Questions for Comanche: Sorry, I had more questions than I thought, so don't feel like you need to tackle them all, but thanks for taking the time to help me out with whatever answers you feel like providing!

 

They talk about a 10 degree approach starting at 60 knots:

 

Do you start at 300 ft?  It depends on any obstacles around landing area. 300' would be a good altitude if your talking about a flat open field. Some LZ''s would require a more steep approach. 

For a pilot of average height, where on the windscreen do you recognize 10 degrees to be? I don't recall having a set spot on the windscreen. but its been a long time. lol.

Do you begin the deceleration simulatanously with initiating your descent or do you wait until you are closer to the ground? Normally you will decelerate first to the speed of a "brisk walk" as my instructor would say. Then start your decent when you are over LZ. However, Ive flown with pilots who did both at the same time, but that's not the way I was taught.

What if you are going at 60 knots less than 100 feet agl. Do you decelerate to some speed before you actually reach your descent point? Yes, decelerate when you approach LZ, 300 - 500 ' before over landing zone. No set speed but a "brisk walk" again. (10-15) knots). They did not want us contacting the ground with any or much forward speed because of potential damage to the skids or tail rotor. When we practiced tail rotor failures, we had to maintain forward flight to keep the aircraft straight (weather vaining) and ease it down onto runway while skidding you way down and using the collective to slow it down once contact it made with the ground. You wouldn't want to try this on rough terrain,  

 

For even steeper approaches, what kind of speeds and altitudes to do you enter from? I remember practicing approaches from 1000', but that was rare. I dont think we were ever more than 30 knots during a decent. Keep in mind, my experience in the Huey was in flight school @ Ft Rucker, I never flew the Huey in an actual unit. I transitioned to the AH-1 after primary flight school. In actual deployment, they may have done things very differently (lol) 

 

 

J hook type descending turns:

 

Do you keep your speed up downwind, and then only decelerate as you come out of the hook?

Is it poor technique to let the helicopter go into a slip as you're doing this, or do you want to be completely coordinated all the way? You should be decelerating as you enter downwind. Always keep it coordinated.

 

H-V diagrams:

 

There are some helicopter pilots who insist that the H-V diagram applies to landing approaches. I've been doing a lot of reading on the pprune rotoheads forum and there are some pilots who talk about maintaining hellacious speeds down to below 50 feet in order to stay out of the dead man's curve. First, does the H-V diagram have any relavence to landing approaches in the Huey at all? I mean, you don't scream down at 60 knots, at a 10 degree angle and 1000 fpm descent (unless you are autorotating) and then power out of it at the last second do you? You can't really adhere to the H-V curve when landing in a "normal" 10 degree helicopter descent in the Huey or any other copter, can you? No, the H-V curve is something you need to know for the particular aircraft but when landing, you can not hot dog it down  to stay out of the dead mans curve. 

 

How do you autorotate when you are in a hover oge? Do you always want to push the nose down and gain forward speed? Part of the check rides, were to perform a hovering auto. They were done from only about 10' or less. You had to pull back on the collective quickly but not jerk it up. Cushion the contact with the ground.  Turning autos were the hardest and where a lot of people had trouble.

 

What does the hat switch on the cyclic of a real Huey do? You mean the collie hat? I forget this one, but I think it was for the search light. It could be moved, up down and left/right. Originally I wanted to say electric trim, but now that I thing about it, it was for the light.

 

Do you ever use force trim on the real huey, or any helicopter, other than during cruise? A lot of sim guys seem to recommend using this to aid them in hovering or approaching, but I don't think this is appropriate use of trim. I would set it up the way I liked it during the hover check. Sometimes, I would adjust it later on if I felt it needed it, but most of the time I left it alone. Each Huey had a different feel to it. some needed more help than others. You would be surprised how different each one felt.

Thank you so much for answering these. It's cleared up a lot of confusion about the correct way to do things.

Some of these questions are general helicopter questions and I will answer as best as I can. My experience is from flying OH-58D's, so some things are different, but the concepts are the same. Also I have limited, combat style approaches into an LZ, as we don't do them, but flying a helicopter is usually flying a helicopter.

 

Every helicopter will be in the dead-mans curve at some point. It's just something to pay attention to thats all. It's important to know, but realize that you will be in it.

 

Autos out of OGE are purely based on situations. Every situation is different. We would always brief that you would either dump the collective (rotor bleeds awfully fast in the OH-58D, unlike the Huey) and pull the guts out of it right before you hit the ground, or if you had some altitude, push the nose down and try and get some forward airspeed. But that also depends on whats around you. Are you hovering in a small clearing of trees? Did you just drop off someone down below and dont want to crush them? It just depends.

 

As for approach speeds, I was always taught to make it appear that you are at a brisk walk. Even high up it will look like you are at one, then as you descend it appears you are going faster and faster so you slow back.  Eventually you are near the ground going no faster than a brisk walk if done correctly.  When ever you are trying to do "combat maneuver" type landings, remember that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Always try to be ahead of the machine, and and always give yourself an out. 

 

Hope this helps some.

This is all good news to hear, because I've actually been doing the 'brisk walk' thing in my practice. Problem was, I started to read too much on certain web sites, and there are some real heli pilots talking about being at 40 knots at 15 feet during approaches as a matter of routine and stuff like that, so it made me think I might be flying the Huey like a wuss, doing things wrong, confused about what the standard practices really were, and I was getting kind of frustrated. I've probably spent too much time trying to fly the Huey like I see them flying helicopters on television too. But it sounds now though like I'm at least doing adaquately at this stage of my learning, and I really do appreciate getting some straight answers from some real Army pilots.

 

"slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". I'm going to have to think about that a little...I'm not sure I'm at the point where I quite digest the meaning of that just yet! Or maybe I do? Maybe you mean, quit trying to fly the helicopter like a cowboy, and just concentrate on the fundamentals.

Thanks guys!  I just recently picked up the Huey as well and have really been enjoying it.  These details will really help with my learning process!

This is all good news to hear, because I've actually been doing the 'brisk walk' thing in my practice. Problem was, I started to read too much on certain web sites, and there are some real heli pilots talking about being at 40 knots at 15 feet during approaches as a matter of routine and stuff like that, so it made me think I might be flying the Huey like a wuss, doing things wrong, confused about what the standard practices really were, and I was getting kind of frustrated. I've probably spent too much time trying to fly the Huey like I see them flying helicopters on television too. But it sounds now though like I'm at least doing adaquately at this stage of my learning, and I really do appreciate getting some straight answers from some real Army pilots.

 

"slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". I'm going to have to think about that a little...I'm not sure I'm at the point where I quite digest the meaning of that just yet! Or maybe I do? Maybe you mean, quit trying to fly the helicopter like a cowboy, and just concentrate on the fundamentals.

Thats exactly what I mean by that. Just practice the fundamentals.  Get a feel for it more and more. Every day that you fly it you will be able to do just a bit more. You will focus less on what the aircraft is doing and more so on what you want it to do and how you want it done. No helicopter pilot is able to just do these things right away. Even after flight school, you spend hundreds of hours flying with guys vastly more experienced than you to continue to practice what you are doing. Helicopters are not easy, these things take time and practice.

The difficulty of 180 degree autorotations was mentioned above. When flying downwind, and the engines quits, is there some kind of decision height to determine whether we attempt to turn into the wind or not, or is just a best judgement?

 

another question that's been making me wonder about proper technique. All across my reading, I keep coming across this rule of thumb that you shouldn't be descending more than 300 fpm below 30 knots during an approach to avoid VRS. But when you're decelerating, at the moment you come through 30 knots, if your r.o.d. were to be exactly 300 fpm, then you are only on a 6 degree approach, which is shallow. And they are saying keep it less. If normal approach angle is 10, and steep is 15 degrees, you aren't actually expected to flatten out the approach to comply with this rule of thumb, are you? Don't you definitely want to make a nice, straight, constant angle to the ground? While being cognizant of the dangers of VRS, and 30/300 is a good mental check, this is something that can otherwise be ignored, right? I HAVE been ignoring it, being at about -500 fpm as I'm passing below 30 kts, and have been getting good, smooth, constant angle approaches; but am I doing something wrong that a flight instructor would ding me for?

Interesting video from XSounds,Vietnam Map Next??

 

a texture MOD.