High-altitude autorotations?

"John Hairell" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:30:44 -0500, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:



John, you might be able to answer a question I have regarding
autorotations.
My late brother experienced exactly one serious mishap in a helo (outside
getting shot down once in Vietnam and having various small arms rounds
zing
through the cabin on other occasions). It involved an autorotation in a
Schweizer 300C (read as Hughes 300/TH-55). He was checking out a cop from
the (unnamed big city) police department, which had recently purchased a
couple of 300C's for law enforcement work. Apparently the cop, who was
also
a part-time ARNG Cobra pilot, had come through flight school during the
post-TH-55 days. During the autorotation, the guy apparently treated the
300C like it was a Cobra, which I gather is a bad thing to do, and when
my
brother tried to take back over the guy froze up and fought the
controls--resulting in a hard landing and rolling the aircraft onto its
side
(he compounded that by stomping all over my brother, who was left on the
lower side, in his haste to depart the now-stationary aircraft). Any idea
what the guy could have done that led to my brother trying to take
control?
And FYI--the accident investigation cleared my brother in the incident,
so I
gather that his side of the story was the way it happened.


Kevin,

I've been talking about this with a well-know Vietnam-era cav pilot
and he says that there's not a whole lot of difference between a
TH-55/Hughes 300 "Mattel Messerschmitt" as far as autorotation. The
Cobra flares higher and longer, and TH-55s level the skids prior to
touchdown. He says it sounds like a late "recovery" to him. If you
have a date and location we could dig out the NTSB accident report and
see what the official cause was.

John Hairell

Your message got me to scrounging on my own and I found the NTSB report
(20001211X16230 --not easy to find, as the NTSB for some reason labled the
aircraft as a Hughes 269, instead of Schweizer 300C, which they use
elsewhere in their database). Looks like they dinged my brother for
supervisory failures (i.e., failing to sufficiently prepare for "NO TRANSFER
OF CONTROL PROCEDURES HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED BEFORE TAKEOFF", but noted the
copilot as a cause for "improper" touchdown. Interestingly, they also dinged
Larry for failing to take over the aircraft "in a timely manner", but as I
recall it he indicated the problem arose rather abruptly as they were
approaching touchdown, and when he tried to take over the copilot refused to
relinquish control (the report indicates *both* were on the controls at
impact). Beyond the data in the report, all I can remember him indicating
was that the investigator assured him he nothing to worry about in terms of
any regulatory/punitive actions. I was surprised to note that the incident
occured only about seven months before he passed away--I had thought it a
bit earlier.

Thanks for the heads up.

Brooks