My First Solo in a TH55A

If nothing else, Army flight training is a sequence of surprises. One of those surprises was your first solo flight. You'd been flying for two or three weeks. Almost every day with exceptions for days when you didn't have weather or an occasional required event where you could not go the flight line. Days at the flight line started the same, a safety briefing then two on one table talk with your instructor and your stick buddy about various topics like emergency procedures, or just what the instructor had planned for the day. Who flies first because if you don't fly first, you take the bus to the stage field.

In a lot of ways things were the same. You had a list of maneuvers you practiced and you were almost always with the same instructor unless your instructor was out for the day for some reason. But a lot of the standard was different every day, like the aircraft you flew. There were 300 TH55a helicopters at Shell Army Heliport and the odds of getting the same one twice in 50 hours of flight time were fairly slim. Due to this, you had to get used to looking for your tail number on the dash while flying just so you'd know what number to give when calling tower.

Well, I was in my third week of training and a few members of the flight had completed their first supervised solos. You could tell this because they now wore a baseball cap that had a set of wings on it. We all wore colored baseball caps and we bought two, one without wings and one with wings. You kept the wings one in your helmet bag that contained your flight gear and after your first solo you swapped hats (Then you had wings sewn on the 2nd one too.) So in that regard, you were prepared for your solo. What you didn't know is when your supervised solo would occur.

The day started out normally for me, my stick buddy had soloed the week prior, but he had an advantage over the rest of us. He had a civilian helicopter rating and had been flying Hughes 500s before he joined the Army, so of course he soloed early in training. I was roughly in the middle of the pack. Mr. Rhoads put me through the regular training routine practicing all the required maneuvers I would need to know to pass my checkride, finishing up with hover work on one of the pads near the tower. Then he did something different. He took out his pencil, drew a Z behind the call letters on the control panel, told me to fly three traffic patterns then return to parking. Surprise, you are flying solo!

I was both honored that he felt I was ready to solo and I was also terrified that I would kill myself in a horrible crash. But I figured Mr. Rhoads knew what he was doing so I got myself composed, radioed tower and requested taxi clearance for 01DZ. Entering the flying portion of the stage field was always the same, you were directed to lane 1 at the closest of the approach pads (1, 2, 3 or 4) then you would hover forward as traffic ahead of you moved forward. Eventually you would get to the end of the lane, then you would radio the tower for takeoff clearance. "Hooper tower, 01DZ lane 1 requesting permission to take off, left traffic." The reply would be something like "01DZ you are clear for takeoff, beware crosswind traffic from lanes 2 and 3, report base." In English I was good to take off but make sure someone wasn't approaching from the right (I would be making a circuit to the left kinda like the Indy oval) and when I was turning from the downwind leg of the circuit (Parallel to the runway going the other direction, turning to get back over to the lanes) call the tower back to find my landing assignment.

I was happy that all happened pretty quick because my hovering sucked and from the time I left the landing pad till take off was less than a minute. I could hover easy for short periods, but the longer I had to stay in one place, the shakier I got when made me tense which made me shakier etc. So I eased the cyclic forward and applied a little power and a little left pedal to compensate for the power increase and started moving forward. The airspeed indicator is unreliable under 10 knots so you barely see it start to move before you go through effective translational lift (ETL for short) and start to climb. Simply put, when you pass through ETL, you move into undisturbed air and the effectiveness of your rotor system improves roughly 25% and you start to climb. Our climb out airspeed target was 40 knots, our cruise was 60 knots and do not exceed speed was 64 knots (I'll get to that more in a bit)

Once you made it to 200 feet, you made a 90 turn to the left (the crosswind leg) and continued to climb to 600 ft above the ground (AGL) which was nominally 1000 ft. on your altimeter as the mean sea level (MSL= height in feet above the average sea level of the planet) altitude of Hooper Stage field is 365 ft. MSL. When the altimeter read 1000 ft, you again turned left 90 degrees and accelerated to 60 knots heading 040 degrees on the compass and roughly paralleling Andrews Avenue which goes next to the stage field. It was pretty easy because you were essentially following the leader as there were roughly 30 helicopters there and at any one time 15 to 20 were in the traffic pattern. There were 2 helicopters in front of me on downwind so I just stayed behind them at the same altitude and same airspeed which made it pretty easy. As I turned again 90 degrees left to the "base leg" I called the tower and reported base for landing. Tower assigned me Lane 3 pad 2.

There are 6 lanes at Hooper and we were using 1, 2 and 3 (the other 3 lanes would be used soon). Lane 3 was nice as I had more time before I had to turn to final (Approaches to Lane 1 were a bit trickier as you had to turn almost immediately after clearance to land.) but pad 2 was bothersome as it meant I had to hover 1200 ft. up the lane and wait for the 2 birds in front of me to takeoff. Hovering forward was easy, hovering in place on a pad waiting, not so much. The good thing about Lane 3 is once you get to the takeoff pad at the end, you don't have to wait for crosswind traffic on your right side because you are the right most lane turning left (Lanes 4, 5 & 6 fry right traffic) because you are always taking off into the wind, and the wind is almost always from the south at Ft. Rucker.

I was lucky, most of the birds ahead of me were moving at a decent pace so I didn't have to hover long. I got my takeoff clearance and started my climb out and turned crosswind following the leader as before. I turned downwind and accelerated to 60 knots and leveled off at 1000 ft. when I noticed something a bit wrong. The bird in front of me was flying heading 080 instead of 040 at 1000 ft. I hesitated for a moment as I was supposed to fly 040 but I was also supposed to fly behind the bird in front of me. I decided to follow the leader even though she seemed a bit lost (Both on our 1st solo, mistakes are made) and while I was distracted with this, I failed on my instrument cross check (you scan all the instruments every 5 seconds or so) and failed to notice I was still accelerating after leveling off because I hadn't reduced power enough while fretting about what direction to fly.

You'll remember I mentioned the 64 knots do not exceed airspeed, here is why it is important. Every helicopter has a max airspeed and it is determined by a specific limitation. Most are limited by retreating blade stall. You are flying using a rotating wing. At hover, all forces are equal, and it is no big deal. In forward flight, the blade moving forward on your right side "Flaps Down" and reduces pitch on the blade to compensate for the increased speed of air going over the wing added due to your forward airspeed. The retreating blade "Flaps Up" increasing pitch on the blade to increase life as the forward airspeed is subtracted from the speed of the air going over that blade. Eventually, you reach a point where the retreating blade stalls from too steep an angle of attack. The blade loses lift and that portion of the rotor (left rear quadrant in this case) becomes a dead zone. Since the front right of the rotor disk has essentially too much life, the nose of the helicopter rises and the aircraft rolls left toward the stall. Immediate action is required because you have maybe two seconds before events are unrecoverable. Lower the collective which reduces pitch on all of the rotor disk and gently pull back on the cyclic to slow below 64 knots.

While I was wondering what in the hell the helo in front of me was doing, I felt the nose start to rise and I glanced at my airspeed (68 knots) OOOPPS!!! I dumped quite a bit of collective and slowed to about 55 knots then pulled power back in to get back up to 1000 ft. as I'd dropped to about 850. WHEW! I'd cheated death for the first time in a helicopter. That wasn't the last time, not even in a TH55a. Finally, the gal in front of me turned to base and I had to slow a bit to left her pass in front of me. I never exactly followed her but kinda split the difference and had flown 060 while nearly killing myself. I turn to base and make my call and get Lane 1 pad 1 (Arrggghhh) so I had to immediately turn and start my decent and make my approach. I came in way too steep (overarched the approach) and actually came to a hover about 20 feet past pad 1 (Close enough). Now I had 4 helicopters in front of me (pads 2, 3 4 & the takeoff pad) and they were also having to wait on traffic from lanes 2 and 3. Meanwhile, my composure was shot from having nearly killed myself and I was hovering in place, which I did badly to begin with. Each time someone took off from lane 1 was a reprieve as I could hover forward and relax a bit until I had to stop and try to force that bird to stay in one spot again. It took nearly 5 minutes to get to the takeoff pad and then I had to wait for both Lanes 2 and 3 to takeoff before I was granted clearance as they were ready before me.

My 3-foot hover was generally within 20 feet of the center of the pad and oscillating from 2 to 10 feet instead of the nominal 3-foot hover. I was losing control and I nearly decided to set it down on the pad when I finally got clearance for my last traffic pattern. I quickly completed my before takeoff check and started my climb out. I was extremely careful on my turn to downwind and acceleration at 1000 ft. 55 knots was plenty for me. No one in front of me was straying this time and I made sure to keep an eye on the airspeed. As expected, on my turn to base I was assigned lane 1 pad 3, taxi to parking. Once parked, my instructor came out, and we completed the shutdown, then I got to go to the bus and wait. I had soloed, I had nearly killed myself but I soloed. Little did I know, there were more adventures to come.

As previously noted, my primary flight training was conducted in the TH-55A (Hughes 300) trainer. The helicopter itself is not very inspiring and I had to overcome my doubts about both it and my capability to fly it.