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.
Now you have blades shooting away from the helicopter at a high speed which could kill someone.
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.
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 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!
straight to heaven
Sus. I watched AirWolf, and Magnum P.I. AND I’ve studied Leonardo di Vinci. Helicopters are next-gen tech and they don’t crash.
Ironically the helicopter casted as Airwolf did crash, killing all its occupants. 😞
Yeah that sucks, I didn’t mean to go there
Why not blow the blades off first with a charge in the Jesus pin? Or have the seats eject siddeways or downward? Or like, open the door and jump out hoping you don’t hit he rotors?
Because now you have blades shooting away from the helicopter at a high speed which could kill someone.
If you eject downward you may hit the ground before your chute has opened. Helicopters tend to stay pretty low.
Can’t believe I had to scroll this far to find the real solution. Eject rotors, then eject pilots. I think fighter jets basically do the same: eject canopy, then seat.
Eject the helicopter not the seat. Duh.
Too hard to accelerate the helicopter’s larger mass to Mach 19. You might still damage the helicopter on the rotor blades.
Shoot the hostage!
So basing off another comment. Have the Ejection seat tied to the rotor and shaft (not in a way that the chair spins. Duh)
Then (as long as rotor hasn’t disintegrated) you can eject the seat with the rotor, thus minimizing filet chances… Whilst also floating to the ground softly like those whirly paper helicopter things you played with as a kid
Boom. Parachute free ejection seat
Nah, just do it like they did in WW1; synchronize the ejection to the rotor blades so you fly through the gap, clean as a whistle.
(Please don’t ask about our experiments with the earlier WW1 method of “Fuck it, just shoot the propeller sometimes, it’ll be fine”. Turns out that doesn’t work so great when you replace bullets with people.)
Didn’t they also put some sort of armoring on the propellers back then?
Some planes did, but early on they mostly just freeballed it. Turns out propellers are really big and heavy, and they can take a few bullets without breaking. Armour actually makes it more likely that fragments of bullets will fly back at the pilot.
Yeah, spall was my first thought when I read they just shot the propellers.
It’s very rare that a bullet strikes the blade anyway. Bursts were short because ammo was very limited (twenty round strips were common in early biplanes), and the percentage of the space in front of the nose that is propeller is absolutely tiny compare to the percentage that is not propeller. To us its all a blur but to a bullet those blades are basically standing still.
Hold up, let him cook
I like all the serious answers as if this was a real option.
Very credible
Fire the seat forward toward the enemy aircraft that forced them to eject to allow them to steal it.
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Why not eject the rotor, Yu-Gi-Oh style
Why not just eject sideways?
Or blow up the rotor at the hub first.
Heck if accelerating to Mach 19 in about 2 meters is acceptable you could just disable the rotors and only experience an acceleration of less than Mach 1 in just a few meters.
What about that fancy thing that stops table saws when you touch them? Just get one of those and stop the rotors. I’m certain there’s no physical reason this wouldn’t work.
The energy will have to go somewhere, so the passengers can stand up with their arms stretched, and when the rotating energy reaches them they can jump out and they will start spinning and their arms will act as rotors keeping them in the air long enough to reach land safely. You just need to make sure there aren’t a lot of people on board because the energy will have to be divided on all of the passengers, if there isn’t enough for everyone, they will fall to their death.
The energy can go in to ejecting the seat!
If it requires the energy of the rotors being stopped suddenly to eject, there’s no chance of getting filleted
It fails “the cool” factor so we rejected it.
When helicopters lose power they just fall. If the rotor head isn’t decapitated then when you get ejected sideways there’s s no zero chance you’ll be julienned on the way down.
It’s why the most (only version currently in operation) common method of helicopter ejection severs the head or blades while it’s still rotating so it/they spin off and hopefully away and then the seat rockets away.
Your first sentence is wrong. Stop explaining things you don’t understand yourself.
It’s a fact. Helicopters in general do not have the ability to glide to a landing, they can auto rotate if the rotor is still moving and has enough momentum. If the rotor stops or detaches helicopters fall…
“if the rotor stops” luckily in this universe we have conservation of motion so the rotor doesn’t typically stop in flight
Sure though, were it to detach the helicopter would fly like a brick
Hubris isn’t looked on Kindle in the aviation world.
Not common doesn’t mean not possible, we teach autorotation for a reason and it’s not because everything happens perfectly and every aircraft is perfectly maintained.
Helicopters crash constantly and just as an fyi auto rotation is falling with style and so is glide.
Like I said helicopters just fall, an aircraft in the most extreme engine failures tend to be able to glide effectively helicopters can never count on that luxury. So I dunno, since you agree maybe hop off the high horse and apologize.
I’m terribly sorry that I pointed out conservation of momentum in a thread where you want to imagine helicopter rotors can just stop. I know that reality is inconvenient.
Being wrong is the issue.
Rotors can add have seized, rotor failure is actually one of the more common modes of failure in a helicopter. Also notably I didn’t say it had to stop just that the rotor is no longer effective, like catastrophic blade loss.
You are failing to ask him a question: how does he know what he’s talking about?
His phrase was “we teach” which implies he’s an instructor. You should ask him if he is.
When helicopters lose power they just fall.
Any modern heli design will autorotate down. It’s not exactly gentle, but it works.
Autorotation relies on one main thing, air being forced past a freewheeling rotor… Air that is being forced past because you’re falling.
https://youtu.be/NLjFQJiJsZc?feature=shared
Notice the immediate loss of attitude? It’s because they’re falling, unlike planes which can generally glide after an engine failure.
Specifically we’re speaking about helicopter ejection which in most cases means total loss of power or control or both. The only known helicopter eje tion seat(to me at least) to operate currently in modern combat is the ka 50/52.
One like this one which happens to eject and notably falls like a stone.
The KA-50 and -52 destroy their rotors when the ejection seat fires, as shown in this simulation. That’s why the helicopter drops like a rock after the ejection seat fires - the blades can’t autorotate if they’re not attached.
Assuming the blades are still attached, the helicopter will autorotate down even if it is completely unpowered. It might lose some altitude initially, but like you said once the air is moving over the blades fast enough for them to spin they will do what they were designed to do.
One thing helicopters and planes have in common is that if they fail too close to the ground autorotation/gliding won’t help. Helis are generally more dangerous than planes for a lot of reasons, the biggest one being that they spend more time in the most dangerous phase of flight - landing.
Tell me you didn’t read the root comment without saying you didn’t read the root comment.
When helicopters lose power they just fall. If the rotor head isn’t decapitated then when you get ejected sideways there’s s no zero chance you’ll be julienned on the way down.
It’s why the most (only version currently in operation) common method of helicopter ejection severs the head or blades while it’s still rotating so it/they spin off and hopefully away and then the seat rockets away.
Losing altitude can be described as falling because the fucking thing is unpowered.
Agreed, though irrelevant.
Just detach the blades. You can always re-attach them when you’ve landed.
I love jigsaw puzzles.
Works as a secret weapon too.
Oh you think I’ve been disarmed? *smirks* AMATEUR *violently ejects rotor blades in all directions*
I was just thinking the entire rotor assembly detaches and the helocopter falls away from it. But I think I like your idea better.
For ejection, the blades come off.
For combat, whole-rotor Beyblade.
The angle of the top of his feet/boots remind me of the Ron DeSantis boot thing - where he’s actually using a platform type setup to gain height.
What is this from? Looks pretty cool
Edge of Tomorrow. Fun movie.
Great for fans of Tom Cruise because he’s in it.
Great for people who hate Tom Cruise because you get to see him die over and over again!
That’s what the Ka-50 does
I doubt you’ll need to if you already had to eject.
How about this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_gear#:~:text=A synchronization gear (also%20known,without%20bullets%20striking%20the%20blades.
Who would win?
Two human skulls 💀💀
One twirly boi 🚁
Put some ERA on them skulls and you’re good
Simple, just put the rotors on the bottom, problem solved!
Place the seats in sleds out the front, and attach them to reins on one of the missiles in the battery.
It can’t be any more dangerous than being in a helicopter that’s decided today’s the day.
Major Mindbleach made local headlines today as he drove a Santa Claus-esque sleigh attached to an AARGM directly over the heads of local combatants. Spectators say that instead of dropping gifts like his holiday counterpart, Mindbleach was dropping dook as he shit his pants repeatedly moving at speeds of Mach 2+ attached to a ballistic missile. The final status of Mindbleach is unknown. More information as the story develops.
Boeing adamantly insisted this not count toward any statistics on the reported dangers of their aircraft, as the system was working as intended at the time of the pilot’s exit. All questions about subsequent events should be directed to the manufacturer of the missile.
