landing help

[VermillionX]

I was thinking about taking the gear off of my heli. I just cant bring myself to do it yet. I am going to keep it on for a few more weeks. My advice is just to take everything slower than what you were before and you will be fine.

[jahatton]

Practice makes perfect and a lot of baby steps.
The weather finely got nice and I had the heli & camera up at a construction site. After the video flight I took some pictures with the same camera to see how they would turn out, I figured the remote (camera remote) was not working right so I aborted the flight and took the camera mount off.
Had a good flight and landed for fuel. Took off and flew around and then leveled off at around 20 feet and was sort of in a hover with the left fuse facing me. All of a sudden it went full negative pitch and pancaked into the ground! I'm holding the TX and thinking this can't be happening!!!!!!!!!!
Well during the post mortum I found the swash plate was missing a long ball where the long pushrod was missing with the pushrod. I remember going through all the bolts, set screws, ball's etc checking if any were lose. Go figure!
The damage is real bad.. The upper frames are broken at the tail boom, one glass blade is toast, carbon tail rotors toast, drive shaft & tail boom, tail feathers, flybar and feathering shaft, tail gearbox, tail boom, main gear at the bottom of the main shaft and the missing parts (long arm ball and pushrod) Total $253.89 canadian plus shipping and taxes!
It's a miracle I took the camera off! (Wipes forhead)

Question... with carrying a payload of around 4 + lbs atribute to a failure like this? I need advice. thank you
Jim
Jim

[chaos]

Dang! And, drat!

Sorry to hear about that. I'm wondering, did the ball break off or fall off? What was its function? What kind of machine is it? Is it ccpm or single-servo?

[jahatton]

Hi, it was the long ball which is on the swash plate which controls the pitch. It fell out. The machine is a Century Raven with CCPM.
I could except a wreck if I was a newbie or trying 3D but not in simple flight.

I want ALL of you to loctite all the ball ends! Tight doesn't cut it! I don't want anyone to suffer a catistrophic melfuction!!!!!!!!!

This type of incident has really got me soul searching my dream of Aerial Photography! Just think what if it went down with the $1100.00 camera?
When seeing the pictures and video's from http://www.airfoilskycam.com/
it is so intreguing but behind the scene's how many major mishaps happen which included their camera's which are $10,000 +

I love flying helicopter!! Planes are real boaring! They fly themselves, you need lots of space, breaking a prop is virtually non existant.

Jim

[chaos]

metal-to-metal = loctite

... and don't count on this being done with a arf

[VermillionX]

I have been thinking about taking the grear off. All thse stories of people doing it has given the urge. I have one question, how do you know that you are ready to take the gear off.

[Seaking]

When you start to ask the question then you are ready

[3dee]

do it, you will find if you hover with the gear on and keep it in one spot most of the time as soon as you take the gear off it will lift with less throttle and you will be able to hover only an inch or two off the ground. my landings were so much better with out the gear you can see when the skids touch down. and its like taking that "am i learner badge off" your back. your next step is to start moving around in "tail in" at low level. .... have fun