Enroute to maintenance for another matter yesterday I was cruising
at 80% and about 110kts when I noticed that I didn't seem to have
hydraulics in the upper-right to lower-left direction on the cyclic,
but movement from upper-left to lower right required no effort.
Hyd Switch was on , so I popped the breaker and all returned to normal.
I still had a bit of butt pucker factor bothering me though because
the nature of the failure didn't follow my understanding of the
solenoid and pump config. So I was thinking that itd be a real bitch
if I had to land with partial hydraulics. Flying hydraulics off isn't
that difficult, but partial would be fairly hard and I was thinking
that maybe there might be some garbage in the lines that might complicate
things even further at any moment. Nothing further happened though
and once I was on the ground, I re-checked the hydraulics system and
all was normal.

The maintenance people went over the hydraulics system with a fine
tooth comb, and discovered/fixed an electrical fault that had caused
the problem. I never did get an explanation of why it felt like I
had hydraulics in one diagonal but not the other though, and wondered
if that was just the way it was supposed to feel at that airspeed
since Id never flown hydraulics-off that fast before.

BTW: The reason I didn't attempt to slow to 60kts during the failure
was because It only took a couple seconds for me to get the hydraulics
re-enabled and I didn't want to potentially aggravate the problem any
more by disrupting the collective.

Is it supposed to feel that way at that airspeed / power setting?


On another subject as an update; I did finally add AE pop-out floats
to the Jetranger after much debate. They only netted a gross weight
increase of about 100lbs, but they slowed the machine down by about
7-10 knots depending on load. The Jetranger used to fly at 110 knots
from 640lbs of fuel down to 450lbs, and 120kts below 350Lbs of fuel
Now it flys at 105kts with heavy fuel loads and 110kts below 60 Gals.

I'm pretty happy to have them though because its a pretty nice feeling
not to worry as much about an upsidedown underwater egress in the mud at
the bottom of the water. It cost about as much as a Porsche for this
peace of mind though. My understanding is that they'll be required
anyways under the new overwater sightseeing rules once they enact that
new part 91 NPRM.

I gotta say that the trigger assembly on the collective leaves a lot
to be desired. It seems like it'd be way too easy to accidentally
deploy the things by bumping that mammoth trigger.

Bart