Sikorsky S-58 - A Classic

We visited Aris Helicopters in LA today.  We’ve previously spoke with Kelly Liken (their general manager) and they seemed interested, but this is going to be the first meeting to discuss the details.

Aris is located in Riverside, at the municipal airport, so it was a relatively short drive from Dryden.  This is good, since the helicopter ferry charge won’t be too much.

We’ve met with Kelly, with Scott Donley Owner), Russ James (pilot).  A pretty sharp bunch, they’re obviously qualified to do the job. I do believe they think we’re nuts, but I also think from a helicopter’s point of view this is an interesting job. They previously flew a flight for the Mythbusters that involved a long-line heigh altitude hover, so have a feel for what we need.

The tether deploy/retrieve systems we’ve devised is acceptable to them, and they can perform what we ask for, except with two caveats:

We will have to use a larger helicopter than we originally expected to.  Once we moved to Mojave (from coastal Florida) we both increased our starting altitude from zero to 2200 feet, and we’ve moved to an area where we have hot dry air (as opposed to warm humid air) – which is less efficient at generating lift through the rotor system of the helicopter.

Our initial plans called for a light single-turbine helicopter, anywhere between a Hughes 500 (yeah, like what’s his name had on Magnum PI) to a Bell 202 Jet Ranger.  Instead, we’re having to move to a twin-turbine mid-size, and the one Aris has is a Sikorsky S-58 – a classic (meaning old) military machine with a very recognizableprofile – this is the type of helicopter that used to pull the old Gemini capsules out of the water.  (As it turned out, Keith Mackey, our helicopter guru, flew the History Channel re-enactments of Gus Grissum’s famous capsule incident - small world, ain’t it?)

We go out to kick the tires (yes, this one has wheels, no skids) and it’s a BIG helicopter. Whereas the MD-500 is (as Dave Marcotte put it) a flying beer can, this helicopter is built like a Brinks truck.  You do NOT want to bang your head against it – it will not yield.  The inside is also very characteristic of military hardware.  Not a gram is wasted on frivolous things like sharp corner protectors.  Are you going to whine, SOLDIER?!!!

There’s only one down side to this Helicopter – it is about $3000 an hour to fly.  Practically a dollar per second. Ouchie.  (this is why we have the “Need you help” box on the right.

The other issue we have is station keeping, or the ability to maintain a hover over a specific point.

Helicopters are very touchy-feely devices. The pilot continuously corrects for the helicopter sporadic drift based on visual cues from the outside – the angle of the horizon, the view of the ground, etc.  When flying “long-line”, such as when placing air-conditioning units on the roof of a building, pilots learn to fly using “vertical reference”, which means they can do without the horizon.

However, all this works well when you’re flying at 100-300 feet above your target. We’re asking them to fly more than 5000 feet above the ground.  It is not clear at all that vertical reference is a good idea.

GPS would be good, except most GPS units do not have a compass built into them. Unless your moving, they do not know how they are oriented in space, since they rely on the assumption that you’re moving “face forward” as you would in a car.  If you were to ask a GPS to point you in the right direction using a screen arrow, it would do ok as long as you’re moving forward, but the minute you’ll start backing up, the arrow will flip to the opposite direction. 

Keith has come up with a very unique GPS-compass arrangement that will do the trick, and so the pilot will have a precise pointer to the target location, plus a distance indicator. What remains to be see is whether the pilot can do the station keeping based on this instrument. There will definitely be a learning curve involved.  Yes, at $3000 an hour…

We’re scheduling the first test flight to June 16th – We’ll find out soon enough.