get away with it when you turn right.

I knew something was wrong because the patter dried up. The aircraft was fighting against the turn and by the time we were into wind we had about 160ft and zero airspeed. Chunky stuffed the nose down to try and get some knots so we plummeted down towards the grass. At the last moment he pulled back, which made no difference to the rate of descent or the airspeed and we three-pointed onto the ground.

It did not feel very hard but the starboard undercarriage had collapsed so I watched in fascination as the rotor blades slapped on the ground and eventually we came to rest on the starboad side.

There was then a lot of huffing and puffing from the LHS as Chunky exited throught the window. A fraction of a second he was back in because the engine was still running and he had put his face over the jet pipe. He shut down the engine and dived out again followed by me who had tidied up the switches and levers.
Apart from the collapsed undercarriage leg the aircraft had very little damage apart from a few dents. What killed it was the winch and motor assembly on the starboard side that caused the frames and stringers it was mounted on to fracture.
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