Not mine this time, but I did have a hand in it.
Guy flying a Safari Homebuilt helo. On approach to field to get fuel, rotor
tach ceases function. No problem engine tach still working and he can see
the blades are turning. Lands, gasses and leaves on the short (10 mile)
flight back to home pad. No problem engine tach is still working..
Then...You guessed it...Eng tach fails. Now he is setting there with one of
his primary instruments completely dead. No problem (this is where I come
in) He has a rotor alarm system that will provide a tone in the headset for
low rotor and a different tone for high rotor. (My design..) All he has to
do is keep the tones quiet. No problem. Gets it on the ground and finds a
wiring problem..
Stu Fields
"John?] "
wrote in message
. net...

Highbluff Stagefield, Fort Rucker, Alabama; Two students aboard, one at
the controls. Routine standard autorotation just like a few thousand
before it.

1000' AGL, 90 knots, aircraft in trim and aligned with the lane.
Collective pitch full down, throttle flight idle, student announces,
"Rotor in the green, gas producer
is...GOING-TO-ZERO-YOU-HAVE-THE-CONTROLS!!!"

I said, "No, I don't; continue the maneuver and I'll back you up if
necessary". He did a respectable autorotation and when the aircraft
stopped I said "I have the controls", rolled the throttle back up to
operating RPM and hovered the aircraft off the lane. He was white as a
sheet and shaking like a leaf. I asked him if he knew what had just
happened, but he couldn't speak; his mouth was opening and closing but
no words were forthcoming.

As much as I would like to take credit for being Joe Cool in a dire
emergency, I was neither cool nor was it an emergency. The day before,
another IP had experienced an N1 tach failure and we had talked about
it in the IP briefing that very morning. When the student went
ballistic, I saw the N1 tach going to zero but remembered the briefing
and noticed that we still had EGT and engine oil pressure so I figured
that the engine was still running. Even if it wasn't, we were set up
for a perfect autorotation so it wasn't a problem.

Turns out that they had gotten a batch of rebuilt N1 tachs from the low
bidder and after a couple of more failures, they changed suppliers.
Fortunately no one was hurt by the failures but several people still
have nightmares.

John




In article , Stu & Kathy Fields
wrote:

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