Mainly just copium for the pilots. Helicopters aren’t like airplanes where you have glide time and altitude to decide what to do after something bad happens. If you watch fixed winged ejections there’s usually about 30 seconds to a min after something goes wrong before the pilot decides to bail. Helicopters go from everything being fine, to a debris field in seconds.
It’s more about altitude than the ability to glide. Helicopters can do what’s called Auto rotation, which means they actually can glide. If the blade seize up however, they can’t autorotate. Helicopters fly a lot lower than most airplanes though, so they can’t glide as far.
Wow. I’d be nuts to fly one of those things. 6000 VVI sounds like suicide
With the collective firmly held down on the bottom stop, things happen very fast. The helicopter is descending in a hurry, as in 4,000 – 6,000 feet per minute. Do the math, if you are at 1,000 feet and the descent rate is 4,000 feet, you have one quarter or a minute – 15 seconds – to find a place to land.
Yeah, helicopters are the apex predators of soldiers and rich people. Even if you pull off the perfect autorotation, the glide ratio is still only a maximum of like 3:1.
I think I remember reading a report somewhere that more people have been killed by practicing autorotation than have actually pulled it off in the wild.
The individual rotor blades are separated from the center with an explosive charge and their centrifugal motion carries them laterally away from the vehicle as the seat rockets straight up.
As a bonus, whoever was close enough to shoot you down is about to get at least one heavy steel javelin flung terrifyingly close to their direction at high speeds.
I’m assuming here that impact with a long range SAM is probably something you’re not about to eject from.
I think i heard one time that helicopters can jettison the rotor so you dont get chopped up
Unfortunately, that won’t stop the blades from spinning, meaning the danger isn’t averted.
You shear the blades so they shoot outwards. I couldn’t find an irl testing video, but here’s a render.
https://youtu.be/a1kr651en7g
Mainly just copium for the pilots. Helicopters aren’t like airplanes where you have glide time and altitude to decide what to do after something bad happens. If you watch fixed winged ejections there’s usually about 30 seconds to a min after something goes wrong before the pilot decides to bail. Helicopters go from everything being fine, to a debris field in seconds.
It’s more about altitude than the ability to glide. Helicopters can do what’s called Auto rotation, which means they actually can glide. If the blade seize up however, they can’t autorotate. Helicopters fly a lot lower than most airplanes though, so they can’t glide as far.
Autorotation is mostly copium as well.
Explanation
Wow. I’d be nuts to fly one of those things. 6000 VVI sounds like suicide
Yeah, helicopters are the apex predators of soldiers and rich people. Even if you pull off the perfect autorotation, the glide ratio is still only a maximum of like 3:1.
I think I remember reading a report somewhere that more people have been killed by practicing autorotation than have actually pulled it off in the wild.
Now you have blades shooting away from the helicopter at a high speed which could kill someone.
The Kamov does it.
The individual rotor blades are separated from the center with an explosive charge and their centrifugal motion carries them laterally away from the vehicle as the seat rockets straight up.
As a bonus, whoever was close enough to shoot you down is about to get at least one heavy steel javelin flung terrifyingly close to their direction at high speeds.
I’m assuming here that impact with a long range SAM is probably something you’re not about to eject from.
In cases like that I’d imagine you’d try and eject prior to being hit, though I don’t know enough to know how much warning time there is.
not much, considering how many of Ka-52s were shot down without pilots ejecting
Pretty sure someone was lying to ya
Several models of helicopters have ejectable blades, this article mentions a few, and has a diagram of the blade severing system.
Damn never would have expected that. Thanks for showing me something new!