Can we transport a car in a Cargo trailer?

[Alaska Deb]

Originally Posted by ASpilot2be

Thats good to a point. I would try to spread the weight out as much as possible. My friend and I had to tow a 3/4 ton pickup from Glenallen to Palmer. The weight was dominantly forward in the trailer so much that it made the front of the truck so light we couldnt go over 50 with doing some gnarly weaving

THAT never would have crossed my mind

[Alaska Deb]

Rotorhead,

I am printing out this email to use as a guide/checklist. There are a couple of things on it that I either didn't know or just never would have thought of. The tires--I have 'really good' tires, but not like what you are saying, and *now* that I've thought of it, it makes perfect sense. Thank you for taking the time to put this out there.

Gotta go tell my truck to get ready to tow

Thanks again,
Deb

[rotorhead]

The voice of (occasional) experience. Being a helicopter pilot I'm sort of professionally paranoid about equipment failure , I guess it bleeds over to other facets of my life as well.

The tire bit is courtesy of someone else at a Johnsons Tire store in Eagle River getting me up to speed. I was originally towing that 5000+ lb. trailer with what amounted to passenger car tires, the ones our Expedition had come with. They're fine for around town and occasional light loads, but not even close to being capable of safely carrying heavy loads or extended towing. I guess we got lucky that we didn't have one fail in a tight spot, even at their maximum pressure (35 psi...maybe?) they were literally too hot to touch after only a couple hundred miles at moderate highway speeds...kinda scary in retrospect! Once I switched to the load range E tires it made a HUGE difference, it rode better loaded and when we got the tire pressures adjusted for the load (something like 45-50 psi front and 60-65 psi rear as I recall) they ran no warmer than normal tires should, which is a very good sign. Of course, that left us free to contemplate how inadequate a half-ton equivalent Expedition with the smallest V-8 engine was when trying to tow a load like that, but thats another story!

[warptman]

Autorotation looks kinda scary, how did you cope Rotor?


YouTube - S-92 helicopter autorotation (power off landing)

[rotorhead]

Once you practice them a bit they're kinda fun. Sorta like the big drop sections in some of the better roller-coasters, but with the additional excitement of knowing that if you screw it up badly enough you can crash and die.

Actually, they're a fairly routine maneuver in all helicopter flight training, and one of the more critical ones. When you're just learning to fly helicopter you practice "autos" endlessly, hoping to install a learned reflex towards the correct action so that if the engine quits for real you'll automatically do the right thing in time. As a flight instructor, you do so many of them that you can practically do them in your sleep. Larger helicopters like the S-92 are sometimes actually harder to do autorotations in since it can be difficult to estimate the right altitudes above ground for the various phases of the auto, and of course they also need more room to land safely. The smaller ones used for training and most utility work land a bit more slowly and need much less space to touch down in.

With a few knots of wind in the right direction and a bit of good luck, you can safely autorotate a helicopter into an open spot not much larger than a tennis court, an obvious advantage over airplanes when it comes to engine failures. Of course if you screw it up you can also fall out of the sky like a homesick anvil, and even at their best helicopters don't glide very far compared to airplanes. The best option of course is preventative; just make sure that the engine doesn't quit!