May
15
Written by:
CyclicAuthority
5/15/2010 7:23 AM
I recently had not one, but two opportunities to do a bit of flying in turbine powered helicopters … and now I am obsessed. The first flight was a joy ride in an MD500E. Being the first time in a turbine, I knew pretty much nothing about the startup, so the owner got it running, but I got to fly it, and it was fantastic.
It was really nice to be able to go over the mountains instead of around them, not to mention just fly without any goals of learning or teaching various maneuvers. Needless to say, I was hooked.
My next foray might seem less exciting, but when you have 250 hours of flight time, hovering a Twinstar is pretty exciting stuff. That's right … I got 0.2 of twin turbine time, and I am proud of it! The operator was moving the helicopter to a different location on the field, and I was there, so I got to hop in, and he gave me the controls for a few minutes of hovering. This time I was minimally more knowledgeable, so I watched the N1 pressure and the temperature during startup, and almost understood what I was looking at … especially since the pilot did it twice.
Needless to say, I went home, cracked open the books, scoured the internet, etc., for any and all information to help me understand how the turbines work, and why the startup sequence is what it is. This is a problem. I actually watched, and possibly drooled a bit, a youtube video of the instrumentation during a JetRanger startup… several times. Now I hop in my R22 and turn the key … there is no smell of Jet A, there is no whine of the turbine or pop as the fuel gets ignited. I will more than likely have to wait another 1000 hours before I get to really fly a turbine, and that pains me to think about. I was hooked on helicopters since before I took a discovery flight, but now I am hooked all over again. So, now I continue to do everything I can to build my hours, and search for any and all opportunities to hop into the turbines to torture myself. Yep … hopping into those helicopters was probably a mistake, but I have no problem repeating that mistake again and again and again until I make it into that first commercial gig.
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