That’s a dramatic license, not a pilot license…
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Great line!
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A friend of mine works at Beta, a battery electric plane company here in Vermont. One of the perks is they offer pilots licensing courses and flight time for any employee that wants it. Even the custodian. On an accelerated course with nearly unlimited access to fixed wing training aircraft and instructors, my friend took 2 months to get his pilots license. With the same access to rotary wing aircraft and instructors, it took him 7 months to achieve his helicopter license.
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They’re chalk and cheese. Helicopters are inherently unstable whirling death traps that are actively trying to crash. Airplanes, if the engine fails, turn into gliders.
One example: most helicopters need (or at least used to when I was teaching principles of flight) positive g-force on the rotors. They’re stressed to hold the weight of the aircraft below them, but do not have strength the other way. So, if you somehow induce negative “g” - the equivalent of that moment you feel cresting a humpback bridge - the rotors are likely to clap hands around the fuselage and end your fun in a hurry. Even the least acrobatic of airplanes will have some level of negative g it can handle before the wings fall off.
And, sure, you’ve seen helicopters roll upside down at airshows, but they’re pulling positive g the whole time. They barrel roll into and out of the pseudo-loop they perform to make this happen. I believe that there are some military helicopters that can perform negative g maneuvers, but they are the absolute exception.
There are also fun things like recirculation, which is when you are near buildings and the like, and the downwash from the rotors gets recycled back in at the top, reducing lift. So if you try and land near a building, the helicopter will be trying to crash into that building.
Anyway, the bottom line is that an airplane wants to stay in the air and a helicopter is doing its damnedest not to. It’s like comparing riding a bike to riding a pogo stick.
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Two of my former teammates were West Point grads who flew Blackhawks for the Army until they both retired. Great guys and when I asked them about the difference about flying a helicopter vs fixed planes, “We can fly a plane. They can’t fly a chopper.”
Or, what Limey said.
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A pilot friend says trying to fly a helicopter is like trying to stand on a basketball. But James Bond can do it, no sweat.
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Accurate.
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I have said this here before, but my jet pilot law partner told me to never get on a helicopter. His words were “They are not designed to fly, and if you get up and down without crashing, it is a miracle.”
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Cool. This always ends well in the movies.
Also, I always thought the issue of weight with probes was achieving escape velocity. Once free from Earth’s gravity, the size/weight isn’t an issue, right?
They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Mass absolutely matters in space. The force required to accelerate an object is directly associated with its mass. Remembering back to your high school physics, F=(M)(A) (force = mass x acceleration). It’s momentum P=(M)(V) (momentum = mass x velocity), that is conserved in a vacuum, regardless of mass.
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All I remember from high school physics was being tasked with measuring the acceleration of a falling weight using a ticker tape machine, but instead deciding to measure the acceleration of a ticker tape machine, using the weight to anchor the paper tape and lobbing the machine out the window.
I now realize that this was likely the natural product of being “2E” but, at the time, I was called “disruptive” and “not funny”. I disagreed with the second part.
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And “weight” is the F of an object’s mass due to the acceleration of gravity. It’s directional and changes with changes in gravitational acceleration. An object’s mass is constant. It never changes. Weight doesn’t factor into momentum outside of earth’s gravity, but mass does.
What I remember from high school physics is terminal velocity is a meter per second squared (I think). Thanks, Mr. Jeckett. He really wasn’t a great teacher and I hate to type that.
Terminal velocity is not constant. It depends on several factors, including an object’s size, weight, orientation, the density of the fluid through which the object is falling, etc. For a person in free fall on earth, it’s typically about 53 m/s or about 120 mph.
Acceleration is what is measure in metres per second squared, not velocity. My physics teacher used to say it as “x metres per second per second”, which was confusing as fuck.
The fact that I even remember that means I need to go and lie down now.
Velocity is distance over time. Acceleration is velocity over time. Which all works until your velocity or acceleration becomes so great that time ceases to exist.
That may help rest easier.
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Nope. Just made my brain hurt more.
There was a reason that, despite me being very adept at math, I dropped Physics as a subject while continuing with Chemistry and Biology.