Nepal AStar landing
 

AStar landing over control. Nepal

Why so many snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? Wasn’t especially dusty, nor off level. Is nose up off-level not covered in training?

As Gomer Pyle once said Surprise Surprise Surprise :ugh:

Yes I saw that earlier elsewhere, along with comments about ground resonance. Looks like a seat-cyclic interface issue to me.

All I can say is WTF?
Hope no one was hurt.

I have always found it to be a very satisfying feeling when I have completed my fight, to smoothly push the collective all the way to the bottom!

Flights not complete DAR until you are seated in the crewroom with coffee and newspaper in hand. ;)

Fair enough, completed my air time....

True enough, it's what you log. :ok:

Or aft stop due to CG at fwd limit or beyond.

An extreme forward C of G would have prevented him from coming to the hover and he would have had a persistent forward drift.

It looks like he panicked when the tail went down further than he expected on the first attempt at landing and he shoved in a big forward cyclic input, nearly saved it and then got into a PIO

Yes, as I said:

Completed
 

Well, in this case it is completed. :bored:

You can have the C.G outside of the fwd limit without that automatically prevent you from a controlled hover, it does not need to be extreme. If you're at the limit, the front skids will touch ground first even the spot is perfectly level. If you at the same time lower the collective too fast (as it seems to be the case here) the feeling of a rocking chair can make the pilot pull collective fast again in an attempt to cushion the set down, but get airborne again as a result. Then the cyclic will not be sufficient at the aft stop to prevent the helicopter to nose forward and accelerate.

Tailwind will add to over controlling, as seen in the Fiji 350 in 2015: Fiji crash, and last years EC130 in Michigan EC130 crash. Essentially the same ''pilot-finesse'' in these cases.

These machines are easy to load for a fwd CG and handles quite well with it at the limit if you know what you're doing, until it bites. Anyone that has flown heli-ski or any taxi with 2-place bench up front will know what this is.

Wasn't disagreeing just thinking about the mechanics of it :ok:

Nubian's scenario could also be correct but the underlying cause seems to be poor handling

Though I have never been out of control while flying an AS350, being as they are so light to fly, I can imagine that once control is lost, between becoming disoriented, and the helicopter being so "reactive" to overcontrolling, a really bad outcome would be easy to create.

If one doesnt land back right skid back left skid and then lower the front landing a 350 can be entertaining . Of all the small helicopters by far the worst machine to land !

Agreed, that wobbling as you near touch down is tough to overcome as a beginner to the AS350.
I came to the conclusion that it is very much induced by the pedal input, if you are a bit sloppy and tend to over control the tail (that is easy because the tail rotor is very reactive),
Then you end up with some lateral cross coupling that messes up your lateral stability, and the squirrel gets all squirly on you.
that leads to a very disorderly touchdown, Do not linger next to the ground and keep your pedal input very small, that was my conclusion during the type rating.

I found the same thing. The AS350 I tried to just make it one smooth transition from approach to touchdown with as little hover as I could manage. On the other hand, the 300 and 500 I was happy to just hover over the pad to gently put it exactly on the pad where I wanted it.

The 350/355 should be flown with some cyclic friction on, even to the point where you get tired of pushing it around which is a solution for "stick stirrers", and should have a minimum friction which gets overlooked, if the cyclic falls over when you let it go you have some serious issues that should be addressed. Pretty sure this even mentioned in the RFM. The rotor has a pretty big hinge offset and has high control power and is not decoupled for movement between the frame and the dynamics and you will start up a resonance that people fight with. Don't move the cyclic and the aircraft will sit there all day on it's own. M/R balance can also have an effect on the coupling, I have had a 355 with extremely good balance that would hover on it's own without cyclic input for up to 45 seconds. The location of the TR relative to the main rotor is influenced by the wake propagation from the MR which probably misses the TR OGE and influences it IGE as the wake changes from convergence to divergence with interesting part being the transition between the two as for a fixed TR pitch the thrust will change when fed from the wake which ends up with yaw and secondary roll about the vertical C of M. (The vertical distance from the TR to the rotor head is a myth) So to account for that you just need to keep the desired heading. Address these points and these aircraft are easy to fly and land smoothly.
In the video this is just dynamic pitch over i.e. rollover in a different plane. Panic when the aircraft pitches back with FWD cyclic which has way more travel than AFT from neutral and with inertia the C of M gets FWD of the ground contact point and you have less AFT than FWD travel it isn't coming back and all bets are off because physics always prevails.

Meat servo issue.