bobmoser
Heliman
Location: Lemoore, CA
| I Was out for a normal day of flying at a field just behind my house and lost my rudder. Can somebody give me some guidance on what may have happened or what I can do to prevent this in the future?
I am flying a Stratus with the futaba 611 gyro. What I did was fly a rather uneventful first flight of figure eights and lots of hovering, not ready for the 3D stuff yet. Landed and fueled her up for another go. On the next flight I spent a lot more time in forward flight and would stop and do a pirouette or two nothing big. I was just about to bring the heli back and land and I decided to do one more pirouette to the left. When I tried to stop the heli from turning it seemed to just slow the pirouette rate down and was not responsive to my rudder inputs at all at this point. I moved the stick back and forth a few times and was unable to get the heli to respond properly. It did seem to stop drifting and just held the nose steady. I almost lost the thing at least five times, until finally I just flipped it to hover mode and slowly brought it to the ground with no rudder. Thank god for the money well spent on the Real Flight software!!! After I landed it I of course checked the rudder and everything seemed to be working just fine. What happened? Did I just lose all my rotor head speed or do I have a gyro problem? Any guidance would be much appreciated. |
