46 Vol. 9 / No. 12/ December/January 2017/18 Global Aviator
By Helen KrasnerHelicopter do's and dont's
HELICOPTER
CONFINED AREA
OPERATIONS
Helicopters can land almost
anywhere. At least, that is
the commonly-held belief.
Most people who are not
familiar with rotary flying
think that you can simply
lift your helicopter into the
hover, take off vertically,
and fly. Then, when you
arrive at your destination,
you descend vertically
and dump the machine on
any old bit of ground.They’ve viewed this sort of thing
on TV, or perhaps seen the police or
air ambulance operating a helicopter
in an extremely tight space, even
landing in an area surrounded by
tall buildings or other obstacles.It looks easy. There’s nothing to it
for a helicopter pilot, is there?
The answer is that ‘confined area
operations’ are actually quite difficult
and can be dangerous, for there are a
great many things that can go wrong.
For this reason the confined area exercise
is one of the very last in the PPL(H)
syllabus, and is not even attempted until
the student is reasonably competent at
helicopter handling. Even after getting
your licence, landing in a small space
is something every pilot needs to
attempt very cautiously. At the school
where I trained for my PPL(H) and
from which I used to hire helicopters
afterwards, low hours pilots were not
allowed to do any off airfield landing
unless an instructor had seen the site
and okayed it in advance. This was to
prevent enthusiastic and over-confidentnew pilots from coming unstuck when
trying to land in a confined area...
as can easily happen. So what is a
confined area and what are the potential
problems? And most importantly,
how do you land in one safely?
I’ve never seen an exact definition,
but basically a confined area is any space
in which the flight of the helicopter is
limited by obstacles. These obstacles
may be terrain, such as a landing site
among hills; they might be trees or
bushes, or they could be houses or
other buildings. They are highly likely
to include electrical pylons and wires.
These are almost impossible to see
from the air, and flying into wires is a
major cause of helicopter accidents. A
confined area may be quite large, but
be difficult to land in because of its
shape, or the position of the obstacles,