Huey Formation Flying Training with the 229th

[Chuck_Owl]

Lecture is given by a real life Huey pilot. Quite interesting!

 

 

The virtual 1st Air Cavalry Division, 229th aviation battalion is the one and only international virtual huey battalion in the world. 229th leader and instructor pilot "Flyer" was kind enough to invite me to a training session on formation flying. As we will see, formation flying is a very hard thing to do, especially in helicopters. 

 

I try to take each flight as if it was a real life one, so I tend to be overly cautious and get scared easily when we need to fly close. During the mission, I thought I was comfortable at first (hover, takeoff, landing and all that jazz have pretty much been mastered) but when it came to flying with other people as a unit... I saw that flying in formation is pretty much summed up in four Hs: Hella Hard, Horrifying and Humbling. 

 

It's not easy to trust the guy in front of you when you haven't flown much with him. You need to get as close as two rotor disk lengths. Whether or not I stayed there was up to whether or not the guy in front of me slowed down or not. It's nerve-racking and very stressful; on one hand you want to do your job and get as close as possible, but on the other hand you don't want to mess up and screw the whole formation/mission, or even worse kill one of your buddies. It's very hard on the ego to see how terrible you can be once you need to do precision flying, and the whole experience made me respect even more the likes of Flyer and Six who did it in real life (as they are real-life helicopter pilots).

 

But I'm certainly not giving up yet. I'll keep training and try to get better. 

 

Here is a (very instructive) video that we used during briefing. Our training was based on it.

 

 

***

 

Music:

 

Beyond Earth - Geoff Knorr, Sid Meier’s Civilization Beyond Earth OST

MI-8 Magnificent Eight Theme -  Konstantsin “BTD” Kuzniatsou, DCS OST

The Seeding - Geoff Knorr, Sid Meier’s Civilization Beyond Earth OST

[von_Greiff]

Enjoyed! ...u da man Chuck!

 

yours

v.Greiff

[JimTM]

Good stuff Chuck, thanks! It's great that you had a real-life Huey pilot doing the training.