A short YouTube conversation (Kenny Keller with Sam) focused on helicopter emergency survival. The speakers stress monitoring three forms of stored energy—airspeed, altitude, and rotor RPM—because maintaining them improves the chance of surviving an engine failure or other emergency, especially during takeoffs, landings, confined-area operations, and cross-country flight. The transcript emphasizes that rotor RPM is critical ('RPM is life') and that losing RPM leads to an unrecoverable descent; it closes with a note about additional training resources and new videos.
Chapters
As I see it all the time as an instructor doing practicing autos, people get too slow, they're too slow, you're too slow. I mean, well, you just lost your.
Airspeed, stored energy, altitude, airspeed and rpm. You should have these things on your mind when you're out there flying and making your decisions on, during a takeoff, on your landing, flying cross country, if you're thinking about the three forms of stored energy and have the mindset that if I have all three of those, my chances of dealing with emergency are pretty good or a failure of some kind. If you take away any one of those three, not saying you can't survive and not saying you won't have a good outcome, but your chances are less likely to come out and walk away. It is something that should be going through your head because again, the scenarios are endless. Takeoff, landing, cross country. No matter what it is you're doing, if it's just something that's in your thought process, maybe you're flying aluminum, you're a little bit too low. Go. You know, what? If I didn't justify right now, like, here we are just. We were open fields just 60 seconds ago. Now we're over a city. Try to keep that three forms of stored energy. And it's a checkride question. Examiner may vary ask you about what are the three forms of stored energy and why do we care? Why are they important? And then you can add to that.
Chris, in a helicopter, RPM is life. That's what. Absolutely. If you lose your rotor rpm, you will literally fall out of the sky.
You're screwed.
Yeah. And you're not gonna get it back. I mean, there's a old video of an R22 that fell out of the sky because he got the RPM too low.
Yeah.
The rotor RPM too low. I mean, literally, he falls out of the sky like a rock. And once you lose that rpm, you can't get it back.
That's the one you saw at the Robinson factory safety course.
Yeah. RPM is life in a helicopter. And if you lose that rpm, there's nothing you can do. As I see it all the time as an instructor doing practicing autos, people get too slow. They're too slow. You're too slow. I mean, well, you just lost your airspeed. We can, you know, we can play with that a little bit, but there are. We got to have some forward airspeed when we do that auto. You'll learn about it as you go through your training. You'll read about it, your instructor will discuss it. You just got to have those things to help you get to the ground in case of an emergency.
Absolutely. Rpm, altitude, airspeed. And there are going to be those times where certain situations you just, you can't have the best of all three. But some takeoffs and some landings, depending on the situation you're gonna, you can be lacking in those areas. So what you do is you just try to avoid those times where, you know, you're a little behind the game. There are times during takeoff and landing, a certain phase of flights where you're doing the best you can. You can be lacking in one of those areas that's just by nature of, of the maneuver that you're doing at.
That time when you're doing for takeoffs and landings and you're doing confined areas if something. And then the FAA comes asking you, you can explain to them that this. I did it the safest I could.
Yes.
That's all you want. I mean, by nature, helicopters are made to do things that aren't the safest, but you can make them as safe as possible.
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