Now we are in to the swing of this Blogging stuff..

Friday 4th March saw an interesting flight to say the least. One that I was in all honesty really quite concerned about. Not that I had any lack of faith in the aircraft, my instructor (Gary Ellson - Chief Flight Instructor of Bournemouth helicopters), the weather or the fact it was my 13th flight.. yes a scary thought for the superstitious out there. It was in fact that I was worried that I would find some yet unknown way of screwing up the training evolution and dropping out the sky like a bowling ball even though it would be hard to achieve especially with an instructor on board. Totally irrational. (Ed-let the tension build in the readers)
So, what was it I was doing? Auto Rotations. In layman's terms purposefully making the aircraft drop out the sky like a bowling ball. To flower the description up a little bit to make it less of a contradiction to the last paragraph I will need to tell you what goes wrong first to constitute this maneuver. The long and short of it is the engine fails because some sort of mechanical failure. Unlike a car on a hill or even a fixed wing aircraft, there is little chance of succeeding in an engine restart mid 'fall'. Especially if you do nothing and take no action at all. This would result in a very obvious 'Bowling Ball' moment. To sum this up in one word - emotional. In two words - very dead. From this conclusion it is clear that some intervention is required to prevent you from cutting out the middle man, keeping the costs low and throwing yourself six foot under. This is called Auto Rotation.
one of the controls you have is the lever in your left hand, the collective. this in its crudest form is the uppy downey lever with an engine throttle attached. in the event of an engine failure the collective should be lowered. In doing this you alter the pitch of the rotor blades to a state where the wind which is now rushing up past you, as you fall in a controlled fashion, accelerates the blades in effect taking over from the engine. However, you still loose altitude. this is good as the closer you get to the ground (really close) you pull up steadily on the collective and pull the cyclic (stick between your legs) towards you and flare, thus slowing you down and cushioning the landing to a state commensurate with survival and minimal damage.... which is really good. In an early training environment you do this final maneuver with some altitude to spare enabling you to go around and do another one. The actual landing version comes later on in the training in Advanced Auto Rotations.
In the video clip you will see my first auto rotations and 9 progressively sneakier, surprise ones thrown in by my instructor. Needless to say my worry was unjustified and now I feel a lot happier about the skill. In the end it is simply making the helicopter do what auto gyros do permanently. (i wont explain, just trust me it does). You will see Take Off, Hover Taxi, Transition, Lots of falling out of the sky and a 'sporty' landing. All in all a very enjoyable and beneficial flight.