Spectacular helicopter aerobatics

Not aerobatics. It’s called Tactical Flying ;-)

Back in 1995, as part of my training as a tank platoon commander, I was taken for a flight on board an attack helicopter (to see what it was like to hunt tanks from the air). Scariest 30 minutes of my life. The interaction between the pilot and the navigator was similar to what you see in auto rallyes; power lines would be called 300 metres out, including “pass below” or “pass above” depending on the clearance, all minutely prepared before the flight.

YouTube states that the pilot of the first clip was Charlie Zimmerman. Sadly I gather he died in a crash.

I met a helo pilot in Namibia who was going for his fixed wing cert.
I’ve always loved helos, so wondered why he was going after a ‘lame’ fixed-wing license.
He said he’d been in 6 helicopter crashes over his years of flying as a poacher patrol (hunting for poachers).
His last flight he crashed at full speed and low altitude. His leg was broken, and he had a piece of steel rammed through it.
Then had to walk 50 miles through poacher territory to get back to safety… thinking he was as good as dead the whole way.
Said that was enough for him…
Scars on his leg were nasty.

I didn’t argue the point and was pretty humbled to meet the guy.
As is the case with many of his ilk, he was incredibly humble, and only humbly divulged his story after I pressed a good bit.

Thanks for that @kwif
There are old pilots and there are bold pilots…

The Bo 105 is well known for its very high maneuverability. It’s still used by Red Bull for that reason, one of the few that can be looped and rolled. It’s easier with a rigid (hingeless) main rotor.

Another one of low altitude tactical flying:



They do it at the same pace at night with NVG.

That is insane…ly impressive!

That’s nuthin. Give someone a few tens of billions of dollars, a whole team of full-time helicopter mechanics, and the ability to be reincarnated 500 times, and they might learn to flying like this:

Come World War III they will have guns on them.

You can do 3D with small RC helicopters because they are super light and their power-to-weight ratio is way up there:



But the g’s and power are both insane, it would not scale to a full size helicopter.

Hmm… I once worked out that my Mikado Logo has only a few times the power to weight ratio of a full size aircraft with a turbine. Batteries have a huge power density, it’s true, but some of the gains are from running heavy blades with a high headspeed. You store a lot of energy in the rotor then use it for the jerky maneuvers. I gather they can pull 10G in a vertical climb.

It would be interesting to try to make a full size electric helicopter specifically for aerobatics. I’m sure you’re right that it would not really compete with the models, but I think much of the issue is that real helicopters are very rarely designed for aerobatics e.g. having inverted fuel systems, semi-rigid rotors etc. I expect that a full size helicopter could do many of the same tricks as smaller ones, but I also doubt there are many pilots who would truly enjoy tik-toks and spinning circuits.