Aviation Forum / General / Rotary-wing / April 2005

Bell's future vision is filled with Tiltrotors (V-22, BA609, Eagle
Eye).
Boeing's future vision is filled with canard wing stop rotors's
(Dragonfly).

Had to take a step back yesterday and get checked out in the 22 by one
of the instructors at my new school.  Man, what a relaxed atmosphere
compared to the old school.  
The flight was uneventful, consisting of some patterns, approaches,

Yep.  I quit my school today.  The ridiculous policies that have been
recently adopted together with the complete lack of flying time since
I got my ticket on 3/7 (4 whopping hours in 5 weeks??) and the
completely disorganized approach to this intrument ground school just

airliners.net let me down on this one and the pics I got from Enstrom
directly are ok, but not sharp enough to let me create guages for a
new sim we're building.  Google has let me down as well.
Anyone got any nice crisp 280FX panel pics?  Preferrably individual

can you recmomend me any books / magazines / other resources for mentioned
Lockheed helicopters?
Regards,
Petr Zaoral

Just walked in from a long weekend in Sedona, AZ.   Long friggin'
drive but an absolutely beautiful place.  For giggles this morning, I
took a drive to the airport to see about possibly renting a
helicopter.  Unfortunately, the only place that had a helicopter was a

Politics and payback aside, is anyone else upset by the fact that the
Navy chose a less-safe, lower-performance helicopter to carry the
President of the United States?
For starters, the S-92 and EH101 were designed a generation apart as

The Army cancelled the Comanche 'cause it had so mis-managed the
program that production became untenable. Given a choice of a Low
Observable armed recon helicopter or essential equipment for a  wartime
fleet, the choice itself was sort of obvious.

What are the best heliports and costs to land/park at a New York City
Heliport?  It looks like the West 34th street one has about 15 pads.
There's one over at East 30th, too, as well as one down on Wall
Street(Port Authority operated), but they don't appear to have as many

Did some transition training in a Raven II today.  Man, what a sweet
ship that thing is compared to the 22s...
Startup procedure is kinda wierd and getting used to no feedback
through the controls 'cuz of the hydraulics took a while.  

Anyone got any decent R44 panel pics?  A couple hours with google
netted me quite a few really low res ones and I won't have the
opportunity to photograph the school's 44 until Friday..
Actual pics to my e-mail addy or a link would be greatly appreciated.

Quote from ~ Flight International, Feb 8-14, 2005
"Sikorsky has decided not to bid for the US Army's Armed Reconnaissance
Helicopter and the Light Utility Helicopter programmes and is instead
looking further ahead. "With the business growing, we have the luxury to