To: Dave Jackson
You say I’ll love this referring to the text that followed. Hell I not only do not love it I don’t understand it. I understand diagrams not words. Regarding my calling Frank Robinson I did just that about seven years ago. I told him that I could show him how to greatly simplify his rigging procedure, which could be performed in about 30 minutes with one man, and you didn’t have to level the helicopter. You could even rig the R-22/44 on a pitching and rolling tuna boat. All it took was two very simple tools that could be manufactured in their own shops with the tools being offered as special tools and sold to the operators. A few days later Franks’ son called me and stated that Robinson helicopters was not in the business of making special tools. As a result the Robinson helicopters are a bear to rig and the rigging instructions are very vague and misleading for the mechanic.
The author of the text you quoted said if I understand that there is no pitch coupling on a high speed rotor system simply because the blades can’t react fast enough. If that is the case, how can a Robinson rotor system respond so quickly with a 72-degree lead angle. If this same reasoning was applied to the tail rotor which rotates considerably faster than the main rotor and there were no pitch flap coupling the tail rotor would eventually fatigue and it and possibly the tail rotor gearbox would would break away from the tail boom.
When collective is pulled and cyclic input is made the pitch link connect point on the horn is above the flapping axis and any flapping up will subtract pitch and when the blade flaps down pitch will be added just like on a tail rotor. Now maybe the blades can’t react due to their rotational speed but the pitch flap coupling is still there.
