My IP, Tom Anderson, would wait to cut the power until we were crabbing sideways or bucking in somebody’s rotor wash or ballooning too high in a hover. He wanted to see how we would react when everything else was going wrong. There was no way you could be ready for it. We learned to react automatically when the power quit.
There were two ways to autorotate. In a hover, you held the collective where it was when the power was cut until the skids were six inches from the ground; then you pulled it up to cushion the landing. In flight, you immediately pushed the collective fully down to neutralize the pitch angle. With the pitch flat, the rotors would continue spinning, providing lift, as the helicopter descended. If you held the collective in flying position, the rotor blades would slow and stop. Because the rotor blades were rigid only by virtue of the centrifugal force of their spinning, the stopped blades would simply fold up and the helicopter would fall like a streamlined anvil. It was fatal not to push the collective down. Autorotations were quick. A Hiller in autorotation descends at 1700 feet per minute. From 500 feet we had twenty seconds to react to the power failure, bottom the pitch, find a spot, and land. In this short glide you maneuvered the machine to any clearing in range. At roughly fifty feet from the ground you pulled the cyclic back, making the ship flare, trying to slow it from 45 knots to zero. With the nose high in the flare, you waited until the tail rotor was close to the ground, pulled a little pitch, and leveled the ship. You saved the rest of the pitch to cushion the landing. That was how it was supposed to go.
At first I hit the ground too hard, or pulled the pitch too soon, or landed crooked. After bouncing around awhile, practicing hovering autorotations in the parking area and down the lane at the stage field, we’d get to the takeoff mark at the end of one of six lanes. There I would attempt to hover the machine, talk to the tower, and be ready for a hovering autorotation at any moment.
“Zero-seven-nine lane three for takeoff.” After saying this, I would turn ninety degrees, wait for clearance, and make the takeoff.
For takeoff from a hover, you pushed the cyclic slightly forward and added a little power by pulling up on the collective, twisting the throttle appropriately to maintain rpm. The helicopter would accelerate across the ground, pretty much at hover altitude, until it reached the point of translational lift. Translational lift was that speed—in the H-23 trainer it was about 20 miles an hour—at which the rotor system moved into undisturbed air and suddenly became more efficient. At that point you could feel it jump into the climb. (That is how overloaded helicopters, unable to hover, can still fly if they make running takeoffs.) From translational lift you attempted to hold a constant airspeed and climb rate until you reached the altitude where you turned to follow the traffic pattern. Because there were six lanes at the stage fields, staying accurately in the traffic pattern was crucial. Midair collisions were not uncommon between students.
Once airborne, we were subject to autorotations on each leg of the rectangular pattern. After we took a few turns around the pattern, practicing landings and takeoffs, the IPs usually took us out to the surrounding countryside and had us work on cruising flight and autorotations.
We spent an hour each day in the cockpit and three or four hours in the bleachers watching our classmates. We read the flight-school syllabus of maneuvers. We attended ground-school classes in aerodynamics, weather, and maintenance. We lived and breathed flying. We waited expectantly for the first of our classmates to solo.
After two weeks, one did. We threw him into a pond, the traditional honor after the first solo. He could also wear his hat forward. By the end of the third week, nearly half the class had been thrown into the pond and were wearing their hats forward, and I was one of them. At the end of the fourth week, those who hadn’t been able to solo were eliminated from flight training.
The next challenge was to learn all the primary maneuvers well enough to pass a check ride in four more weeks. We flew more often. Each day, I. flew an hour of dual with Anderson. Additionally, he assigned us another hour-and-a-half solo in which to eliminate whatever errors he had pointed out. When next we flew dual, we would be expected to demonstrate improvement. Pleasing the IP meant becoming a pilot and a warrant officer instead of a pfc infantryman. Getting the maneuvers right in the air, and worrying about them on the ground, became a total occupation.
The IPs believed that student errors were premeditated attempts on their lives, and reacted accordingly. (When later I became an IP at the same school, I shared this feeling.) The IPs had several different ways of showing their displeasure. Most of them shouted over the intercom at every repeated mistake. At least one of them hit his students with a stick. All of them used bad grades to underline bad performance. Tom Anderson, however, used extreme disappointment to point out our mistakes.
A week before I was to take my primary check ride, Anderson cut the power as I cruised toward the stage field. I bottomed the pitch immediately, turned into the wind (everything that flies lands into the wind—it reduces ground speed at touchdown), and glided down in autorotation, just like an automaton. I was very proud of the fact that I had remembered to bottom the pitch satisfactorily, and was intent on landing straight ahead, into the wind. But Anderson had picked a place where to turn into the wind was also to turn toward some huge power lines. Being a dumb candidate, I was concentrating on doing the maneuver by the numbers. I noticed Anderson shaking his head forlornly, out of the corner of my eye. My feeling of pride and competence turned to stark terror. I saw the power lines. I turned abruptly away from them, but I was now very low, heading for a stand of trees. Anderson kept shaking his head sadly.
“I’ve got it,” said Anderson. A hopeless tone in his voice completed the rest of the sentence wordlessly. “I’ve got it, asshole.” I nodded my head in agreement. How could I have not seen all those wires? Anderson restored the helicopter to intelligent control, brought back the power, and nursed us gently away from the trees. He looked like he was attending a funeral.
“Bob, if you land in the wires, you will get killed.” At that moment, I would have preferred death to his disappointment. Back at cruising altitude, he gave me the controls again. “Let’s just go to the stage field. Maybe you can land without hurting us?” He sighed.
I nodded eagerly. I would definitely get us back okay. “I’ve got it,” I said.
Anderson nodded and sat back with his arms folded. When I turned to look for the stage field, he cut the power again—at the same place, with the same power lines. This time I looked for a clear spot first, then maneuvered to approach it into the wind. Anderson just sat there. When we were fifty feet from the clearing I had picked and he hadn’t taken over the controls, I knew he was going to let me go all the way. I hit the ground and skidded twenty feet into a shallow ditch I hadn’t seen and came to a halt.
“That’s more like it,” he said, smiling.
I knew then that I would pass my primary check ride.
After the check ride we concentrated on advanced maneuvers: takeoffs and landings in confined areas and pinnacles, cross-country navigation, night flying, night autorotations.
Anderson very carefully demonstrated the flight school’s procedure for getting into and out of confined areas. It was a method designed to minimize damage. A student helicopter pilot wallowing around in a hover in a tight clearing is an accident waiting to happen. You circled the clearing you picked until you had determined the best approach path over the lowest obstacles, into the wind. You would then pick a spot in the clearing and make your landing. On the ground, you would lock the collective down and the throttle at idle position and get out of the helicopter, leaving it running. You put a rock or a stick under the chin bubble so you could see it from inside. Then you went to the downwind side of the clearing, paced a distance equal to the length of the helicopter plus five paces safety margin back from the nearest obstacle, and deposited another marker. Then you paced it out to see if you were able to turn around in a hover over the first marker without hitting the trees at the upwind side of the clearing. If you could, you were finished analyzing the area and could get back into the machine. If you couldn’t turn it and were going to have to hover backward from the upwind marker to the downwind marker, you had to install a line of markers between the two points as a guide for your rearward flight.