Even a Numbskull Like Me Can Learn to Fly a Gyroplane

[Music] first of all it's a gyro plane not a gyrocopter and second if you want to get a rating in one of these things and you look in part 61 of the cfrs you're going to be really confused because none of it makes any sense we're going to go over that in a second third i forgot what third was but it has to do probably with how much fun these are to fly the one behind me is an ela cougar which is made in spain i spent the day here at blaze over me it's a gyroplane school in sebastian florida and they specialize in this kind of training so rich lanning is going to tell us what exactly it takes to get the rating if you're doing a transition from a certificate you already have rich i looked in part 61 and i thought i understood what it would take for me atp or private pilot to get a category in class rating for a gyro plane i got it all wrong this tell me exactly what's required actually the regulations aren't entirely clear on what's required and but basically it's pretty simple all you need is to meet the requirements of the pts for sport plane gyro plug or sport pilot gyro plane and then you just need to go through the maneuvers with an instructor when the instructor feels you're competent they will give you a sign off and a recommendation and it's basically just in your logbook recommendation that no formal faa paperwork is required and then you will then have a formal check ride with another gyroplane certified cfi if they feel you're competent then you fill out the normal 8710 paperwork submit it to the faa and you will receive your rating in the mail okay so that's the sport pilot version of it correct now let's say that i'm a hairy chested helicopter pilot or i want to get the gyro plane category and class rating through the regular faa process it's not sport pilot so i can fly at night in the other other privileges now what right that's a little more involved and you mentioned helicopters so the helicopter actually is already a rotorcraft category so the requirements are less for a helicopter pilot the helicopter can transition to a gyroplane really relatively quickly for a fixed-wing pilot you're going to it's going to take significantly more hours you will have to take a written test and the real distinguisher between the sport pilot is you're also going to have to go through a designated examiner to get your check ride and if i have nothing at all and i'm coming in and i want to do a private pilot gyro plane then on i'm it's almost like a private pilot airplane right 40 hours what all is involved in that they still have to do cross countries there's night flight they actually the regulation actually stipulates some instrument time it's a little struggling how you do instrument time in the gyro plane because they're just not equipped for that yeah i didn't notice any gyrus no there's not so i guess we'll we have to little improvise i guess i'm part of those but uh most people come to us for sport pilot um there really is not a big advantage to getting the regular uh certification uh unless you want to fly at night that might be the biggest distinguisher most of the gyroplanes are available out here fall under the lsa category so any sport pilot can fly them i doubt you want to go above 10 000 feet in them so the restrictions for a sport pilot uh really aren't aren't all very uh onerous let's talk a little bit about the transition pipe coming in here uh what kind of time it's going to take him to do that we've typically found that for a transition pilot if if they've been actively flying i mean that's a big distinguisher between 10 and 15 hours a lot depends on how frequently they come for training you know if you come once a month it might take longer you know if you come once or twice a week then your transition will be much much quicker i mean the thing we focus on is take offs and landings because really once you're up in the air the gyro plane with a few exceptions flies pretty much like an airplane so the real trick is taking them off and landing them and we we put a lot of emphasis on that yeah having flown the gyre planes a little bit i can attest to that the basically in flight and when you push the stick this way and you go that way so it's relatively simple but the landings are really something else and that really takes wrapping your head around a lot of things it's definitely different than fixed wing i fly gliders as well and i kind it's a lot like gliders if you fly gliders you know a lot about energy management that's what we're doing in the gyroplane we're basically managing the energy in that rotor that rotor is what's keeping us in the air as we bleed off that energy from the rotor then we're going to land and we don't typically flare like you do in an airplane so you don't have that high pitch up attitude it's more flat kind of like a glider the amazing thing with a gyro plane is though when you land your forward velocity goes to zero almost instantly that's why these have been typically touted as the safe airplane because you can land in pretty small areas and with no forward velocity okay well i'm supposed to go out and fly with raw so i'll get in the gyre plane go do it have fun okay well maybe it's not that complicated but the aerodynamics are at least compared to an airplane so let's get on with that if you just think of a gyroplane being exactly like a helicopter you would have it well pretty much all wrong a gyroplane isn't anything like a helicopter except in one regard i'll get to that in a minute the helicopter has a powered rotor system with blades capable of variable pitch because of that it has a pedal control tail rotor to counteract torque effects it also has a collective to control play pitch which is why flying the helicopter isn't for people who can't walk and chew gum at the same time and hold this thought the helicopter draws air from above and thrusts it downward a gyroplane on the other hand does none of this although it does have a rudder to point the nose in the desired direction a gyroplane's rotor is unpowered obtaining its rotational energy from the relative wind as the gyro moves forward through the air the flexible blades are connected to the rotor shaft through a hub bar which allows the rotor system to teeter without this the imbalance and lift between the advancing and the retreating blade would cause the aircraft to roll over and that in fact happened in the early gyro plane development you can think of the gyroplane rotor as a big lifting disc but it's a little more complicated than that as with an airplane propeller the outer portion of the rotor has a higher velocity than either the middle or inner portion and as the gyro plane moves forward through the relative wind the angle of attack of the blade changes the advancing blade has more speed but a lower angle of attack while the retreating blade is slower but has a higher angle of attack there's a lot of swirling around going on here and that results in a rotor disc divided into three segments or regions the driven the driving and the stalled the driven or outer segment does the heavy lifting literally its lift vector from the spinning blades is pointed almost straight up moving inboard towards the middle of the rotor disc the lift vector changes from straight up to more forward into the direction of rotation this is what powers the blades from the relative wind passing through the rotor and it keeps the rotor spinning it's similar to auto rotation without power in a helicopter in the inner or stalled region the angle of attack of the blades is higher than the stall point so they contribute no lift at all only drag that has to be overcome by the driving segment over here on the advancing blade side the angle of attack is lower but the speed is much higher so the driving segment shifts this way because the driven segment is larger this is where the teetering mechanism comes into play to keep the higher lift on that side from creating a rolling moment notice in this clip how the aircraft is noticeably pulsing this is not due to dynamic imbalance in the rotor blades but the teetering action of the hub bar balancing uneven aerodynamic lift it is possible to exceed the rotor system's ability to damp asymmetric lift by flying faster than the never exceed speed in which case an uncommanded role could occur there's one other peculiar aspect of gyroplane aerodynamics in an airplane if you load the wings by pitching up the airplane slows down in the gyroplane it does the same but the rotor speeds up because of what's called coning the rotor's effective diameter decreases like a spinning ice skater pulling her arms in but the reverse unloading the disc with aggressive pitch down causes the rotor to rapidly lose speed and if this is overdone with sharp negative g at low altitude it can be unrecoverable [Music] gyroplanes don't stall but if slowed up enough they'll descend at a high sink rate which means you can land them on a posted stand either intentionally or in case of a power loss that's what we're doing in this clip a maneuver that's a standard part of the flight test like helicopters gyroplanes also have a height velocity curve which means that at certain combinations of altitude and airspeed the gyro can't recover rotor energy lost due to an engine failure or unloading and it will enter an unarrestable descent the gyroplane has one big advantage if the engine fails and one disadvantage first the bad news the glide ratio is only about three to one compared to eight or ten to one in an airplane so if you're half a mile off the end of the runway you need to be at about a thousand feet to reach it but the gyroplane's advantage is that it can touch down very slowly with little forward movement which reduces damage or potential injury unlike an airplane a gyroplane doesn't need a long field to land safely before you can get to the slightly weird landings you have to do the slightly weird takeoff that requires spinning up the rotor with a device called a pre-rotator just before takeoff depending on model you need around 200 rpm for takeoff right there and we'll start the pre-rotation and is that just a clutch that does that is uh yeah is a uh this is mechanical so it's engaging the the pre-rotation so now the other one has pneumatic or hydraulic uh so as you feel that momentum going you bring the clutch when you get to 40 you go all the way in okay and we'll take off at 180. now it's not gonna increase anymore so we get a little power that's exactly what you're approaching [Music] runway 180 is all you're going to get yes because he has a big rotor let me get 190 so now we release the real is the break we're going keep it there the rpms are going to increase sebastian the gyroplane doesn't exactly rotate for takeoff like an airplane but kind of levitates vertically it accelerates in ground effect and the rotor continues to spin up until it gets to about 350 rpm so just after takeoff the angle is flat until the speed builds and then it climbs around a thousand feet per minute uh similar and one of the things that you do is that you make sure that as soon as the nose goes up you give it a little more power smoothly so you keep the nose up and you saw how he lifted then you go into round effect to get to your speed which will be 65 and that rotation was 50 something it was yeah we were up at 47 miles an hour that is when the nose goes up and goes off the out of the wheel around that in maneuvering flight the gyro plane is a little distinguishable from a fixed wing aircraft pitch and roll inputs are the same and although there's a rudder the gyro doesn't have ailerons so it doesn't have adverse yaw its version of a coordinated turn is to keep the fuselage aligned with the turn direction gyroplanes sometimes have a tuft of yarn taped on the outside of the nose like a glider streamlining that helps to keep the nose properly pointed right turns require a little more pedal than left turns but neither requires much one thing to get used to is small stick movements by airplane standards so what we do the first time that we take a student out if we introduce it to the airplane in terms of the flying characteristics how much movement of the stick you have to do because look it goes up so you can just trim a little to go forward there's very little movement yeah so basically think of you have a dollar coin underneath this and that is what you move it so what we're going to do usually with a student is that we tell the student to start thinking ahead of the aircraft making sure that you know if you can realize that any changes that you made there are small changes it takes three to four seconds look i want to slow down i just do this and i wait keep it there and look at how it goes three to four seconds and then you are 76 we got a little faster just lower the nozzle here and we're going to go down a little i keep it at 700 i don't want to be at the same level of the planes they don't see us although a gyro can't hover like a helicopter it can fly slow really slow point it into a stiff wind and slow it down and you can park it over a point on the ground interestingly the higher the power a gyro has the slower it can fly because it has excess thrust to accelerate out of the slow flight condition you fly the gyro at 65 to 70 miles per hour in the pattern about like my cub approach speed is about the same but the pattern has flown tight enough to protect the aircraft's three to one power off glide ratio also the pattern has flown below fixed-wing traffic so the airplanes can see the gyro better landing a gyro plane an airplane pilot has to resist the urge to flare rather you just hold the flight attitude and fly it onto the runway in this particular gyro we used a little power to soften the touchdown all right so we're at the 65 that's slowing down zero pick on the upland for runway two three we'll be departing uh the area to the west sebastian that we're slowing down giving a little power a little power a little power a little power uh and what's the purpose of the power at the end you have to soften the landing so you don't just then to go you just keep the rpms in here and you're softening by getting little forwards lego forward power yes i say okay if you'd like to learn to fly a gyro plane blaze over me has a hanger full of them in sebastian and these guys can show you the ropes here's the website for rav webb i'm paul bertarelli thanks for watching you

Channel: AVweb

Views: 345,707

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Id: _4166UnhtpM

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020