Perhaps they could stop using low time, hours building instructors who are little better than the students themselves.

But that would mean paying more...........

Come on Crab, our esteemed Royalist of Navies have just graduated their first ‘Creamie’ QHI. It must be the only way to go, no?

I have said this before but here goes again. My only time in true VRS occurred at 2000 ft AGL. Student had done 6 very nice recoveries from IVRS. We had one last go. Down wind pulling 18MAP in a Hughes 300. Airspeed has gone below 30 kts, GPS ground speed about 8. IVSI showing 700 ft a min airspeed indicator now less than 20 knots. Ac has already gone through the Hughes rumble ( loss of translational lift ) . I ask the student to recover, to my surprise he pulls full collective, almost instantly the ac pitches about 75 degrees up, no movement on the cylic. I glance at the IVSI which now is rapidly going south of 1500 fpm. I apply full left pedal and full forward cylic, NOTHING happens apart from my ring piece puckering. In desperation I dump the collective and push full right pedal. Now then ac is pitched what feels like 90 degrees nose down with ASI rapidly accelerating towards VNE. At this point the ground is worryingly close, gingerly apply rear cylic and a load of collective to stop the disc overspeeding. Pull the ac out just above tree top height. Back to airfield to change underwear . This is why I think Claude has never experienced VRS. Now i do a bit of line work ( about 1500 hours so not that experienced compared to a lot ) only problem with stepping left or right is a load of shouting from the ground crew as one swings the load into them ! I have always found it better to push forward but always willing to learn.

Curious now,...does Vuichard distinguish between VRS and IVRS? I only ask because this distinction is something I've only come across here on pprune. I mean, its been a while since I opened the text, but I don't remember the Rotorcraft Flying Handbook making it either? :ooh:

IMO, the Vuichard technique has merits, but it is an advanced manuevre that would waste a student's time learning during a PPL course. They need to know the signs of onset of VRS and how to prevent it from occuring, and the basic recovery method.


It is similar to doing 0 airspeed, or reverse autorotations. Yes, it can be done, but really, most of the time it is instructors showing off their skills.

Out of interest, why demonstrate it downwind at 2,000’? The rotor system doesn’t know it’s downwind

Its easier to demonstrate IVRS when downwind as you have to lose ETL. If you try demonstrating it into a 20 kt headwind you have to be moving backwards over the ground at 20 kts, which feels a little odd, and in reality most PPL holders are going to get into IVRS at altitude when they are downwind (eg circling someones house slowly to take a photo)

Exactly.

And given FI pay is stuck at 2007 levels....

"The rotor system doesn’t know it’s downwind"

It does with dirty air coming from the tail

at 2,000’?

Why not? The rotor system doesn't know :)

I will probably get a lot of flak for this but this is a combination of 2 posts on the old discussion.

I am posting a couple of photos just to relieve the monotony.

I was doing a job which entailed a lot of climbing, descending and hovering at high altitudes AGL.
I discovered that it is possible to enter VRS from a steady hover.
It was a great surprise the first time.
Due to the job it happened a lot. So I got the chance to try various things out.
Maintaining a vertical descent pulling power just increased the rate of descent.
Controls got sloppy but the aircraft did not enter any unusual attitudes.
There were no torque or RPM fluctuations.
Recovery was simple, Initiate forward or sideways movement and exit the column of descending air.
The aircraft was very light during these operations just myself and sometimes 1 passenger and around half fuel.
It warned you it was going to enter VRS. You would be happily sitting there at about 80%Q. The VSI would flicker (not even to 100FPM down) Altimeter would hardly move. If you did nothing it would enter VRS shortly thereafter. Pull a bit of collective and it usually entered VRS immediately and fully.
It only happened in calm wind conditions.
As we were hovering, climbing or descending on a ‘Laser’ beam you were never moving more than 2 feet in the horizontal from ground level to as much as 7000 AGL. Usually we only climbed 2000-4000 ft.
If you lost the ‘Laser’ beam you had to descend to ground level in order to reacquire it so sometimes I remained in VRS to descend.
The aircraft was being observed using a 50x theodolite so the surveyors could see the aircraft depart downwards. They would have me in the crosshairs as I hovered and suddenly I would depart downwards. They thought it was very funny to watch.
Just for info the aircraft had a cowling just abut under the fwd seats. The cowling had a screen on the bottom. Inside the cowilng was a video camera focused on the screen and a small 3 inch square monitor was installed on the instrument panel. A 10 amp gyro stabilized ‘Laser’ was placed on the ground pointed vertically upwards. You hovered low over the ‘Laser’ and placed the aircraft over it until you saw the ‘laser’ dot on the screen. You then initiated a climb at about 6-800 FPM keeping the dot as close to the center of the screen as possible. If you rapid control movements failed in this and you lost the dot you had to return to ground level and start over again. It took a lot of practice to learn the technique usually about 5 -10 hours. Some guys caught on quickly, some never could. The customer paid fro the training. They also allowed you to go out and practice if you didn’t do a shot for a day or two as it was a skill that required constant practice. Totally an eye, hands, feet coordination thing…if you had to think about it the dot was gone.

Starting from 100 ASL to 8000 ASL Temps -20 to +25C. Terrain100 ASL to 1500-2000.
Well some folks are going to say that entering VRS in still air and zero rate of descent is impossible.
In discussion years later with a very experienced and well respected test pilot he was surprised to hear of it but thought that it was just amazing that the circumstance was created. The ‘Laser’ keeping the aircraft in a +- 24 inch hover for extended periods and the aircraft being tracked with a theodolite. The chance to operate in the conditions described and stay in VRS for up to 1-2 minutes try various things and observe results was a unique opportunity. He said that they had never even thought of doing it and it would have been a separate test programme during which it would have been difficult to achieve the test parameters.. I agreed totally with him. It was an interesting thing but not worth the candle to spend time to explore. In the end what would have been the benefit of it a except the “Been There Done That” T-shirt.
You always lost the ‘Laser’ dot when it happened so you had to descend back down to ground level so staying in VRS was quick way to get there. I found exiting at a +-45 degree from aircraft heading with a +- 10 degree nose down attitude to gain fwd speed seemed to work best. You could exit by entering autorotation but this involved a considerable height loss. Exiting fully developed VRS with power applied and fwd speed was the most easy but when you are looking at VS anywhere from -1500 to -2500 it is going to take TIME and ALTITUDE to return to straight and level flight. As I stated before aside from the sloppy controls the aircraft never entered any unusual attitude or did anything scary. It seemed happy in the state it was in, no RPM, Torque or heading changes.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....262012c2e.jpeg
DLY a nice 350D. The Helicopter was brought to the hover over the laser with the beam hitting the screen on the cowling.
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....80ad6c532.jpeg
The dot is displayed on the small TV screen on the right,
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....2be496a57.jpeg
The 10 amp gyro stabilized laser in position. Now just keep the dot in the screen and climb vertically 4-5 thousand feet and come to a stable hover for the surveyors to take the shot. .

it was going to come one day Jelly - I'm horrified that it has but Military flying training has been messed up so badly by the dogma of contractorisation that it's not a huge surprise.

If you need more QHIs and the system is too slow to produce them (and you are bleeding experience as people jump ship) then the idea of a creamie becomes more attractive.

For those that don't know the term it comes from the FJ world where the best students on the course were 'creamed off' to become instructors without any operational experience. Much like low time PPLs hour building via the AFI route.

albatross, interesting story, one question, what was the aim of the task, some sort of survey work?

well, its a proven thing in the fixed wing world, the chopper world is woefully behind in that area, but hopefully the advancements in VR tech on a full motion platform will change that. On the most important note, he is absolutely right that the amount of paperwork chasing is destroying any safety advancements they are working for. Its insane the amount of crap we need to deal with in the fixed wing world, yet we have operators just avoiding crashing by 6ft on an approach, departing from wrong intersections, going offroading and back on the runway etc etc.. Basically flying skills are trash these days, but damn everybody is being chased for doing a fuel check 4min late or asked to do additional paperwork instead on focusing on the flight at hand. So Vuichard is completely right in this case.

Yes basically you were a very tall stadia rod. Pre GPS.
For example if you were cutting a base line for a power line and the next turning point was miles away you set up the laser on the turning point and climbed until the surveyor could see you. You then hovered there until he “took the shot, later on we mounted reflectors on the cowling front and sides so he could get a laser range too. .
The surveyor now could direct the line cutters on the correct path.
In hilly terrain that could be 3000 feet or more. I think the highest shot I did was 7000+, at that height the laser “dot” filled just about the entire screen.
If the laser was set up in soft ground you had to tell people near it not to walk around as it could cause the tripod to move which caused the stabilization to kick in and the dot would move in the screen causing you to think the helicopter was moving and make a correction.
If you lost the dot you had to descend well away from the beam as you didn’t want to be looking down and accidentally look into a 10 amp laser beam.
You tried not to use pedal much and soon discovered that ( into Wind ) a little collective up moved you forward and down moved you back so you used that a bit. The whole thing was muscle memory and constant practice was required which the client paid for.
It was common to turn slowly as you climbed and discover when you had a chance to look around that you had turned 60 degrees or more.
You could encounter rapid changes in winds aloft as you climbed at +- 1000 fpm and be blown “off the spot”. So you would, on your next attempt, slow your rate of climb to transition more slowly coming through the area of change.
Coming down after the shot we would just lay it on its side and peg the VSI.
It was a fun job. Great crews to work with.

You can do the same these days with any Airbus Helionix equipped aircraft automatically which will hold ~ +- 1 metre with good DGPS data.

It will also drop you straight into VRS if you engage GTC-H (Ground Trajectory Control - Hover) from forward flight with a low power setting as engaging GTC-H does not automatically engage a Vertical axis.
You need relatively calm conditions of course. Not an issue if you have taken the time to actually read the AFCS FOBN.

But if you do engage collective axis autopilot with GTC.H (or any other mode), the Helionix will keep the helicoper out of VRS-region regardless of how much rate of descend pilot asks for.

No, the problem is that helicopters are far more difficult to model than FW and although you can make a generic model, accurately reproducing a particular aircraft requires accurate data from a fully instrumented real aircraft and no-one is going to pay to explore VRS in an expensive helicopter.
​​​​​​​
VR is a great training tool for some things but it would suffer from the same issues - accurately reproducing handling qualities in hazardous scenarios.

Well that would take all the fun out of it!
The system was pre GPS and it was all hand flown.

When I originally talked about it with reference to entering VRS from a stable hover in these specific circumstances, ( very stable hover, OGE, extended time in the hover, no wind, no turbulence or down draughts etc) more than a few folks violently disagreed and stated that you could not enter VRS from a stable hover in calm wind conditions. Since then I have seen some of these same folks state with some authority that you can

One thing I never encountered was any sort of violent aircraft movements, unusual attitudes, torque fluctuations or vibrations. Just sloppy controls and an exhilarating rate of descent which could be increased with an increase in power. I sometimes spent up to 2 minutes in this flight regime as I had to descend back to ground level to reacquire the laser dot again anyway. I would exit the VRS with a 45 degree exit with power applied…worked every time. You would feel a bump as you exited (much like flying through your wake when doing. a 360 steep turn ) . Fun daze.

.