Scanning While Flying Helicopters

What do we mean by scanning? Scanning is simply where and how often we look at some thing or at some place. Maybe a better way of describing it is to look at the opposite of scanning which in my opinion is fixating. Fixating on something invariably leads to what I refer to as you look but you don't see.

I believe in order to fly a helicopter we need to fly it based on attitude. Just to recap attitude is the orientation of the helicopter relative to the horizon or any other point for that matter. But that does not mean we are not allowed to look or scan at our instruments. We have to refer to our instruments in order to verify whether the attitude we've selected gives us the correct outcome depending on what we want to achieve for example a certain speed, a certain altitude or a certain direction. The secret however is not to stare or fixate on a particular instrument and not to "chase" an instrument but to make changes to my attitude OUTSIDE and then to verify the result inside.

Remember we also have engine instruments so although we might not need to refer to a flight instrument like when we in the hover for example we still need to scan at our engine instruments to monitor engine parameters.

The point that I want to bring across is that we need to scan at a certain rate as to prevent fixation either on an instrument or the horizon for that matter. Let me explain by way of an example. Let's say we need to maintain 55 KIAS (knots indicated air speed) but we observe the ASI (Airspeed indicator) reads 65 KIAS. The correct way would be to scan at the ASI, observe the incorrect speed, look OUTSIDE at the attitude, make the corrective ATTITUDE change and wait for it to take affect and then rescan the ASI to check the result. The incorrect way would be to make the corrective attitude change while staring at the ASI and wait to see the result while STILL staring at the ASI. Don't try and scan all the instruments together, split them up by looking at the attitude (horizon) between looking at DIFFERENT instruments.

One last comment. I see our brain as a computer and our eyes as the medium whereby we feed information to this computer to process. The more we look around the more information our brain can process whilst if we fixate we go into a "trance" and "hang" like a computer.

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By Harry Cameron | Posted on 2009-03-15 21:30:58

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Definition:

A helicopter is an aircraft that is lifted and propelled by one or more horizontal rotors, each rotor consisting of two or more rotor blades. Helicopters are classified as rotorcraft or rotary-wing aircraft to distinguish them from fixed-wing aircraft because the helicopter achieves lift with the rotor blades which rotate around a mast. The word 'helicopter' is adapted from the French hélicoptère, coined by Gustave de Ponton d'Amecourt in 1861, which originates from the Greek helix/helik- (ἕλικ-) = "spiral" or "turning" and pteron (πτερόν) = "wing".[1][2] The primary advantage of a helicopter is from the rotor which provides lift without the aircraft needing to move forward, allowing the helicopter take off and land vertically without a runway. For this reason, helicopters are often used in congested or isolated areas where fixed-wing aircraft cannot take off or land. The lift from the rotor also allows the helicopter to hover in one area and more efficiently than other forms of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, allowing it to accomplish tasks that fixed-wing aircraft cannot perform. Although helicopters were developed and built during the first half-century of flight, some even reaching limited production, it was not until 1942 that a helicopter designed by Igor Sikorsky reached full-scale production,[3] with 131 aircraft built.[4] Even though most previous designs used more than one main rotor, it was the single main rotor with antitorque tail rotor configuration of this design that would come to be recognized worldwide as the helicopter.

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