How does airspeed affect helicopter climb performance?
Just from a very basic physics guestimate, having a lateral velocity of zero would seem to give the best climb performance due to the lift vector acting at 90 degrees to the horizontal. Therefore any lateral velocity would (by this reasoning) result in diminished climb rate.
However, helicopters generally seem to have a noticeable forward velocity when on final approach, during the initial climb-out and during an auto-rotation. If something went wrong during there phases of flight, I assume you would want the smallest ground speed possible. A low/nill ground speed would mean that lift does not have to be 'allocated' towards slowing the aircraft down prior to touchdown (assuming nill wind).
So does a higher airspeed make for easier handling etc. or is my initial guestimate simply wrong (I think it’s more likely to be the latter...
) ?
Sorry if this has been covered before but without the search function it’s a tad hard to find out.
Thanks in advance, Dave.
[ 11 July 2001: Message edited by: Dave Incognito ]