www.brantly.info

Well you know what the book says. Left quatering headwind bad, left crosswind bad, tailwind bad. The wind was about 16mph today(later got up to 30 but I put the helicopter up before that lol) and I did some experimenting with pedal turns. It seemed that a left quartering tailwind and a right quartering tail wind were the worst with the tail wind behind that. Got some pretty good vibrations and action in those quadrants. Not sure why that would have been since theory says the left quartering headwind is the worst due to vortices getting blown over your tail, left crosswind bad because it opposes your tail rotor thrust and the tailwind bad because of weather vaning-this link shows all the text book stuff http://www.dynamicflight.com/aerodynami ... _tail_eff/. BUT the worst I felt was as above. The right crosswind was the easiest and I landed and took off(from a hover) several times in the 16 mph with no issue at all. The other quadrants were controllable but the two were irratic but controllable. I set down once when I developed a little dutch roll out of the left quaterting tailwind hover. Anybody else notice this?

Sounds like you were having a fun day flying that all of us "wish we were there" too.

Not an expert, just a couple thoughts:
1) I share your observations.
Quartering tailwinds were always most challenging to me from as a pilot and not an aeronautical analyst.

2) You probably know that the FAA Circular upon which your link was based was issued primarily to address the pretty dramatic hull loss experience with the Army OH-58 (Bell 206) due to LTE.
The FAA Circular additionally was based on and in fact used quotations directly from several Bell Helicopter Factory Publications concerning the 206, and cite several Bell Factory 206 Pubs as "Related Materiel" in the openers.
http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guida ... c90-95.pdf


So, I kinda think I think the Article you link although certainly great reference and beneficial, was pretty much Bell 206 specific.
And this may be why why our flying differs somewhat from this 'book stuff' ??

This AOPA Article and the 11 comments seemed to me more generic about the subject and more universally applicable to the overall rotary wing fleet, and more in line with what you shared about your flying yesterday.
http://blog.aopa.org/helicopter/?p=717

Tamflyer thanks for your comments! I've got a few helicopter books and about all of them list those three areas that the FAA Rotorcraft Manual does. So that seems to be the prevailing thoughts in printed material on the subject. The Bell manual also goes on to list that right crosswind around to the tail Azimuth on top of it. So there's almost no preferred wind direction left to land in.

In the Brantly especially, I find that winds from the 7-8 o'clock position (left quartering tailwind, for any analog clock challenged readers) are the most challenging to deal with, and what gets guys into trouble the quickest. Just my experience anyhow. Thanks for posting.

Thanks Ron I'm glad to hear that it wasn't specific to my machine or me!