From this week's Navy Wings newsletter...an excellent description of initial attempts at helicopter flying in a basic no frills machine. No governors or throttle to collective cam assistance here!
Fixed Wing Boredom to Rotary Activity
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In the spring and summer of 1957, I was happily flying round the skies of, mainly southern, England with 796 Squadron at Culdrose as a newly qualified A/S Gannet pilot. The primary task, flying trainee observers around as they undertook the advanced stage of their flying training. Life was pleasantly enjoyable but not very demanding. Warm sunny afternoons on a gentle Navex after an excellent wardroom curry lunch on a Thursday induced terrible drowsiness and I found a few breaths of oxygen from the pilot’s supply did help to offset that incapacitating sensation.
In due course, summoned to appear before the Squadron CO, he demanded that I explain my unwarranted use of this expensive commodity. I made the observation that I found it helped me to remain alert and wakeful during the hours spent trundling through the boredom of a trainee’s Navex. A few days later my presence was required by Commandeer Air. He advised me that to alleviate such boredom I was to be inducted into the excitement and mysteries of helicopter aviation with a S. M. A. C. 9 Course.
Thus, a fortnight later I reported to Lee on Solent and in short order was introduced to a diminutive bubble of a machine. No hours spent in a simulator in those days. After a few brief lectures on Helicopter Aerodynamics, I found myself strapping a Hiller H.T.1 helicopter to my backside in the company of my instructor, Lt. Bill Kerr R.N., for the purposes of aviation, but not as I had previously known it.
As all those with helicopter experience will know, whilst all the controls operate in the normal sense, the main complication is that alterations in one control input automatically requires changes in one, or more, of the others. There was no automatic linkage between the collective and the engine throttle; pull up to go up, push down to go down Thus, either of these movements required a turning of the twist grip throttle. To counteract the change in torque would require an adjustment to the rudder pedals and most likely further adjustment to the throttle. But this might then also require a further adjustment to the collective to maintain the correct height above the ground. And, oh good grief, how, when we started so comfortably in the middle of the airfield are we now so perilously close to the boundary fence. Input to the cyclic stick starts to drift us back to the required position in the airfield but also requires further inputs to the collective and throttle, oh and, of course, the rudder. Initially, at least, this means that the trainee helicopter pilot never has a hand free to scratch that annoying itch on the nose. Despite these novel complications, after six hours or so of instruction I was deemed sufficiently competent to be sent off for “First Solo on Type”.
Most of the difficulties involved in flying this little bug hutch of a machine would be encountered in the hover, in close proximity to the ground. So, a number of intricate exercises were introduced involving white painted circles on the ground with further lines painted between opposite points on the circumference. The trick was, with the aircraft initially pointing head to wind, and keeping it so orientated, to fly around the circumferential circle, with occasional sideways, or even backwards trips across one of the radials to the opposing side. Master that and then, in wind speeds of 15 knots or less, one might try it across wind, first with the wind from port, then with the wind from starboard; one might even attempt similar manoeuvres with the wind from dead astern, but all the time being warned that it is easy to run out of control authority in any out-of-wind heading if the wind speed becomes too great.
There were other new experiences to learn and practise. Autorotative descents and zero or low forward speed landings following simulated engine failure; the perils of entering the Vortex Ring; flying into restricted spaces with trees or buildings seemingly perilously close to rotor blade tips; landings on sloping ground; the novelty of night flight in helicopter mode. For someone trained and qualified in the ethos of fixed wing flying techniques, it all required a swift change of mind set to adjust to this new and novel approach to aviation.
Basic helicopter skills had been sufficiently absorbed after approximately twenty-five hours to permit progress from flying the little bubble-like Hiller to aircraft with more practical uses. Initially this was the Westland built, Whirlwind Marks 1 and 3, with their American engines. Now further new skills would be acquired. How to pluck downed airmen and others from the sea using both single and double lift techniques and that strange piece of human fishing equipment, the Sproule net.
Destined for duty in the station SAR unit at Eglinton further conversion was required following my helicopter course, this time to the Westland Dragonfly, another British built copy of an American aircraft, the Sikorsky S 51, but this time with a British Alvis Leonides engine. Not the most impressive SAR aircraft, with its limited lifting capacity, but one that had already done valuable work in the Korean war and in rescuing civilians from the floods of the English east coast in 1953. And incidentally, quite a frightening machine to recover from a vortex ring state.
Two further appointments to SAR units and to front line helicopter squadrons enabled me to cope well with most activities in the rotary world but few were as much fun as flying the little bubble Hiller HT1.
Fleet Air Arm Veteran Tony Wilson