Friday, October 29, 2010

Oct 28th Flight Lesson 2

Today was slightly overcast, 5000 ft ceiling and sprinkling.... but still flyable!!

We went straight to flying, I performed the pre flight check and the start up procedure as Bryan read off the start up to me. All was in working order, Bryan took the controls and hovered out to helipad 6. Once we had clearance Bryan handed over the controls and I performed a south bound take off. We headed through Long Acres and south to Auburn airport. I practiced flying more take off and landing patterns with more precision. Once I had executed 3 patterns Bryan threw in set downs at pickups to and from hover. Set downs where considerably easier that pickups. To perform a set down you obtain a steady hover and ever so slightly reduce collective and let the helicopter lower to the ground till the skids touch then drop the collective all the way to settle the helicopter. Pickups are the opposite but due to the power increase you have to be more active on the anti torque pedals there for making it a little trickier. As I was practicing the maneuvers there was plane taxiing for take off so we had to clear the run way. We found a patch of taxi way to practice my hover where I was again challenged to a minute of hover. This time I sustained a fairly controlled hover for more than a minute and succeeded in hover taxiing back out to the run way to perform an interesting take off where my left and right brain had a slight conflict and I found the helicopter performing a right hand dog track takeoff. On the way back to Boeing I made the radio calls while in Long Acres. For radio calls you announce who you are, where you are, and what your doing. Back at Boeing I performed the landing, taxi hover, set down and shut down.

Back at the office we debriefed and went over the nights homework.

This new experience is awesome and I couldn't be happier with my decision to start learning to fly helicopters.