Cyclic climb after entering autorotation
Hi folks -
Just read Hugh Mills' "Low Level Hell", in which he describes his first tour in Vietnam flying OH6As.
At one point he describes an engine failure due to gunfire while he was "about forty feet off the ground and doing maybe fifty knots".
His reaction to this situation was: "I dumped collective... pulled the cyclic back.. and managed to cyclic climb to about 150 feet. With that extra altitude, I was able to enter autorotation..."
He managed to land the helicopter - hard, and damaging the skids, but otherwise without incident.
I'm curious what people think of this maneuver. From my own meager experience with the R22, doing something like that would put you dangerously slow and with decaying rotor RPM as you started to drop back down. Of course - the R22 isn't an OH6, and obviously the maneuver worked for Mills, but I'm still curious.