What else would you name a Black Hawk helicopter?

The Seahawk/Blackhawk/Jayhawk has been a great airframe and mission capable aircraft, with a great name. Also, I had not seen a Nick Lappos post in a long time, great to see you are still keeping on eye on this newsgroup.

Years ago I was a regular contributor/learner from this site and we had a bunch of very experience pilots. Then the group slid off the deep end due to many spam posts. A few months ago I started looking at this news group again and every time I see a hateful post I report it to get it removed from the site.

Glad to see Nick post again. For a few that may not know Nick has had a very storied career in aviation, and when he says something I keep my ears open and mouth shut.


The belief that Black Hawk stabilators caused a bunch of accidents is
an old wive's tale. The problem was whenever an accident happened in
the early days, the Army sent out a message to inspect the stabilator
(nervous reaction) and that triggered the natural response in the
field that the stab must be the culpret. To set the record straight,
ther have been two accidents that in any way involved the stab. A
test aircraft, early in the program had a fatal, due to the fact that
the stabilator electronics were not connected to the airspeed probes,
due to maintenance error where the airspeed sensor cannon plugs were
left disconnected during an engineering test, and not reconnected. I
was there, and lost three friends in that one. The crew made a sporty
takeoff, and pitched nose down for a rapid takeoff, which caught them
badly when the stab stayed in low speed mose (it never knew the
aircraft was accelerating). Not a stab fault, really.

The second was a foreign aircraft that went into severe icing
conditions, with the pitot heat off. Same outcome, with the crew
quite confused as the airspeed slowly bled off.

In short, there have been no accidents where the stabilator caused an
accident, but there have been two where other errors made the
stabilator a contributer. That reflects about 4 million hours among
2500 Hawks.

For the record, the Black Hawk has the best safety record of any Army
helicopter, ever, even though it does the typical nasty night missions
that the Army has to do.

Nick Lappos
WORWAC 69-5
D 1/1 Cav 1969-1970