Hi Doc. I heard an interesting story from a Coastie chopper pilot about our new choppers. It seems a cross wind blew one slightly sideways and it clipped the top of a telephone pole with the new Kevlar? rotors blades and made pine pancake sections. They sent the rotors out to be analyzed and he said they were virtually undamaged! They are still at Selfridge and a lot of folks don't know that was the home of Eddie Rickenbackers squadron! What a history we have there. I actually got to work there many times during my Ma Bell career.
I was in one that went cut through several palm trees, some with trunks around a foot thick. Then it got scary; before I could get out, the pilot panicked and took off, worst vibration I've ever felt - even blurred my vision. About 6' of the leading edge of the blades were flapping loose from the rest, all bent up on the bottom of the blades, made a hell of a racket but the mess hung together somehow. Lordy was I ever glad to get back on the ground, only flew about 10-15 minutes, but all that time I was expecting freefall from 2,000'. Then he wanted to fly it nearly about a half hour back to base; I just turned around and got in the copter that followed us, pilot never said anything about that; my gunner went with me, too. Had 6 Vietnamese soldiers ejected into the trees at about 80mph, never found out what happened to them. Suspect it wasn't good...
hmmmmm....Blade strikes are NEVER good!! Lots of times, the damage from shock shows up somewhere else in the drivetrain. Those sort of incidents require lots and lots of inspections.
Hear lots of good stuff about the composites. Always good to have new research and development going on.
That one I was in that hit the trees got a new rotor head, but kept the transmission. A few months later, it lost the rotors at several hundred feet. It got hit on takeoff out of a hot LZ, so it got wrote up for getting the blades shot off, but there was a puff of white out of the hell hole as the blades snapped off; I think the transmission seized, cracked the case, losing oil for that white puff, and snapped them off. Hueys fall upside down, nose down a bit without blades. Could be the transmission seized from damage, the copter did get hit. The crewchief was flying gunner with me in the tree strike incident. No survivors, of course, our first entire crew loss. Only the first...
03-05-2015, 09:13 AM
