Jonathan St. Cloud
October 7th 15, 09:51 PM
The Seahawk/Blackhawk/Jayhawk has been a great airframe and mission capable aircraft, with a great name. Also, I had not seen a Nick Lappos post in a long time, great to see you are still keeping on eye on this newsgroup.
Years ago I was a regular contributor/learner from this site and we had a bunch of very experience pilots. Then the group slid off the deep end due to many spam posts. A few months ago I started looking at this news group again and every time I see a hateful post I report it to get it removed from the site.
Glad to see Nick post again. For a few that may not know Nick has had a very storied career in aviation, and when he says something I keep my ears open and mouth shut.
> The belief that Black Hawk stabilators caused a bunch of accidents is
> an old wive's tale. The problem was whenever an accident happened in
> the early days, the Army sent out a message to inspect the stabilator
> (nervous reaction) and that triggered the natural response in the
> field that the stab must be the culpret. To set the record straight,
> ther have been two accidents that in any way involved the stab. A
> test aircraft, early in the program had a fatal, due to the fact that
> the stabilator electronics were not connected to the airspeed probes,
> due to maintenance error where the airspeed sensor cannon plugs were
> left disconnected during an engineering test, and not reconnected. I
> was there, and lost three friends in that one. The crew made a sporty
> takeoff, and pitched nose down for a rapid takeoff, which caught them
> badly when the stab stayed in low speed mose (it never knew the
> aircraft was accelerating). Not a stab fault, really.
>
> The second was a foreign aircraft that went into severe icing
> conditions, with the pitot heat off. Same outcome, with the crew
> quite confused as the airspeed slowly bled off.
>
> In short, there have been no accidents where the stabilator caused an
> accident, but there have been two where other errors made the
> stabilator a contributer. That reflects about 4 million hours among
> 2500 Hawks.
>
> For the record, the Black Hawk has the best safety record of any Army
> helicopter, ever, even though it does the typical nasty night missions
> that the Army has to do.
>
> Nick Lappos
> WORWAC 69-5
> D 1/1 Cav 1969-1970
Years ago I was a regular contributor/learner from this site and we had a bunch of very experience pilots. Then the group slid off the deep end due to many spam posts. A few months ago I started looking at this news group again and every time I see a hateful post I report it to get it removed from the site.
Glad to see Nick post again. For a few that may not know Nick has had a very storied career in aviation, and when he says something I keep my ears open and mouth shut.
> The belief that Black Hawk stabilators caused a bunch of accidents is
> an old wive's tale. The problem was whenever an accident happened in
> the early days, the Army sent out a message to inspect the stabilator
> (nervous reaction) and that triggered the natural response in the
> field that the stab must be the culpret. To set the record straight,
> ther have been two accidents that in any way involved the stab. A
> test aircraft, early in the program had a fatal, due to the fact that
> the stabilator electronics were not connected to the airspeed probes,
> due to maintenance error where the airspeed sensor cannon plugs were
> left disconnected during an engineering test, and not reconnected. I
> was there, and lost three friends in that one. The crew made a sporty
> takeoff, and pitched nose down for a rapid takeoff, which caught them
> badly when the stab stayed in low speed mose (it never knew the
> aircraft was accelerating). Not a stab fault, really.
>
> The second was a foreign aircraft that went into severe icing
> conditions, with the pitot heat off. Same outcome, with the crew
> quite confused as the airspeed slowly bled off.
>
> In short, there have been no accidents where the stabilator caused an
> accident, but there have been two where other errors made the
> stabilator a contributer. That reflects about 4 million hours among
> 2500 Hawks.
>
> For the record, the Black Hawk has the best safety record of any Army
> helicopter, ever, even though it does the typical nasty night missions
> that the Army has to do.
>
> Nick Lappos
> WORWAC 69-5
> D 1/1 Cav 1969-1970