Old Man Rotor:
From a few years of flying, training, checking and being checked.......one thing I have learnt...
A big mouth is always associated with a small brain.
And in your case, OMR, that is so clearly true. SOOOOOO clearly true. (Aren't you supposed to be out somewhere working on your skin cancer?)
Too bad Crabby's reading comprehension skills aren't as "good" as his cut-and-paste skills. (Crab, really, get some 12 year-old to demonstrate how to put quotations in html.) And Crab? If there's anything more boring on the planet than reading *your* drivel, it's being forced to re-read my own.
So to summarise – You like - a. insulting people and b. steep approaches only
You dislike – a. helicopter pilots and b. moderators
Yes, no, yes and yes. I never said that I like steep approaches "only." I said I prefer steep approaches to shallow in general, but that there are too many variables in flying to make any hard-and-fast rules. How did you miss that?
Your experience with oil rigs ( and btw does 16 minutes flight time from the coast really qualify as offshore?) seems to be based on once carrying 6 skinny people with little fuel to a helideck that you flew a steep approach to an OGE hover when you knew that hovering is never guaranteed. Your paranoia with striking the tail due to flaring at the end of the approach is endearing as anyone who claims to be as great as you would just come to a slightly higher hover. Oh yes I forgot since hovering is never guaranteed it is much better to pull to max power at 200’ and let it waffle in hoping that ground effect will save you.
Ahh yes old bean, absolutely right! I only ever went to ONE platform offshore once, never to any others. And I only ever went to that ONE platform once in perfect weather. Crab, your post shows how little you really know about offshore flying. So just stick to what you *do* know, okay....umm, what was that again?
As for approach angles offshore- it wasn't just me. The outfit I was flying for did not like shallow approaches. They had enough tail strikes and hard landings to know that steeper is better. On a checkride, they'd get their knickers in a twist if you came in shallow. No instructor that I ever flew with *ever* said that I was coming in
too steeply. A whole book could be written on single-engine offshore flying. Shawn and Nick couldn't write it- they don't have experience in that arena. Perhaps that cranky night pilot from Galveston will stay awake long enough to write it?
Out in the Gulf Of Mexico, you might find yourself landing on a helideck that is only 24 feet square. Your rotor however, is 37 feet and round. This means that your blades will extend out over the edges of the deck by a bit. This also means that you may not have much ground-effect if the wind is calm. The company I flew for only had a vague reference to this in our Operations Manual. It said that operations to and from such helidecks may require reduced gross weights. By how much? It didn't say. Too many variables.
Hoverman:
Think you'll find PF1is a 206 pilot.
I proudly state that most of my flight time is indeed in single-engine helos. However, I would wager that my total flight time well exceeds that of most of the people who routinely post here (unless you all have 10,000+ hours, I guess). And if being *just* a 206 pilot is something bad...well, so be it.