freestyle
Veteran
Location: Redmond WA USA
| diving vs. flying [...] you stay in a vertical dive with collective at 0 degrees for too long (before you hit the ground, that is)? My thinking tells me that the flybar loses its ability to fight the main rotor's pitching tendancy [...]
Thing is, during the dive you're at or near zero collective, so the 'lift' (if there is any) is very slight, so there is little or no tendency to pitch one way or the other. If something weird happens, it will happen during the pullout.
That video is difficult to make sense of, because the whole thing is a blur between the dive and the wreckage. That heli went from flying to wreckage in a heartbeat, so I don't think it was very high... the problem was probably either mechanical failure or just pile-it error. People routinely do extended knife-edge plummetting stuff from much higher altitudes without any trouble. A tailslide with three rolls takes a lot longer than that video showed, and yet you can pull out with full control as long as you pull out in time.
There have been a couple of reports of blades snapping off during the pullout, but I think that has more to do with blade strength than aerodynamic effects.
Far as I know, as long as the blades are intact, the heli behaves well. Has anyone been able to consistently get the heli to do something unusual (read: change orientation without pilot input) during the descent or pullout? |
