All About Rotary Wing Aircraft

Helicopters are a different breed of machine than anything else poking holes in the sky. They are by design, able to do marvelous things within the scope of their design. They can be used to haul passengers or materials to places where other aircraft cannot land. These machines are finding a place in several niches of our society. Helicopters have made several improvements since the days of the Korean War.

There are several companies manufacturing helicopters for civilian use as well as for the military. There is two and four passenger version Robinson's with gasoline combustion engines Bell Helicopter makes several larger aircraft with turbine engines. Sicorsky helicopters are larger still. Then there is the foreign market, with the Germans making the Euro Copters, and the French Aerospatiale, This is not an all inclusive list, but you get the idea, there are a lot of helicopters on the market.

Helicopters are one of the safest platforms for flight, they are stable and capable of several maneuvers that airplanes cannot do. Hovering, holding its weight up to its maximum load at three to five feet above the ground, moving in any direction at the discretion of the pilot, forward, backward, or sideways. With a little less weight than maximum load, the helicopter can hover out of ground effect, producing all the power necessary to remain motionless at 50 or 100 feet above the ground.

Helicopters are wonderful for moving objects from one point to another. A Discovery Channel demonstrated this ability in a show about a Woolly Mammoth found in the ice, the ice was cut away and a Russian helicopter was hooked up to the load and after a bit of work, the frozen mammoth was lifted clear of the site and transported to a study area. Helicopters are used to set air conditioners on top of big buildings with great precision, in rapid succession. They are used in the logging industry to move cut trees. They are a diverse means of transportation.

But the biggest question is Safety. How safe are helicopters really. A machine with all those rotating parts, what happens if the engine quits? A helicopter in flight that loses an engine is still able to fly; it is just flying in a decent. As the wind moves upward through the rotor system, it produces the force needed to turn the rotors at a steady rpm, so all the maneuvers of flight are still available, it is called Autorotation. It is sort of like holding a windmill out of the window of your car as you go down the road; the wind causes the windmill to spin. The blades hold a kinetic energy that can be used at the bottom of the flight to slow the helicopter down and produce the needed power to land the aircraft safely. In flight school we do many of these maneuvers till we are quite comfortable with them. The largest percentage of all accidents can be attributed to Pilot Error, doing things outside the parameters of flight, not paying attention etc. Only a very small percentage of accidents are caused by material failure.

As was stated earlier in this article, helicopters have come a long way from the days of Mash. They can have an autopilot, air conditioning, full instrumentation, fly by GPS, there are some experiments with automation flying from point a to point b without a pilot at all. The title is a bit presumptuous, there is too much information to put all in one article, but for an overview this should cover the basics.

Learn more about this author, Dan Balcom.
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