The Scariest Helicopter Ever
 

I used to fly around in a Bell 47J with a carburettor and a float valve which in turbulence used to cause the engine to splutter and fart worse than the old crone down the road coming home from the pub... and to make that even worse we did it at night over the ocean landing on ships and oil platforms and I need several scotches just thinking about it which considering I don't drink is saying something... anyway, so my scariest helicopter ever is the Bell 47J... so what's yours... anyway this is all on my blog about helicopters in Kiwi Land and can be found on the following link;

Top Birds & Everyfing

Good luck!

Chris

I'll take the bait

Hughes 300 A model fuel injected STC'd for Mogas (Super) early 80's

Without blaspheming?? all I can say is that after two silent arrivals and fact that the ink wasn't dry on my licence so I was current the economic disavantages of Avgas in the hotter months were definitely preferable

You all take care now

205Jack

helicopter with ejection seat
 

I would have to think that the scariest helicopter would be the russian one with an upward firing ejection seat. Granted the rotor blades were supposed to disengage/release, come off just prior to the ejection, but....

yup...copter, ejection se4at...u do the math

With syncronisation it is straightforward enough even with the blades attached.
A medium power ejection seat will cause the pilot leave the end of the gun at 60 ft/sec. The pilot and seat is about six feet tall so top to toe will take 1 tenth/sec to pass a certain point.
A 3 bladed main rotor turning at 240 Rrpm is turning at 9 blades/sec so if the seat is sequenced to fire as one blade is approaching the overhead the seat will be clear when the next blade comes around.
Should you have more or a faster rotor then part of the sequence would be to slow the rotors by whatever means to bring back the same time frame.

The advantage of ejector seats is that you can get rid of whining co-pilots.

Dont be silly - we all know the R22 is the scariest helicopter but we wont admit it.

The Scariest Helicopter Ever
 

Oh give me give me, can I have bang seats in the back as we'll please......wouldn't need GPS, I could just follow the trail of whiney drillers. Scariest for me, the three the donk went quite on.....

Mine was a Chinook that had one Engine runaway up....that would not respond to the published procedure....and a cloud deck at only 5,000 feet above me. Upon loading the rotor system with Collective....I then had two engines at Max or More than Max power. The only difference was the Ng speeds which had one at Topping....and one well beyond Topping! Talk about being on a Runaway Express Elevator! Smack dab in the middle of that small deviation from normal....we had to add IIMC....me with two students who between them had three hours of Chinook experience.

My Beer tasted very good that evening....despite being very foamy from all the shaking my hand was doing!

Math
 

3 x 240 / 60 = 12 blades/sec.
So with a time window of .1 second, something will have to give. :)

on current form it has to be the EC 225

Nice blog Chris :ok:

Enstrom F-28C...with this supposed to be turbocharged engine, and then R22...they go hand in hand!:}

I agree, the Enstrom was the worst thing I have been associated with, it needed 30+ inches of boost just to be airborne, so if the turbo went on holidays, you went onto the ground.
Rattled, shook, refused to start for the second time on a hot day, the clutch was ridiculous, and the dashboard looked like a Leyland P-76, which was the crappiest car ever to be built in Oz.
Enstrom gives me shivers just reminding myself that I flew one.

In 1978 aeronautical engineering students (maybe with Iranian Aircraft Industries) were assembling 6 Rotorway Scorpion kits at Ghale Morghi airport in Tehran. The Scorpion had a tail rotor driven by multiple V-belts.

The Scorpion was one of the first kit helicopter which really flew, but I don't know if these were ever finished and if they were if anybody was brave enough to fly them :}

@ Ascend Charlie; yep, when the turboboost went on holiday, the skid marks became bigger! I don't want to fly this thing ever again!!!

I would rather be in an Enstrom than Robbie any day of the week. One is gentle and will get you to the ground in one piece the other is a widow maker.

I do not understand how the Enstrom gets a mention with so many scary helicopters around .....you should get out more , the Enstrom is in fact the gentlest and least scary of ANY helicopter . Granted it may lack power but its never going to hurt you and has safest record in the world i am guessing . . For me it has to be the R22 . The first flight in around 1981 getting a student to enter auto after cutting the throttle in the cruise was enough for me . Never ever want to be in one again .:eek:

Seconded.

These opinions seldom come from anyone with any meaningful Enstrom time.

Seconded.

These opinions seldom come from anyone with any meaningful Enstrom time.

While I loved the B47 the model I flew (3GB1 iirc) had the hydraulic pump on the engine not the gearbox so if the donk quit you had a hydraulics off EOL to perform which is rather unkind.

If the engine stops in a B47 I guarantee you won't notice the lack of hydraulics - adrenalin will give you strength - just make sure you run on.
OOW ;)

Who'd fly this?

FZR600 deathtrap - Snippets - Visordown

One of Bugs builds there is a you tube of one in tethered hover

Erm, him? http://www.pprune.org/members/66184-bugdevheli

http://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/400...balls-try.html

Rotormouse.mov:eek: on youtube:D Turbine powered:ok: ,Single pilot:{, cruise 180 mph,,,,:=

Scariest
 

Some may refer to it as a Zeppelin, but the Piasecki Helistsat looked scary to me from the outset. One day the phone rang in the SA pilots office and the pilot who had hired on to fly it wanted to talk to anyone. He got connected to the pilot in our office who was our strongest in the area of structures/ dynamics ( a former USMC aviator with an Engr MS in that area who came to us from SA Engr Dept. ). The caller was given a whole list of things to look into. Later events seemed to say that some basics were missed. I say that based on the published info which said the landing gear wheels started to shimmy, which then kicked off a mechanical stability ( ground resonance ) situation. With all of the military history of that subject, on that machine, the V-leg gear vs the Straight-legged gear etc, one would have thought that the importance of the landing gear would naturally have been a primary design issue.

The S-58s on the helistat were gearless & tailless.:}
The pipe frame was an abortion at best,:eek: POS for the Forest Circus:uhoh:

HelistatGear
 

That was my point, Hillberg. Instead of the normal landing gear, which incorporates a damper, the Helistat was hard mounted on wheels. The S-58 landing gear is a part of the mechanical instability attenuating system, along with the main rotor dampers. Sometimes the onset of that sort of instability is exceedingly rapid, so that just retarding the throttles and applying a rotor break simply takes too long, leaving the alternative of grabbing a handful of collective and applying it NOW is the only salvation. My recollection of the accident footage showed a fairly slow attempt to lift to hover, but structural failure had already commenced.

I wonder how it would have worked if they had used old H-25 Airframes instead of the H-34's? I have never heard any discussion about the H-25's having a ground resonance problem.

That video does make one wonder about the level and quality of engineering that went into the design.

HUP vs S-58
 

Main reason for using S-58 vs HUP would be power: 1525 vs 550. I believe the HUP head was articulated, so the 2/3P inherent in the rotor was there. I don't know anyone to ask! Took a look at the video clip and one can see that the rotors are wobbling at a fairly low frequency but at " scary " ( sorry, couldn't resist ) amplitudes. Nobody around to report on whether they did a shake test on the frame to look for natural frequencies, and the other thing that comes to mind is that the 2/3P is a wobble, i.e., a combined pitch/roll excursion, which would transmit accompanying high oscillatory loads into the frame structure that it may/may not have been designed to take. The rotor is at high thrust in the clip, so the thrust is high, thus the oscillatory loads were high.

You are a Test Pilot Brother Dixson.....would you have flown that thing? Did each H-34 have a Pilot....and if so....how would you coordinate control of the machine?


An interesting link.....

Piasecki "Heli-Stat" helicopter - development history, photos, technical data

This must rate high in the scary list. KA-26

Helistat
 

SAS, the answer is no, with the information I had at the time, which was only that passed along by the Helistat pilot in the conversation reported in the earlier post.

You asked another question which pointed to discussion we had internally after that phone call. Specifically, it was our understanding that one pilot would fly the machine, thru interconnected controls. After the accident, it was reported that the four vehicles were manned. Perhaps those personnel were there to operate the engine and other basic S-58 systems? In any case the control runs were very long, and control slop and hysteresis, effects of frame structure deflection, statically and dynamically and a raft of related questions seemed to be open, again just our conclusion based on the phone call.

You may recall the CH-54 Twin Lift project, wherein the lifting power of two CH-54B's would be gained by utilizing a balance beam structure, the ends of which each of the two Cranes would pick up with their cargo hooks, after reeling out 50 ft or so of cable. While we did that manually, using the back seat controls, the plan was to link the two AFCS systems and couple up the control systems. We did one real flight with a load of 35,000 lbs, but it never went anywhere, as I believe that everyone realized that it was just too tricky to do on a regular basis in a tactical environment. I know that following that program, from time to time someone would ask me what I knew about twin lift, and I would plead absolute ingorance.

A very....very Wise Man you are too, Sir!

As one Inspector Callahan once said....."A Man must know his own Limitations!".

Wise?
 

The other three guys ( one each in the front and back seats ) played it the same way. It was a phantom project...nobody ever did it.

Scariest - tie between R22 (duh!) and Enstrom. Enstrom due to 2 precautionary landings due to bits flying off at inopportune times.

Dangerous Helicopters
 

I think we can add the AS350 to the list of the R22 & R44!

At the opposite end of the scale to the R22 and still scary....



Wider than a 747. Too big for its own good.

As a fixed wing boy with only 2 hours on helicopters I think if had engines that were doing that i would jump out and run away to get the fire brigade and not get anywhere near it ever again

I think the R22 is being an injustice here... Its great fun to fly. A rotorway on the other hand?!? Or even the 333 for a scary title...

MADY

My scariest helo: Wasp. Balsa wood tail rotor blades, bicycle chain used to alter the pitch rod. Engine with a power output of a lawn mower.
Undercarriage wheels canted outwards to act as brakes on landing. [And we all pracitced EOL's to running landings].:D