Dang, R-44 crash in Newport Beach.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... crash.html

Damn. Only flew a mile.....
The last 44 that went down here in Orlando had a blade delamination.
Instead of landing it he radiod in the tower at KORL asking for a downtown approach.
But you could hear the blades sounding so freaking bad in the background.
I can NEVER understand the effort of trying to get back to the airport.
It's a helicopter. Land it!

Rotor RPM issues. Looks like he lost rotor RPM and screwed the pooch. blades show very little rotation impacts lots of vertical bending, not good RPM = Life.

I am not too familiar with the Robbies but don't they have the correlator set to a certain minimum RPM?

they have electronic Governors and the pilots now days don't practice power management. The have no clue as the manifold limits and when it tops out the torque needed to bring up the rotors back to speed isn't there. A S-58 with a round engine you lower the collective a bit and roll it back up, Like a big Bell 47. An R-44 is anemic at altitude and even worse when the RPM hits the low green. You have to be aggressive getting the RPM back. Most pilots trained with those governors have lazy wrists.... (FAGS?) Looking at the damage they went ballistic , into the side of that house.

Power topped or loss of power

RPM horn

slow in milking the collective or does nothing in the beginning of autorotation

Noses over as the rotors slow, Forward C/G + Float drag = nose low with low RPM == More RPM loss as the ground rushes up,

No aft cyclic to load the rotors in the first moment of autorotation entry especially with floats make for a big pitch down and lots of RPM loss in the first seconds . If he was at 500 ft he'd only have 3 seconds to start and 8 to finish if he did it wrong no start 8 to finish. not much time in any helicopter.

Thank you Don. I was wondering about that.
Another SilverState graduate?
Boy oh boy they had simply flooded the market with thousands of hours logged in 3 months of flight training
Then they started crashing left and right.

Army pilots used to have training in Hughes TH 55s and TH 13s plenty of power management training, then the Bell TH 57 (206) took over and they went directly to the Black Hawks... Put them in a Piston helicopter and you get a disaster. Seen it over & over through the years. Not exactly a Robinson problem more of a "Machines get smarter and people get dumber problem"

Yes I am so grateful that the 269 has none of that nonsense.
You have to learn to roll the throttle as you move the collective.
I have saved my butt a few times by dropping the damn thing while revving the engine back up.
Damn students rolling the throttle the wrong direction on final approach!!!!

I was one of the TH-55 guys. We also had to practice "EMER GOV OPS" in Hueys where we shut off the governor and did pedal turns with manual throttle control and without causing compressor stall. I experienced unrecoverable low Rotor RPM in my Mini-500 ONCE in 1997 and got very lucky. I was in a position to slide it on before the descent rate got very high but not high enough to autorotate. I was crossing a wooden fence so a hovering auto was not doable.

My tail could not have cleared the fence by more than an inch! That taught me a lesson. I cannot remember a low RPM event since. That made a believer out of me. All pilots should be required to demonstrate ability to fly dumb aircraft in every category they fly. Fixed wing pilots should be required to be tailwheel qualified. Helicopter pilots should be required to fly non-governed pistons.

Absolutely agree with that Bryan.
When I was instructing I did try to simulate almost every situation I could think of that were typical chopper pilot traps.
Unfortunately the industry being a fucking backstabbers paradise the owner of the school had heard of my every attempt to teach outside of the 141 script.
It did get my ass fired eventually......
Anyways..... we were to believe that commercial pilots didn't have to know full downs.
Because it makes sense that you fly for example the Canyon tour chopper with 3 people on board and if shit goes on you ain't supposed to be able to put the damn thing down safely...... According to the FAA!!!!
It's only required if you instruct. But they don't want you to practice it after you passed your CFI checkride......
Ahaaaaaaaaa. I got it!
Anyways. I have managed to bend the cross beam on the 269 more times than I will ever admit to.
The A&P liked Vodka so he routinely recharged the oleos and straightened the cross beam for my girl.
Sometimes the damn thing had her tail hanging so low I could jump over the tail boom
But every single of my pilots knew how to put it down without breaking the tail off!!!!!
Practice is the very essence of knowing what to do when the real thing happens.