Alouette, gentille alouette. Alouette, je te plumerai.
Hello and welcome back.
Today, I'd like to share with you a little bit about our Alouette helicopter.
The Alouette is a French helicopter. Now, even though the United States invented
the first airplane, France actually led the world in aircraft development until
about the mid 1920s. Alouette is the French word for "lark." You know, a lot of
aircraft are named after birds. France also gave us a lot of our aviation
vocabulary. A lot of the words that are still used universally to describe
aircraft parts come from French. Think about fuselage, empennage, nacelle,
canard, pitot, aileron, all of those are derived directly from French.
The Alouette came into service in 1961, and it was built until 1985. The Flight for
Life Organization started using Alouettes like this one in 1972 and used
them for 20 years. That's an enormously long time. Until 1992.
So let's go check out the cockpit.
Okay, here we are are in the cockpit of the Alouette, and one of
the things you notice is that I'm sitting on the right side of the helicopter.
And usually, in airplanes, the pilot in command sits on the left side.
So why is that? Well, part of it is because helicopter pilots just like to
be different. But actually, there's some very good reasons why helicopter pilots
sit on the right. In the early days of helicopters, helicopters were extremely
unstable, and you had to have your hand on the cyclic control the whole time.
You couldn't be taking your hand off to tune radios or adjust engine controls.
So, having that available to your left hand and putting the instrument panel in the
middle for helicopters that had a pilot seat on both sides just made sense.
That way you can keep your dominant hand on the stick, and your other hand was free
to do everything else. You'll notice that the seats on the left side of this
Alouette are pointed backwards. Those are for the flight nurses and paramedics
that tend to the patients that are in the back. If you'd like to know more
about the medical aspects of this particular Alouette, and how it was used,
I'd refer you to the Behind the Wings episode on Flight for Life.
So let me talk, just for a minute, about the flight controls
of the helicopter. Just like in an airplane, you have a stick and pedals.
Unlike in an airplane, the cyclic stick, in the middle, controls which direction
the helicopter is going to go. The pedals, on the floor, serve a function similar to
the rudder pedals in an airplane. But rather than swinging a rudder on the
back of the helicopter, they actually change the pitch of the tail rotor's blades.
This causes the tail rotor to have more
or less thrust, and that keeps the helicopter moving straight, or let's the
pilot steer the helicopter in yaw without moving laterally. That's about it
for the cockpit. What do you say we go look under the hood?
Under the hood, in this case, means naked on top of the fuselage. The big thing
with the heart painted on it is the air intake. There's one on each side for the
jet engine. That's right. This is a turbine engine. It's a turbo shaft engine, which
is a little bit different than the jet engines you'll find on airliners.
With jet engines on airplanes, they're usually used to provide thrust. But, in this case,
a turbine engine is used to create the motion of a turbo shaft. And the shaft is
connected to the rotor blades. It doesn't provide much thrust to drive the
helicopter forward at all. So this particular engine is an Artouste engine.
Now, its predecessor was the Astazou. Now, I was curious about those names, so I
looked them up. They are peaks in the Pyrenees, and that's significant, because
this helicopter is noted for its high altitude performance. So what's the
reason for using a turbine engine on a helicopter, as opposed to a piston engine?
Well, for one thing, it's a lot simpler. Helicopters are inherently complex
beasts from the get-go. And turbines are much more reliable, because they're so
much simpler. They also pack an awful lot of power into a very small package, and
that's a very useful thing for an aircraft of any kind. So the Artouste
engine produces 660 shaft horsepower that gives this helicopter a very high
ceiling, which is the reason that Flight for Life chose it to be their
medical evacuation helicopter in Colorado, which has high altitudes.
And, especially in the summertime when it gets hot, those high and hot conditions
really degrade aircraft performance, and this has enough performance left over
that it can perform well in the mountains. Now, let's take a look at the rotor.
The rotor of a helicopter is an enormously complicated piece of
machinery. The rotor blades go through a half a dozen different motions each time
they rotate. But all of that complexity is tied in with a shaft that goes to the
tail rotor so that everything stays synchronized. Helicopters generate their
lift the same way that an airplane does, with air foils. The rotor blades are like
wings. Well, when that rotor is turning in one direction, it causes the fuselage of
the helicopter to want to turn in the other direction. It's Newton's Third Law.
It's the principle of for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.
So, the thing that keeps the fuselage from rotating around in the opposite
direction from the rotor is the tail rotor. That provides enough of a
balancing force to keep the fuselage stationary in the face of the torque
from the rotor. So, what do you say we check out the landing gear?
So here we are on the bottom of the helicopter, which is the logical place to put the
landing gear. You'll notice that the helicopter has wheels, but it also has skis.
Now, is that so that the helicopter can go schussing down the slopes of the
Pyrenees? No, you know that helicopters take off and land vertically, so these
act as snowshoes. You know, when you go snowshoeing, the snowshoe spreads your
weight out over the snow, so that you don't sink in as far. And that's exactly
what these do. Now, in the summertime, of course, they take these off.
So I hope you've enjoyed this brief walk around of the Alouette helicopter.
When you come to the Wings Over the Rockies Museum, you'll see it on your right just
as you enter. And we can hardly wait for our doors to open, so you can see it in
person. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you again next time.
You know, we do get a lot of French words from aviation now.
For example, there's the baguette
and the Claire de Lune and the fiance and champignon and...