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
Already enough real good answers up above, but here’s a good thought for you:
Every now and then there’s a real life story or a study involving random people with very little or no flying experience at all suddenly having to try and land an airplane, usually with some kind of outside guidance. In a surprising number of these cases they actually manage to kind of pull it off and survive.
Have you *ever* heard of that happening in a helicopter?
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.
One of the most terrifying things about a helicopter is [this diagram](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hvcurve-en.png).
When your engine fails in a helicopter, you start falling. While you’re falling, if you angle the helicopter *just* right, you can make air flow through the rotor blades and slow your descent. Do that enough, and you can softly land on the ground rather than completely being smashed to bits. Angling the helicopter just right requires a bunch of forward momentum as well as downwards.
See that red segment on the left? That represents “the forward momentum you have now plus the forward momentum you can gain on the way down isn’t enough to stop your downwards momentum”. Close to the ground, you need less forward momentum because you will pick up less downwards momentum. Further up, you can gain a bunch of forward momentum on the way down, so you need less now. In the middle? Well, you’re in trouble. The red segment on the bottom right represents “you don’t have enough time to react to stuff on the ground if something unexpected happens”.
You almost always start in the bottom left, so taking off requires this somewhat perilous trajectory – gain a little height, pick up a bunch of speed, maintain your speed and move upwards as much as you can. Yes, a helicopter doesn’t need a long runway, but it *does* need a clear space for a safe takeoff. You can head into the red region, but there’s an inherent risk if your engine fails.
A plane flys because of physics. It *wants* to fly.
A helicopter does not want to fly. It flies despite physics.
Knowing how much skill flying a helicopter takes, longline operation is so impressive. A good pilot can put a hook on a 100 foot rope right in my hand then hover over me until I hook it onto the barrel of poop, then they can smoothly pick it up and fly away with it.
The logistics of backcountry outhouses are wild.
Just to point out an error in your phrasing, the term aircraft means any vehicle that floats or flies in the air. Helicopters, blimps, and airplanes are all aircraft.
A better way to phrase your question is why are helicopters harder to fly than airplanes.
the controls are necessarily a nightmare and there are a million little things that can catch you off-guard.
take the simplest thing possible, flying straight forward. on an airplane this is easy. depending on the plane, it may even be built to naturally enter and stay in level flight without being controlled. (if you’ve ever noticed airplanes with a slight V shape to their wings, it helps them not roll)
with a helicopter, if the rotor is moving anticlockwise, flying forward means the rotor blades on the right side of your aircraft are generating more lift than the blades on the left side, because the blades are rotating “into the wind” on the right side.
a gust of wind can change the lift of an airplane. a gust of wind will change the lift on every part of every blade of a helicopter by a different amount.
Chopper instructor to student pilot on his first lesson:
“Get the chopper up some feet and try to hover over the tarmac.”
After ten minutes:
“Well, at least try to stay within the country.”
Airplane has fixed wings. Helicopter’s wings are the big as blade rotating above the pilot. I am kind of a helicopter pilot myself albeit a tiny one (flew a Kyosho helicopter before)
Having flown both, when flying at a decent speed from one location to another – they are *remarkably* similar. They yaw, pitch, roll in a similar way. The helicopter wasn’t some unruly beast I had to fight, it’s pretty stable and you’re not having to constantly work to balance the craft (contrary to what everyone else says).
When hovering, the helicopter was quite different because planes can’t (usually) hover. I only spent about 10 minutes hovering, I expect after about half an hour of practice I would have been OK at hovering.
In terms of preflight checks, buttons and knobs to push and set. The helicopter was way more complicated than a light aircraft, however it was much simpler than a commercial jet.
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