This short led me to find the actual video, pretty cool.




The Fat Electrician on YT has some great military history content if you want to check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/@the_fat_electrician

Reckless. I'd never fly with that guy again.

I think that's about ten years old, or I watched a different one. Would freak me out!

Oldie but a goodie. I don’t know what was reckless about it.

Yeah, that was suicidal.

Old pilots and bold pilots and all that.

The narrator takes the time to explain this maneuver isn’t dangerous because the pilot has experience. The pilot’s experience is trumped only by his recklessness.

Next, the narrator further explains this student pilot says helicopter pilots by their very nature accept greater risks. No, they don't; this one does.

The instructor verbally says he has the property owner’s permission to land. If this was a spontaneous as we’re led to believe, that’s impossible.

This gentleman has no business flying, never mind instructing.

The one leaning out interfered with the cyclic control. He EASILY could have sent that flying cuisinart into the trees.

(Side rant: When I click on the video it won't play, it tells me to sign in to prove I'm not a bot. Irony being I am logged, and I'm watching a different Fat electrician video in another window.)

That's one of the dumbest things I have seen in a long time.

quote:

Originally posted by mjlennon:

Next, the narrator further explains this student pilot says helicopter pilots by their very nature accept greater risks. No, they don't; this one does.

I think context matters here. Yes, in general, they do accept greater risks, at least in my experience. We had a saying... "The big fan stops turning, you fly directly to the crash site."

Although I was not a pilot, I have many flight hours as aircrew and we did things that were orders of magnitude more risky and dangerous than this.

Helicopters by nature have a higher mishap rate than all other fixed wing aircraft (except in some cases the AV-8B Harrier, but that's not your typical fixed wing aircraft).

I do remember once dropping a few grunts on a mountain peak in 29 Palms. The peak wasn't large enough for our CH-53E to land, so we put the rear mains on the edge of the cliff and nose was suspended in the air. We dropped the ramp just enough for them to run out the back and turn left to clear the tail rotor.

I also recall landing in a spot once that had uneven terrain. I kid you not, there was maybe 6" to 12" of clearance between the tips of the rotor and the ground. That landing scared the $#!T out of me.

And don't get me started on NVG landings on ships. My idea of risky is a bit different than most and nothing in that video would have scared me.

Tony.

i rescued an RC plane from the top of a tree while i was in the basket of a hot air balloon once.
Sadly, no video.

It's hard to judge from that video, but I feel pretty comfortable that this was more dangerous than not doing it. I also found it funny the the instructor was smoking a cigarette while flying a helicopter with open sides, so I guess safety is subjective.

The Fat Electrician mentions the pilot is an ex 160th SOAR(Night Stalkers) pilot.

I know nothing about flying helicopters, but saying something like that was okay because flying helicopters is inherently risky is an illogical argument. Even if we accept certain risks every day (as virtually everyone does), that does not justify running every risk every day—or even once. The risk I run by walking down a flight of stairs doesn’t justify the risk of free climbing up the side of a skyscraper, nor are risks accepted in military combat operations necessarily justified to recover someone’s hobby toy.

And even the best pilots can make fatal mistakes. One day when I was an emergency services dispatcher a 160th SOAR helicopter crashed on one of our nearby mountains on a clear summer afternoon, killing the three men on board. The accident was ruled to have been caused by pilot error.

Helicopters are different than fixed wing aircraft. They have different capabilities and different limitations.

Having learned to fly at a small airport with a lot of antique airplanes, one thought that that is always in the back of my mind is, “What happens if the/an engine quits?” There are times when the answer would be “You crash land, and there is no good place to crash land here.”

I am not helicopter rated. (I did 4.9 hours of dual in an Enstrom 280C before moving to an area when the only local training helicopters are Robinson R-22s.) I did learn a few things about helicopters though. One is that they have what is called an “avoid curve” which is a combination of airspeed and altitude where you are likely hosed if the engine quits while you are in that region. If you’re high enough, you can unload the rotor disk and build enough rotor inertia to autorotate and land safely. If you’re hovering six inches off the ground, you wouldn’t fall long enough to build up enough vertical speed to injure you.

I’d guess (but don’t know or care) that that helicopter may have been an R-22, which is famous for having low rotor inertia. Regardless of what type that helicopter is, I don’t know what the avoid curve is for that type, but I’d guess that doing a pinnacle landing in the top of a 60 tree is solidly in that avoid curve. I would be interested in hearing that instructor’s plan for what he would have done if the engine coughed in the middle of the “rescue”.

I don’t have the expertise in flying helicopters to say with authority that what he did was crazy, and I know that to someone without experience in the operation routine stuff would give many folks the vapors. One of my favorite forms of stress relief is doing pattern work in a Pitts S2-B.

My preferred approach single or twin is configure the airplane appropriately, power off abeam the numbers, and glide to a landing maneuvering as appropriate for the airplane. The beauty of this is that if most every landing that you have ever made is a power off landing, then if you ever have an engine failure and have to make an emergency landing it is just another landing. All you have to do differently is figure out where the landing is going to be from the menu of choices available to you.

In a Cessna 182 or a Bellanca Super Decathlon, that doesn’t make for a particularly visually exciting approach. In a Beechcraft Travel Air, dirty (gear and flaps down, engines idling, props fine pitch) it looks considerably steeper than most would consider normal. In a Pitts S-2B, the glide path approximates that of a thin flat rock. With a 1000’ pattern altitude, gliding at 100 mph, and turning all the way (which keeps the runway in sight right into the flare) it may take 30 seconds from closing the throttle to straightening out and flaring over the numbers. One might be close to 30 degrees wing down 20 or so feet above the ground when starting the rollout/flare. In all cases, it is aerodynamically stable, using management of kinetic (airspeed) and potential (altitude) energy that is not subject to the potential of engine failure. If one chose an inopportune moment to take a nap and failed to roll out or flare it could be messy, but heck one isn’t supposed go flying unless they’re well rested and mentally present.

quote:

Originally posted by xantom:
The Fat Electrician mentions the pilot is an ex 160th SOAR(Night Stalkers) pilot.

I probably wouldn’t want to be doing 150+ MPH in a car being driven by a “regular Joe”.

Oscar Piastri, Lewis Hamilton, Richard Petty, Jeff Gordon… I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable.

If the Pilot was a former Night Stalker? I’d be pretty comfortable.
But I’ve been known to take some risks.

Effin aye, that was sick.

Cherish the little moments in your life, they can be the best.

That's awesome! Good for him.

I have this friend (great first line, isn’t it?)
He spent many years flying helicopters for the military. If they had it, he learned to fly it. Apache and all the rest.

While I’m sure they recommended not taking unnecessary risks, the pilots were trained to,let’s say, fly much closer to the capability of the aircraft.
As an example, on a rare occasion of flying with my friend we flew over my house. With cell phone in hand I was clicking away to get some pictures. To accommodate me he flew a large circle (maybe not that large) with the aircraft almost on its side. It made for great pix. It was a little unnerving.
Military pilot? No problem. Conventional pilot - highly out of the ordinary.