Climb, Descend And Turn
Up, Down and Around
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Flying Hours Today 1:40, Total 6:50
Climbing and descending and turning. Preparing for circuits
I arrived, time for a ½ cup of tea as we were to continue the previous lesson so no major briefing today. A quick review of climbing and descending – power settings, speeds, attitudes. PAT on descent, APT on climbs both on the entry and exit. The attitudes and power settings are there to give us a nominal vertical speed of 500ft/min either climbing or descending.
To recap:
Climb Descend
A – 60kt attitude P – 15” MAP
P – 23.5” MAP, left pedal A – 60kts, right pedal
T – Adjust (compared to Trim in FW) T – Adjust
Level off Level Off
A – 70kt attitude P – 20” MAP
P – 20” MAP (or what is suitable), right pedal A – 70kt attitude, left pedal
T – Adjust T – adjust
Generally climb or descend first, then turn. But as I advance I’ll be able to do both simultaneously.
Full A-Check – talk my way around the helicopter. The ‘drum’ sound on the panels. All the various bits and pieces – get photos in here. Rotor, oils. The MAP check which confirms our max rated manifold pressure for sustained high power manoeuvres. 13C at 200ft was around 24.5 inches.
By now I had memorised those key maneouvers. We took off southerly, The wind was on 180 so Sheffield control were using R10, very unusual with right hand circuits. We decided to override and just go, after some tricky backwards maneovers to get out of our tight parking spot – Question, what if someone / something had got in behind us in the 8 mins or so it takes to warm up.
Flying towards Orgreave area, at 70kts a 800ft I was given control. It all feels so much more familiar now. For a change we were to head north east of the airfield, keeping to the west of the A1 to ensure we were well away from Doncaster. I had done the R/T call (pre-fix Helicopter) and had to recheck with the instructor that we really were going north east.
So I began with a few climbs, then descents, then climb, then descend. We were over the area shown in this link. I started to advance and begin descend or climb and then turn, using a decent angle of bank, then we brought the two together, a descending turn and a climbing turn, to the left and to the right. It was only after an hour or so that I had it pointed out to me that I’d been flying wide circuits – shown on the link page as the boundary between… I was enjoying this, I had manoevuerability of the helicopter. My hour was almost up, but I decided to stay out and do a couple more tighter circuits. For the first time in my training my brain wasn’t fried by this point so I could stay out a little longer. But before long it was time to get back to the airfield.
We headed south, located (??) reservoir, overflew the castle at Consiburgh (sp?) – something I’d never knew existed, a great sight from the air – then headed for the gap between Rotherham and ??, over the trees. I made the call to Sheffield that we were 5 miles NE and received joining instructions: R10 right hand. We would need to keep a good look out for any aircraft coming in from the VRP. See the map at this link. The VRP at Sheffield is the triangle formed by the motorways.
As we were crusing at 80kts to make up time I found that the usual 70kts attitude wasn’t working, it was pointed out by the instructor that this was due to the change in centre of gravity due to fuel burn. Good point. I was trying to keep us level but was all over the place between 1300ft and 1800ft, due to trying to maintain the 80kt speed – and struggling with the flap back as I needed to continue to adjust the cyclic to maintain speed and height. As we approach Sheffield I’m listening to other pilots on the radio. I know one has just taken off and then hear that he is departing to the North East. Mmmm… and we are incoming from the North East. Time for a good look out. I mention this to the instructor and we are both scanning the sky ahead for an aircraft heading towards us. We had dropped from 1500ft to 1200ft when a Cessna appeared in front of us, suddenly contrasted against the sky rather than the land and very visible. Probably 300ft above us, right on our previous 1500ft track, and because we were both making use of the gap between the towns we were close. It demonstrates the value of listening to the radio and building a mental picture and then maintaining a very good lookout.
My instructor made the point that when around busy areas where you hear of other traffic then it makes sense to go low – most fixed wing pilots want to gain height, helicopters can go down low with no issue so that is where to go. I’m talking here of being around 1000ft of course, not 100ft.
Look at the map again, we flew over the trees, across the M1, to the west of , across the black part to the bridge, then made for an odd shaped circuit following the line of houses to the threshold of R10, making the downwind call as we went and stating our intentions to land on the south side grass.
I flew us to around 800ft and then the instructor took over and I followed through. As usual everything was made to look so easy as we turned sharply on the descent to R10 threshold and then to land on the grass. There wasn’t any time for hovering today so we quickly made the request for transit across the runway and we were parked up shortly afterwards. Usually we have to wait a few minutes for the cylinder head temperature to cool down after we have been hovering for a while. This time the CHT was almost cool enough so we only had to wait a minute or so before commencing full shut down. I’m back in two weeks.
Mention the Schweizer 300 as an option. Had a look in, looks nice, 25% more space than R22.