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Old 25th Oct 2017, 17:40
  #50 (permalink)  
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Teaching people to manipulate the controls of a helicopter in the cruise is relatively straight forward and, in a stabilised aircraft, teaching someone to hover isn't that much more difficult.

However, getting from cruise to hover and landing is usually where it goes wrong for the inexperienced.

I have taught many RAF rearcrew to fly (in the old days with single pilot and a navigator that was quite useful) and some were very competent.

However, we had an incident a few years ago when a helicopter pilot did slump across the controls and it took the co-pilot several hundred feet to recover - had it happened lower, they would have been toast.

In short, know your audience and consider carefully the implications of them suddenly putting in a random control input - a favourite is lowering the lever and pulling back on the cyclic in the hover!

Definitely not recommended in anything with Robinson on the placard!
crab@SAAvn.co.uk is offline