Wisdom & Humor

Company A

227th Assault Helicopter Battalion

1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)

Helicopter Wisdom / Humor

Helicopter Wisdom

"The helicopter approaches closer than any other vehicle to fulfillment of mankind's ancient dream of the flying horse, and the magic carpet" - Igor Sikorsky
"If you are in trouble anywhere in the world, an airplane can fly over and drop flowers, but a helicopter can land and save your life" -- Igor Sikorsky, 1947
The rotor is just a big fan on top of the helicopter designed to keep the pilot cool. When it stops, you can actually watch the pilot start sweating.
The engine RPM and the rotor RPM must BOTH be kept in the GREEN. Failure to heed this commandment can affect the morale of the crew.
If helicopters are so safe, how come there are no vintage / classic helicopter fly-ins? - Anonymous
Hovering is for pilots who love to fly but have no place to go.
Helicopters don't fly . . . . they just beat the air into submission.
Never let a helicopter take you somewhere your brain didn't get to five minutes earlier.
A helicopter is a collection of rotating parts going round and round and reciprocating parts going up and down - all of them trying to become random in motion.
It is a bad thing to run out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas all at the same time.
If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it's probably a helicopter . . . and therefore, unsafe.
It is a fact that helicopter tail rotors are instinctively drawn toward trees, stumps, rocks, etc. While it may be possible to ward off this natural event some of the time, it cannot, despite the best efforts of the crew, always be prevented. It's just what they do.
If something hasn't broken on your helicopter . . . it's about to.
Loud, sudden noises in a helicopter WILL get your undivided attention.
The terms Protective Armor and Helicopter are mutually exclusive.
A 'good' landing is one from which you can walk away. A 'great' landing is one after which they can use the helicopter again

General Rules of the Air

If you push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. If you pull the stick back, they get smaller. That is, unless you keep pulling the stick all the way back, then they get bigger again.
Flying isn't dangerous. Crashing is what's dangerous.
Try to learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all of them yourself.
Stay out of clouds. The silver lining everyone keeps talking about might be another aircraft going in the opposite direction. Reliable sources also report that mountains have been known to hide out in clouds.
Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, experience usually comes from bad judgment.
Keep looking around. There's always something you've missed.
If you're ever faced with a forced landing at night, turn on the landing lights to see the landing area. If you don't like what you see, turn' em back off.
Flying is the second greatest thrill known to man. Landing is the first!
Helicopter pilots believe in clean living. They never drink whiskey from a dirty glass.
It's a good landing if you can still get the doors open.
It's best to keep the pointed end going forward as much as possible.
Any helicoter pilot who does not at least privately consider himself the best in the business...is in the wrong business.
Three old helicopter pilots are walking on the ramp.

First one says, "Windy, isn't it?"
Second one says, "No, its Thursday!"
Third one says, "So am I. Lets go get a beer."

Mankind has a perfect record in aviation; we never left one up there!
While the rest of the crew may be in the same predicament, it's almost always the pilot's job to arrive at the crash site first.
The farther you fly into the mountains, the louder the strange engine noises become.

Helicopters are Different From Airplanes
The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly.
A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
That is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why, in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened, it is about to.
- - Commentary by Harry Reasoner, February 16, 1971

Low Flight for Helicopters

Oh, I've slipped the surly bonds of earth
And hovered out of ground effect on semi-rigid blades;
Earthward I've auto'ed and met the rising brush of non-paved terrain;
And done a thousand things you would never care to,
Skidded and dropped and flared low in the heat soaked roar.
Confined there, I've chased the earthbound traffic
And lost the race to insignificant headwinds;
Forward and up a little in ground effect
I've topped the General's hedge with drooping turns
Where never Skyhawk or even Phantom flew.
Shaking and pulling collective,
I've lumbered the low untresspassed halls of victor airways,
Put out my hand and touched a tree.

Musings of an unknown helicopter pilot.....

Anything that screws its way into the sky flies according to unnatural principals.
You never want to sneak up behind an old, high-time helicopter pilot and clap your hands. He will instantly dive for cover and most likely whimper...then get up and smack you.
There are no old helicopters laying around airports like you see old airplanes. There is a reason for this. Come to think of it, there are not many old, high-time helicopter pilots hanging around airports either so the first issue is problematic.
You can always tell a helicopter pilot in anything moving: a train, an airplane, a car or a boat. They never smile, they are always listening to the machine and they always hear something they think is not right. Helicopter pilots fly in a mode of intensity, actually more like "spring loaded", while waiting for pieces of their ship to fall off.
Flying a helicopter at any altitude over 500 feet is considered reckless and should be avoided. Flying a helicopter at any altitude or condition that precludes a landing in less than 20 seconds is considered outright foolhardy.
Remember in a helicopter you have about 1 second to lower the collective in an engine failure before the craft becomes unrecoverable. Once you've failed this maneuver the machine flies about as well as a 20 case Coke machine. Even a perfectly executed autorotation only gives you a glide ratio slightly better than that of a brick.
When your wings are leading, lagging, flapping, precessing and moving faster than your fuselage there's something unnatural going on.
While hovering, if you start to sink a bit, you pull up on the collective while twisting the throttle, push with your left foot (more torque) and move the stick left (more translating tendency) to hold your spot. If you now need to stop rising, you do the opposite in that order. Sometimes in wind you do this many times each second.
If everything is working fine on your helicopter consider yourself temporarily lucky. Something is about to break.

And remember the fighter pilot's prayer:
"Lord I pray for the eyes of an eagle, the heart of a lion
and the balls of a combat helicopter pilot."