Well, I’m used to seeing myself type “Great Lesson” a lot recently, but not today. No fault of Steve who did his utmost to boy me up. I just wasn’t in the zone.

It started off ok. I had worked out over the weekend how to record the full ATC communications and I brought that setup with me ready to rock’n'roll. It was the new aircraft today G-DOGI (Doggy). It is a beautiful machine. Metallic Blue and everything looks very fresh and new on it.

So, I checked her over. I spent 5-10 minutes setting up the camera and ATC recording unit and it all tested fine.

All good so far !!!

With only the final LOW RPM Horn to check, I waited on Steve. When Steve arrived, he plugged in his headset and then we realised it didn’t work with my headset. BUGGER !!!!!  So, with the rotors turning and everything setup to work with my headset, I made the snap decision to just swap mine out for the school headset, which means no video and no ATC I was gutted.

The insides of the new helicopter are a little different. There’s more buttons on the cyclic for changing the frequency, swapping channels and it took me a few seconds to realise that to talk on the radio, there is a button where the fire button on a joystick would be ie a trigger button.

The aircraft felt different. It’s funny how accustomed to G-MAVI and G-BZBU I have become and how different a new machine can feel. But it was easy to get used to quickly.

Today, we did some advanced autorotation practice. We flew out north past Morpeth and did a variety of different types of autorotation……

Standard auto (60/5 knots)
180′ auto
Range
Max Range

and a new one……

Not sure what the name is but basically we reduced the speed in the auto to zero knots. So basically, we are in a rapidly descending hover, the idea being that we don’t need to move forward much to reach a field. When we are at about 400 feet, we bring the speed back in, so we have it for the final flare.

The last few autos we did at the plateau so we could do it all the way down to a 5 foot hover. There was virtually no wind today, which made the autos much harder for the final flare. Steve reckons we’d have rolled over on one of them. I reckoned we’d have done somersaults personally It wasn’t pretty, not enough speed shaved off and a messy flare and bit of pedal work.

But, I don’t think anything would have felt right today. I just wasn’t in the zone. After we’d done about 5 or 6 autos, we headed back to the airport. As we taxi’ed in, I was close to asking Steve to do the final landing next to the bowser, as my previous performance was so poor, but my gut told me to do it. And it went really well. One of my better landings (8/10), so was well happy with that for what had been a pretty dire lesson. Gutted there’s no footage and audio. But maybe next time.

I did take a photo of Doggy…..

And totally unrelated to helicopters, but I just LOVE this youtube video…….