As a low time civilian amateur PPL (H) on Scouts (170 hrs plus 1200hrs on other, non rotary things) I suppose I just have to accept that I am, in the opinion of those ex-army pprune heroes, just another deadly accident waiting to happen.
I can’t see any point in defending my favourite flying dump truck against such a wealth of experience but I can admit that I do enjoy flying the brute hugely.
I love the sheer crudity of the thing. I’ve tried a Gazelle and it makes the Scout feel like a jeep compared to a Ferrari. The Ferrari is lovely but for everyday use I really want a jeep.
It’s not that fast and a headwind can make you mutter but the power is something else. I did my ab initio training in high and hot California and so was never really sure that I had enough power to come into a high hover when two up in a Schweizer. No such problem in the Scout.
It’s amazingly heavy if you chop the hydraulics but it is definitely flyable by anything slightly stronger than a wimp. A couple of years ago I was at Thruxton when the CAA did a series of test runs during which they chopped the hydraulics at speeds up to 110 knots. The pilot (an attractive figure….he does my annual checks) isn’t built like Tarzan and he seemed unfazed by the experience.
I accept that the Scout E.O.L’s are a spectator sport most of the way down with all the input over the last few seconds. To compensate I always dial in the wind direction on the compass and fly just teeny bit higher to give me a few more yards of gliding.
I also accept that four of the Scouts have crashed in civilian hands but it’s a testament to something (luck?) that everybody managed to walk or crawl away. Literally in the case of the guys who autoed into a flooded quarry, the only ones who seem to have had some sort of inexplicable power failure.
One pilot lost tail rotor authority in a slow right hand descending spiral close to the ground in marginal viz….not a clever position for anybody with a left turning rotor system to put themselves into and another destroyed his aircraft just 15 short minutes after finishing his conversion….it is very, very twitchy in pitch. The last one had water in the fuel…hardly a fault of the aircraft.
I did ask an ex-military man to show me what a Scout could do. I have never been so frightened in my life but I did realise that we civilians actually fly it at only about 40% of it’s capability……….it’s going to be a sad day when I have to give it up…I think a recession is about to hit us.
The Scout