Venter, Al. Gunship Ace: The Wars of Neall Ellis, Helicopter Pilot and MercenaryI recall some of those take-offs from the football field inside the military camp where we would land. Juba was a brilliant pilot who had spent a lot of his professional career flying chopper gunships in Angola and elsewhere. Self-taught, he’d learned to fly the Mi-17 very well indeed. He ended up teaching me a trick or two, which I applied to my work in other contract areas when we were overweight on take-off or there weren’t any decent runways or areas for take-off. He demonstrated a technique for taking off from a field the size of a football pitch that could be surrounded by high-tension wires, 20 metres high. He’d go into the hover using ground cushion and then slowly reverse back to the furthest point downwind of the field, where he’d initiate a positive move forward. He’d go on doing that to the point where we lost the ground cushion effect and translational lift and that would effectively allow the Hip to descend. At the same time, he’d pull maximum collective and would allow downward movement to the ground to continue. Together with forward speed, he would compress the oleos, which would cause the helicopter to bounce back into the air and, at the same time, pass through transition. The helicopter would accelerate while climbing out of the LZ and clear the wires. It was all very hairy the first couple of times, because once committed nothing would prevent the chopper from striking any of the obstacles if all that didn’t succeed. However, once mastered, the technique was sometimes the only way to clear confined areas safely, albeit with a small margin, without sacrificing load. We never considered the possibility of an engine cut during the take-off—after all, we were supposed to be immortal.
Is this credible?
Mr Joubert looks like he might a coax a boulder into flight by sheer will alone mind you.
I leave it to wiser and far more experienced heads to tell me about techniques that they have used that won't be found in any tyro's flying manual.
Caco