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Old 22nd April 2013 | 22:20
  #14 (permalink)  
HeliComparator
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Joined: Aug 2004
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From: Aberdeen
waterbottle, a couple of differences: FW has inherent stability so the aircraft will keep flying with no flight control inputs, eg whilst the system is rebooted following catastrophic software crash, glitch caused by cosmic rays, lightning etc. Helis will typically be upside down within a couple of seconds of swashplate freeze at cruise speed. You couldn't do a Soux City in a helicopter!

Helis suffer from a much less electronics-friendly environment mainly due to vibration levels. Take an item of avionics installed in FW, MTBF is looooong. Identical item in RW, MTBF can be shorter by orders of magnitude.

Oh and yes, we are in the main Luddites!
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