Taz Christman lands a helicopter in a tight desert valley outside Las Vegas, scouting the terrain from 3,000 feet before committing to the bottleneck. He explains how to manage power and altitude for a running landing and out-of-ground-effect hover at 4,000 feet.
About 3,000 ft.
Up to 4,000 ft.
Well, why don't you go do a. Talk us through a confined area? Okay. Just like you're teaching one. Okay. Pick one out, and we'll just film as much of it as possible. All right, let's see what we can get here. Make sure as we go over the edge, I point the camera down and get the effect of going off the edge. Yep. All right, here we go. Canyon road, southeast side, Back to north on bay right there. Sa. All right. I don't know if I could use that one. I did that one on my checkride. See what these winds are doing over here? Oh, there's a good spot up here. So that picture that I gave you for the CFI of the year thing. Yep. I was sitting right up here. There's a little. There's a little h that somebody put up here, Which is a pretty good little. Little pinnacle. Oh, I see it. Very nice. That's too funny. There used to be a flag right there up in front of us, but I think it blew away. All right, so I'll go try that confined. It doesn't look like the winds are too. Too crazy right now. I would love to shoot red rock. Yeah, we'll go. We'll go back over there. We got. We got gas. What's on the side of the hill? Is that a freaking vehicle? Yep. All right, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna. This little valley, this little dirt road right here, Basically fly over the top of it. There's a little confined inside there. So it's kind of at the bottleneck of a valley or this little dirt road right here. So I'm going to stay high and do my high reconnaissance over the top of it here. So I'm going to be kind of over the top of this little ridge right here and kind of come back around. So I'm going to kind of look and see if I can tell what the winds are doing, Figure out my path in, my path out. Pretty much as soon as I get into this little bottleneck right here, I'm pretty much committed. Have any out as you can see, going up this direction. So I'm gonna go land right there Next to those little dirt. Dirt spots right there. Okay. So this is gonna be my high reconnaissance right here. So I'm just kind of looking at it, seeing what I've got. I think there's a fence down there on the. Just to the. To the north of it. Maintaining about 50 knots here. All right. Doesn't look too bad. We'll come down here and see how the winds are doing as I. As I come back in. Once I. Like I said, Once I get to that bottleneck, I don't really have a left or right turn at that point. So I'm pretty much committed. So I'll bring it on down, See how the winds are doing. I think we're getting a little bit of shelter from the winds. Not too bad. And I always can go A little bit to the left. If I keep my altitude up here Just a little bit. Come in over the top of this ridge. All right. So now I'm pretty much committed. Going right for that spot right over there, Kind of where the two roads meet. Northwest practice area. Skyhawk 4, November Juliet. Over the country club. Northwest down. We're definitely down in a hole now. There we go. We can kind of look at our big rock Right in front of me there. Pretty good little slope. Bunch of junk out here. I know. It's like, what do these people haul this out here for? And then stack tires nice and neat. Yep. But what. We're at about 3,000ft here. We got plenty of power. I'm gonna kind of move over this side. And we'll go back out the same way we came back. There's not a lot of good spots to set down here. If I had to, I'd probably put it right here on this little y intersection. I think this is probably the best spot. Watch it. With my tail's going clear back behind. You can see there's a little valley that we came in over. Yeah, it looked a little bit flatter from up where we were. Right. But now we're down here. And we can see it's pretty. Pretty rocky, A lot of bushes. We got pretty good power right now. What I'm doing is I'm just going to. I know I got a little bit of room there. To kind of get a good running start at it. I'm just going to come up here a little bit, See how high I can get. I know based on the power that it said earlier in the book, that should have all the way up to 4,000ft to get a pretty good out of ground effect hover. But you can see we got plenty of power there. We can get. We can get some altitude. All right. So just ease it forward here Just a little bit. And we'll follow that trail on up. Yeah. With those rockies, it was back there. I'd probably land up on that little bridge. And make somebody walk down there if they. They really want to go down there. Not something you see all the time in Indiana. That's why this is effing amazing. Freaking amazing, Sam.
