Well I will share another, but I'm starting to see that I have so many to
share that I had better review my maintenance , flight planning and safety
strategies.
The Safari that I fly has a spring system on the collective to trim out the
forces so that I can even take my hand off the collective in flight for at
least long enough to scratch my nose. Without this spring, the collective
wants to come to high pitch rather strongly.
On a beautiful day on my approach to land, I had just flared and was pulling
pitch when I heard a loud bang, the collective wound up under my left ear,
the helicopter was going thru 15' straight up and the low rotor alarm was
screaming in my headset. To use a "Bartism" the sphincter torque gage went
off scale. By the time I got control of the collective, I had a good idea
what had happened: The spring broke. I now have two springs operating in
parallel. I have since come to believe that seat belts are not needed if
you have a 1/4" bolt just protruding from the middle of the seat.
Stu Fields
"SelwayKid" wrote in message
m...
Over the past weekend in San Diego, an 84 year old man decided to
unstrap and get out of the aircraft while on short final. It killed
him of course. He was in a biplane but it reminded me of some
incidents when I had passengers who became the emergency in
helicopters too. How to handle them?
A pax who was moving around in the front seat and stuck his foot thru
the chin bubble and got it stuck..... Or the big guy pax who filled
the seat so much that he limited the amount of aft cyclic while trying
to flare and land....
Or the guy who was drunk and tried to wrestle the controls away from
me so he could show me how it was done......
The pax who unstrapped and began to move around in the cockpit and was
actually going to change seats by crawling across me?.....
I'm sure you have seen others as weird. How about sharing them and
spice up the board? Its getting pretty dull....
Ol Shy & Bashful