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Saturday 5th July 2008
Brainteasers
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Dec. 28, 2006

Brainteasers
Interactive Quiz #115:
Beyond Fixed Wing

We've taken it on the chin for not quizzing much outside the fixed wing realm. The Brainteaser's response: "You can fly without fixed wings -- who knew?" See what you knew about things that go whump-whump-whump in the night.

INSTRUCTIONS: Answer the questions as best you can, then click on the "Score my quiz answers" button to see your score and read the explanations. If you don't like your score the first time around, you can change some of your answers and resubmit. To get the most out of this quiz, we suggest you keep trying until you get a perfect score.

NOTE: When more than one answer is true, only the most complete, correct answer will be scored as correct. The answers are assumed to apply within the United States unless otherwise noted.

1. Do those black helicopters hovering over your house at night keep you awake? Make you paranoid? Or does the sound of machinery thrashing air molecules in the name of flight inspire you to become a whirligig yourself? If so, cool! But, first, you'll need to verify that you know the night rules for helicopter VFR currency. Since many helicopters do not have wheels or brakes, the PIC cannot log, per se, "three landings to a full stop" as required to maintain night currency as per 61.57. Accordingly, a pilot acting as PIC (and carry passengers at night) of a helicopter without wheels (using skids), must log three autorotations to a designated landing zone and three takeoffs ever 60 days to remain night current.
a. True
b. False
2. Your early helicopter lesson probably won't include a lot of practice swooping between canyon walls to rescue stranded kayakers or landing on skyscrapers. Instead, you'll hover. And hover ... and ... ZZZZzzzz ... During hovering flight, a single main rotor helicopter's tendency to drift in the same direction as antitorque rotor thrust is called:
a. Translational tendency
b. Transplanting tendency
c. Translating tendency
d. Transtorquinol tendency
3. When your helicopter accelerates in forward flight, induced flow drops to near zero at the forward disc area and increases at the aft disc area. This increases the angle of attack at the front disc area and causes the rotor blade to flap up. It reduces angle of attack at the aft disc area causing the rotor blade to flap down. Since the rotor acts like a gyro, maximum displacement occurs 90 degrees in the direction of rotation. There's a tendency for the helicopter to roll slightly to the right as it accelerates through about 20 knots or if the headwind is approximately 20 knots. This is called (_____). Please fill in the blank.
a. Transverse flow effect
b. Transverse rotor tendency
c. Adverse flow effect
d. Transdisk impeller anomaly
e. Transylvanian impaler effect
4. The inexperienced fixed-wing pilot is often surprised by unanticipated yaw, for instance when flying a tailwheel airplane for the first time. The new taildragger student brings the tail up on takeoff and suddenly finds the nose pointing toward the left side of the runway. That's due, in part, to gyroscopic precession caused by changing the propeller's rotational plane. Rudder cures that. Helicopters are gyro nightmares to the uninitiated, so an unanticipated yaw called LTE can send a copter out of control. The first step to recovery, in this question, is to define LTE:
a. Less Tailrotor Effectiveness
b. Left Turning Effectiveness
c. Lost Translational Effectiveness
d. Loss of Tailrotor Effectiveness
5. OK, you've mastered LTE, so, keep hovering and define ETL:
a. Effective Transitional Lift
b. Effective Translational Lift
c. Extra Translational Lift
d. Effortless Translational Lift
6. Every fixed-wing pilot should take spin training; at the very least, spin awareness needs to be demonstrated on a flight review. Loosely speaking, a fixed-wing airplane spins after an aggravated stall when one wing is "less stalled" than the other, and the airplane screws itself toward the ground in an autorotation. (Don't panic: Spin recovery technique was discussed in Brainteaser Quiz #85.) Left unattended, a spin is a bad thing in airplanes. Autorotation as applied to helicopters, however, has a more positive spin ... so to speak. Please select the best definition of autorotation as it applies to helicopters in flight:
a. The tail rotor system only is being centered by the action of relative wind rather than engine power.
b. The main rotor system is automatically turned by the engine rather than relative wind.
c. The main rotor system is being turned by the action of relative wind rather than engine power.
d. The collective is operated by the action of relative wind rather than cyclic engine power.
7. There are four basic controls used during helicopter flight. They are:
a. Pitch, yaw, roll, thrust
b. Elevator, rudder, rotor, throttle
c. Collective antitorque control, throttle, cyclic pitch control, and collective pedals
d. Collective pitch control, throttle, cyclic pitch control, and antitorque pedals
8. Please fill in the blank: Besides counteracting torque of the main rotor, the (_____) is/are also used to control the heading of the helicopter while hovering or when making hovering turns.
a. Tail rotor
b. Cyclic control
c. Collective pedals
d. Main mast
e. Mizzen mast
9. Helicopter training introduces a whole new lexicon of aviation terms, including the word "lexicon," which means new words tossed about by cool pilots. One term most fixed-wing pilots rarely see, but copter pilots must understand, is "butt line." Without snickering, please select the best definition for butt line:
a. Derogatory term used by helicopter pilots when describing a line of unemployed, fixed-wing pilots
b. Line from which the longitudinal arms are measured when figuring a helicopter's CG
c. Line beyond which the lateral limits of a helicopter's CG may be exceeded
d. Line from which the lateral arms are measured when figuring a helicopter's CG
10. Inside Class G airspace, the minimum visibility for daytime, fixed-wing, VFR operations is 1 statue mile. That's skinny mins, but it's legal for a Cessna 210 to scud run barely outside of Class G clouds with a mile vis. Of course, the fixed-wing, VFR, scud-runnin' pilot may encounter a similar helicopter pilot legally flying through the same airspace, VFR, talking to no one. Like the fixed-wing pilot, the helicopter pilot must remain clear of clouds (Class G) and the minimum VFR helicopter visibility is:
a. 1/2 mile
b. 1 mile
c. 3 miles
d. None