Play / pause The Mechanics of a Chinook

The Mechanics of a Chinook

  • John Murnane
  • Interview by: Jess Boydon-Juckes

Transcript

A normal helicopter if you want to call it

It's got a bit of a bubble

and then at some pointy tail at the back

and then a much smaller rotor at the side,

which stops the whole thing

Round on the laws of physics.

the clever people back in the 50s

that if you had two big rotors on the top,

they could sort of counteract

You didn't need a tail rotor.

And what that meant is you could have this

you got over the problem of having a tail

when it didn't work and all that space

It was just a tail, and you could use that

Love it.

So they can a whole load of people

is that you can use a lot more power

rather than using some of the power

to control the tail rotor

So you've got you can lift quite a lot.

So you put that all together

that can carry a lot,

and you can get things underneath,

the tail rotor.

You do have problems in that tandem rotors

so it takes a little bit

The aerodynamics is such that the back

and if it didn't have some clever stuff

then it can be a bit slippery.

But the Air Force being the Air Force,

not working.

I remember a day at a funeral fly past

in the lead and a couple of other

and they came over bang on time,

And I started the pilot afterwards.

He said,

I said, no, you look great.

And he said, well,

The stabilization system,

So I flew the whole way

stab out

You couldn't tell.

So the practice comes good

that you really don't want to cancel,

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