Why is piloting a helicopter considered more challenging, despite not requiring much space to take off and land and being able to stabilize in the air and stand still?
In: Engineering
What people aren’t mentioning is that when you fly an airplane and make an adjustment, it tends to affect something else. If you point the nose up a little higher, you have to add throttle to keep from slowing down. If you tilt the wings, you have to pull up a little too in order to not lose altitude. With a helicopter, one adjustment affects everything else and those affect everything else again. Suppose you are starting from a perfect hover. If you want to go just go straight up, you increase the collective, which increases torque which turns the helicopter, so you have to adjust the rear propeller, which is pushing air sideways, so now you have to compensate for that, too, and so on. Fail to compensate and you fill fall out of the sky.
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