The thing is, helicopters are different from planes.
An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly.
A helicopter does not want to fly.
It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously.
There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why, in general, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, bouyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipatiors of trouble. They knowif something bad has not happened, it is about to.
Story was published in the July 1977 issue of The MAC Flyer
An AME at the airport I trained once remarked, “Helicopters are half a million pieces of metal spinning around in circles!”
I’ve got this article on my wall. I love what this gets at.
I tell my students that a helicopter has 74,000 moving parts, all moving in opposition to each other, each with the common goal to kill you.
It is a good article for aircrew
I was once told – by a helicopter pilot – that autorotation is a maneuver specifically designed to keep the pilot’s hands and feet busy as he falls tragically to his death.
And an item called the Jesus nut holds all the pieces together.
I heard once that helicopters don’t fly. They beat the air into submission.
Whoever wrote this article has to be a fixed wing pilot. He obviously doesn’t know what he is talking about. Fixed wing pilots don’t how much fun it is to fly until you have flown a helo. I flew SH-3s and I love them. In fact I flew one from Key West to San Diego. The stretch from El Paso to Tucson was incredible.
Helicopters do not fly by their own at all. They are simply that ugly so the Earth repels them.
I flew the Kaman SH2-F in the NAVY. One of my fixed wing colleagues described a helicopter as “10,000 moving parts all flying in Clos formation”. I don’t know about that but I do know they vibrate. Our Civilian Tech Reps from Kaman would have us sit on the ground turning our rotors while they ran a gadget, that I can best describe as a little box you would use to tune a piano, along the fuselage looking for certain frequencies. He would see one he recognized and say “Yep, you have a bearing going out on your generator”. Interestingly… Read more »
Soaring is heavenly but hovering is devine.
Helicopter Definition:
An assortment of sheet metal fasteners, and miscellaneous nuts bolts and screws flying in close formation continuously endeavoring to shake itself apart to the detriment of those carried inside.
Flying a helicopter is like log rolling while juggling chainsaws.