I never met Bob, but at 74, I could certainly understand the business of feeling a few G's! I did two years in Vietnam working on engines in helicopters for the Army. It is fifty some years since my last test flight I took that required you to ride along for the whole experience. Turbine Engines burn large quanities of oxygen so one thing that had to be measured was altitude along with temperature at the highest altitude attainable. In tropical conditions, often the heat thinned the air and limited your altitude, but what came next was the auto rotation at that topped out altitude! The hydraulic system that operated the rotor flight controls was switched off, and you had to rely on an accumulator that stored hydraulic pressure to get you safely to the ground! How this worked was simply a free fall to get the rotor moving as the air rushed through the blades, then you would pull up on the collective that put pitch into the blades and glide forward slowing the ship down with part of that accumulated hydraulic pressure. Each time you repeated this for a total of five times and you better be close to the ground or the test failed! Usually if you got close enough to the ground that the potential crash would only qualify as a "Hard Landing" the hydraulics would be clicked on and away you went! Nothing so put fear into you as that very first test flight! Knowing full well if you showed any fear, it would come back to haunt you! You would become a marked man for every adventure to try and scare the crap out of you! After a time, that sort of thing became an everyday occurance and now after fifty plus years, a taste of that very thing would turn back my clock! Knowing what flight crews faced if there was a hydraulic failure in triple canopy jungle with no place to land but in the trees would give you pause, but our test flight area was over an island that had very little vegetation, but even that didn't give a "green" troop much comfort!
I never met Bob, but at 74, I could certainly understand the business of feeling a few G's! I did two years in Vietnam working on engines in helicopters for the Army. It is fifty some years since my last test flight I took that required you to ride along for the whole experience. Turbine Engines burn large quanities of oxygen so one thing that had to be measured was altitude along with temperature at the highest altitude attainable. In tropical conditions, often the heat thinned the air and limited your altitude, but what came next was the auto rotation at that topped out altitude! The hydraulic system that operated the rotor flight controls was switched off, and you had to rely on an accumulator that stored hydraulic pressure to get you safely to the ground! How this worked was simply a free fall to get the rotor moving as the air rushed through the blades, then you would pull up on the collective that put pitch into the blades and glide forward slowing the ship down with part of that accumulated hydraulic pressure. Each time you repeated this for a total of five times and you better be close to the ground or the test failed! Usually if you got close enough to the ground that the potential crash would only qualify as a "Hard Landing" the hydraulics would be clicked on and away you went! Nothing so put fear into you as that very first test flight! Knowing full well if you showed any fear, it would come back to haunt you! You would become a marked man for every adventure to try and scare the crap out of you! After a time, that sort of thing became an everyday occurance and now after fifty plus years, a taste of that very thing would turn back my clock! Knowing what flight crews faced if there was a hydraulic failure in triple canopy jungle with no place to land but in the trees would give you pause, but our test flight area was over an island that had very little vegetation, but even that didn't give a "green" troop much comfort!