I found this on wikipedia last night and absolutely cannot get over it. it makes me livid
first off, i consider helicopters to be toys. they're like those neon sculptures in the early 20th century - an interesting trick, but not something you'd use for serious applications.
i mean, just look at them. they're contraptions. they're fail-deadly, if the slightest thing goes wrong they crash and explode. they are immensely complex and constantly struggling not to kill their occupants. it is astonishing to me that people have just made helicopters a normal part of life.
i can't picture how someone looks at a helicopter and goes "we should use that for things other than otherwise-impossible mountain rescue operations." it's not even like fixed-wing craft, where they COULD crash but the reality is that 99.99% of flights are safe and the exceptions are almost all perfect storms that will happen once in a lifetime. when you get into a helicopter you are condemning yourself to the grave, and if you get out safely, you're experiencing a probabilistic anomaly. they shouldn't work - and in practice, they don't! they crash a lot!
all the things that helicopters get used for daily are astonishing to me. do we REALLY need to have traffic info that badly? do we REALLY need aerial news photography? why is it legal to run air taxis? we should be using these things for life and death situations and nothing else, it just amazes me to no end that we're so casual about it.
so helicopters baffle me enough on their own. but then militaries are just like "sure, let's build special helicopters that will by their nature always have far fewer hours of operation to prove their airworthiness, and then hang tons of weapons and shit on them, and then put them in the air for hours and hours at a time"
and THEN i find out that THIS is going on, and it's just too much. it's too much! i am flipping my lid at this time!
what really puts me over the edge is that I don't know where to start. there's so much to get upset about
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why are there helicopters that are large enough to dwarf a four-engine plane
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why is anyone putting a helicopter in the air long enough to need midair refueling
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why is anyone operating a helicopter far enough from base that it makes SENSE to midair refuel
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why is anyone operating TWO helicopters in this fashion SO consistently that they DEVELOPED A DUAL-CRAFT CAPABLE TANKER JUST FOR THIS PURPOSE
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helicopters go up and sideways and a little bit forward. like, gently, for stations keeping, or getting from one place to another eventually.* it is illegal that they can maintain a consistent forward velocity above the stall speed of any plane larger than a cessna 152. there is NO WAY a helicopter could fly in formation with a fixed wing craft. i reject this. i reject ALL of this
every time i look at the picture i come at it from a different direction, my brain randomly picks one of these things to get mad at and then i bounce through all the others as if it's my first time looking at the picture, every time. i think i'm having a stroke and i think i've been having it since 1AM
* yes, i know that helicopters can go forward very fast. but i don't accept it.
helicopters are horrifying abominations of aerodynamics and it is mind-boggling that they ever became anything more than a novelty
and that's why they're cool
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a helicopter should be able to fly.
Matt Gray flew a helicopter and I have never been more terrified for another human being in my life.
