I used to hear folks bragging about doing 130 mph in a Dodge Dart with a 6 in it. Not a chance, it's speedo error and hyperbole.
And those old cars were not designed for such speeds of course and could turn briefly into aeroplanes as air gets underneath them. CWS knows about this.
I have read that airplane pilots have difficulty learning to operate rotary wings because the controls are so different. I am only vaguely familiar with terms like "collective" except as applied to The Borg.
An airplane gives you three basic controls, throttle, stick/yoke, and pedals. The pedals turn the rear of the plane, and oddly enough steer it when on the ground. I and others found it challenging to hit and maintain a specific altitude, it takes a lot of work to do that.
Heh! You asked for it!
I'll talk about a helicopter with a simple single main rotor (rotating counterclockwise as seen from above--the
American way) and a tail rotor.
The collective stick ("collective" for short) sits to the left of the pilot and adjusts the overall pitch of the main rotor blades. In a turbine-engine helicopter, it's sort of analogous to the throttle. The throttle is like a sleeve on the outside of the collective, which pivots in a housing that is mounted to the floor at its aft end. At zero pitch it sits at maybe a 15-30-degree angle upward to where you hold it. When you are starting and running up the helicopter, it is twisted clockwise (to of your hand moving inward) to that position. When you are ready to taxi or take-off, you twist in the other way to max rpm and a governor takes care of it when you make more demand on the engine by pulling the collective stick up. If the power is by a piston engine, the governor may not work very well (as it does not on a TH-55) and you will need to increase throttle as you increase collective pitch, and reduce it when you decrease collective pitch. Between the throttle (w/ or w/o a governor) and changing the overall pitch of the main rotor, the collective is effectively the power, analogous to the throttle on an airplane.
The cyclic stick ("cyclic") variably (cyclically) alters the pitch of the main rotor blades as they rotate around the mast. This effectively tilts the thrust of the rotor so that some of it is going in a direction other than pure vertical. To do this, the rotor blades, either by hinges or their inherent flexibility, "flap" up and down as they go through each rotation around the mast. (In most rotor designs, the blades can "hunt" a little bit forward ("lead") or a little bit aft ("lag"), but this does not require any pilot input, so it's just something to know about as you do pre-flight inspection of the rotor head.) In forward flight, for the pilot, it is very much like the "control stick" on an airplane. If you push the cyclic forward, a combination of pitch-change rods and upper and lower swash plates will cause each blade, as it comes past 9 o-clock (strait out left) to be at its highest pitch (given how much collective you are pulling) and as it comes past 3 o'clock (straight out right) to be at its lowest pitch. Because of gyroscopic precession, the effect of max and minimum pitch inputs does not take effect until 90 degrees later. So the rotor disc is tilted up at the back and tilted down at the front. The pilot will also have to adjust the collective to maintain level flight as he moves the collective around. As the helicopter reaches effective translational lift (ETL--lift by way of fresh air rather than rotor-wash being sucked into the top of the disc) at 25-ish knots, it will require a reduction of collective to stay at the same altitude. As you increase speed further, it will require more collective the more you push the cyclic forward, or you will descend.
In forward flight the pedals are analogous to rudder pedals on an airplane. They control the tail rotor. In a simple single-rotor helicopter, the fuselage will want to rotate around the mast in the opposite direction as the rotor blades are moving. So, for this example, the nose of the helicopter will want to turn to the right, and more strongly as the pilot pulls in collective. The tail rotor applies lateral thrust to the aft end of the helicopter to compensate for that. In slow or hovering flight, you apply pressure to the left pedal to keep the nose pointed the way you want it pointed. At higher speeds in forward flight, you apply pedal as necessary to keep the aircraft in trim. There's a trim ball--usually associated with the turn-and-bank indicator that you use to monitor this.
That's it in a nutshell. All in all, once you're at 40-50 knots in a forward direction, flying a helicopter is a lot like flying an airplane as far as control inputs go.
