Helicopter down - Curtis Island

What have you heard?
arrrj
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby arrrj » Mon Mar 20 2017, 23:38

The word "flameout" was quoted on another site.

Perhaps we say "engine stops"...then there are no semantics !

PS _ Scarlett...you know that LTE (the expression) was invented by Bell to cover for the poor performance of the original TR's ? Marketing covering poor design.
arrrj
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby arrrj » Tue Mar 21 2017, 06:26

Gents,

You have been a bit slow in the "sorry Arrrj"... :D . Whilst I admit I don't know as much as some of you experts, I do remember what I have been told (old brain still works).

Back when everything ran on kero, including the lights (joke intended), and I learned how to fly, my instructor at the time told me "never hover the jetty downwind"...and then explained why. He was one of the guys who had the fire go out, and an unexpected landing from hover as a result. And he showed me where. He has 20k hours or so...all heli. I suspect he knows what he is talking about.

Perhaps this extra bit of wording from the internet will help those non-believers.

There are many operational environments that make a helicopter more susceptible to compressor stalls and surges. One of these is hovering in a tailwind condition, resulting in distorted flow of air into the engine inlet.

Helicopters hovering in locations with “squirrely” winds will be especially prone to this phenomenon. Such a location is the downwind side of buildings and obstructions where the direction and velocity of the moving air changes rapidly. Also, airflow interrupted by obstructions will contain strong wind gradients. Airflow studies around buildings at the University of Notre Dame's aeronautical engineering school revealed that windsocks positioned at each of the four corners of the rooftop platform can blow in completely different directions simultaneously, illustrating the complex nature of airflow in the vicinity of these structures. Under such complex airflow conditions it can be impossible for the pilot to determine the “predominant” wind condition in the confines of that location. The probability of distorted inlet airflow during hovering rises significantly in such an environment.


There are a whole bunch of references to Bell 206 in all the docs I can find, but I think this one has been beaten enough already.

As Rotors99 once said "do everything into the wind, except pissing".

Cheers,
Arrrj
The Scarlett Harlot
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby The Scarlett Harlot » Tue Mar 21 2017, 10:00

I did indeed know that, the sight of tapered, skinny and short TR blades on a jet banger probably still send shivers up and down the spine of some "even older than me" timers.


Oh and did you assume the gender of all slappers? :lol:
arrrj
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby arrrj » Tue Mar 21 2017, 10:04

Scarlett.

Apologies !

:D
flyboy111111
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby flyboy111111 » Tue Mar 21 2017, 12:20

Can anybody tell me where the skids are? They don't appear in any photos I've seen.
Sioux47
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby Sioux47 » Wed Mar 22 2017, 00:40

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Yankee
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby Yankee » Wed Mar 22 2017, 10:59

Might just be over certain contenants, but I always that the relative wind direction in a hovering helicopter, below the rotor disk was straight down.

http://www.rotorandwing.com/2011/11/29/ ... -velocity/
Don't think of yourself as and ugly person. Think of yourself as a beautiful monkey.
kiwiflyer
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby kiwiflyer » Wed Mar 22 2017, 20:09

This downwind engine stopping thing is a load of crap.
If that were the case there would be helicopters falling out of the sky at a far greater rate than they do now.
I suspect that it's a good excuse to cover up running out of power or LTE downwind or some other situation that the pilot of the day has got himself into and the theory has just caught on from there.
The accident scenario on page 1 states the pilot was dragging the load downwind and the engine flamed out then the tail boom got chopped off, translation: the load got caught Heli pitched nose down pilot pulls cyclic full aft and chops off tail boom.
If the downwind flame out story works for you we'll run with it but it's a load of rubbish.
The Scarlett Harlot
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby The Scarlett Harlot » Wed Mar 22 2017, 21:30

A fellow I worked with who had a bit of time in a squirrel with a C-30 conversion told me that compressor stalling was Mr Soloy's way of telling you not to hover downwind.

I never had the pleasure of sharing his experience but it did stick in my neophyte mind at the time. :shock:

I don't recall him mentioning a flame out though.

The other context I'd heard of it was about long rangers. Maybe it's a C30 thing? I assume you'd need a fair bit of tail wind to get the gases to go that far forward in that time, but when you look at he gases passing out of the exhaust they don't necessarily go straight down. The soot on the blades certainly suggests it's going up at some point..... :?
kiwiflyer
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Re: Helicopter down - Curtis Island

Postby kiwiflyer » Wed Mar 22 2017, 23:47

Those C30 squirrels were that underpowered they probably compresser stalled because the collective was around the pilots ears.
If you need that much tailwind in a 206 to get this so called situation how do you keep the tail into wind as you would run of pedal and it would weathercock anyway.

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