What happens if the tail rotor fails

Therefore torque tends to turn the aircraft in one way and the tail rotor's thrust opposes this. To turn the helicopter in the opposite way, the tail rotor thrust is reduced. What happens if tail rotor fails? Category: hobbies and interests radio control. Tail Rotor failure in flight. If the tail rotor fails in flight, engine torque can no longer be countered by the tail rotor , and uncontrolled spinning of the aircraft is a possibility.

Most manufacturers call for an immediate autorotation. Some call for a running landing, instead. Can a helicopter fly without tail rotor? Can a helicopter land with engine failure? Why does a helicopter have a tail rotor? The role of the tail rotor. What would cause a helicopter to spin? What causes helicopter to spin out of control?

Can a helicopter fly in the rain? What happens if a helicopter engine fails? What is the tail of a helicopter called? How fast does a helicopter tail rotor spin? Why does a helicopter have two rotors?

What are the parts of helicopter? Why do small helicopters with a single overhead rotor generally have a smaller rotor attached to the tail? Which way does a helicopter rotor spin? What is tail prop? What is a Fenestron tail rotor? What does Notar stand for? Why do helicopters have 2 propellers? My hat goes off to any pilot that can lose the tail rotor and make a landing without rolling the helicopter into a little scrap metal ball.

I own a Rotorway F. Yes, it is possible to make an emergency landing in a helicopter should a tail rotor failure occur. The procedure is that same as that of a engine failure and it's called an autorotative landing. Essentially a powerless helicopter becomes an autogyro gyrocopter in flight and can be flown as such. This is a common emergency procedure taught to students working on a pilot certificate for a rotorcraft-helicopter. A loss of tail rotor effectiveness in cruise flight is manageable.

The vertical fin is cambered in the form of a wing in order to "fly the tail" in some manner. It is imperative to keep a minimum speed of 40 kts to keep the tail effective. For the ASTAR ASB3E helicopter, the "book" calls for you to continue flying to a landing zone and then to kill the engine at an altitude high enough more than 1,' to sustain an autorotation.

Once you kill the engine you will reduce the torque thus reducing the need for the tail rotor. Other schools of thought are to keep the engine on and to head to an airport with a decent sized runway and to fly down the runway at 40kts or more and then kill the engine and slow at the same time.

You will spin. You will not get that long in the air as helos executing auto rotations come down like a brick! Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. If a helicopter's tail rotor fails, is it possible to perform an emergency landing? Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 1 month ago. Active 1 year, 7 months ago. Viewed 33k times.

Improve this question. Pondlife Krishnaraj Rao Krishnaraj Rao 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. It will rely on high forward speed and autorotation to somehow limit the aircraft spin. As the vertical rate will be around to fpm, this anyway forbids a 30 mn flight. The rotor design is to keep the helicopter from not spinning around in circles. The helicopter would most likely spin around and crash.

It is perfectly possible to recover from a tail rotor failure. There are some flight regimes that might lead to a crash with all but the best pilot and some luck.

A tail rotor failure in cruise should be survivable, especially if you can find something hard to land on. The killers are hovering out of ground effect and low altitude, high speed. A better question might be, how far can an auto-rotating helicopter go? This will depend on many things, of course, and you can't just multiply the cruise speed by the time of descent because I'm pretty sure the forward speed during auto-rotation is much less than full cruise speed, so it would be an interesting and non-trivial question.

See Earp's answer and his link for the story. I think we all got fixated on auto-rotation, as usually that's what you must do immediately when the tail rotor fails, but main engine can still run despite tail rotor failure and forward flight can be maintained with weathervaning under the right conditions. Hopefully it is still safe to say that actual auto-rotation cannot be maintained for 30 minutes. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.

Improve this answer. Earp Earp 2 2 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges. Welcome to aviation. The correct recovery is to enter auto rotation. In a hover, roll off the throttle and keep it there then perform a hovering autorotation. Simon Simon I don't think any auto-rotation can last that long, but it can certainly save your life.

Exactly how far you can go during auto-rotation is probably not the best priority you're concerned with during an emergency, but nevertheless seems to be what the OP is curious about. Some modern rotor systems, such as the bearingless rotor system, use an engineered combination of these types. Tail rotors are simpler than main rotors since they require only collective changes in pitch to vary thrust. Most helicopters have between a to ratio.

In the first case, every time the main rotor turns one rotation, the tail rotor makes three revolutions For example: If the main rotor is turning at RPM, then the tail rotor turns at RPM at Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Sociology What happens if the tail rotor fails?

Ben Davis February 6, What happens if the tail rotor fails?