- [Jared] In this video,
we're gonna learn about a Black Hawk military helicopter,
but not just any Black Hawk.
This is a specialized version called the Pave Hawk.
We'll walk through the different features of the helicopter,
the engines on top,
the rotors and the flight controls
and how they're used to maneuver the helicopter.
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This is a specialized version of the Black Hawk helicopter.
It's called a Sikorsky HH-60G Pave Hawk.
It's owned and operated by the United States Air Force.
It's been in use since the early 1980s.
The Pave Hawk helicopter is meant for combat,
search and rescue.
So anyone on the ground that needs to be picked up
in a combat zone or in another dangerous area,
the Pave Hawk helicopter can go pick them
up and bring them back to safety.
The Pave Hawk usually has a crew of four.
A pilot, a co-pilot and two special missions aviators,
otherwise an known as flight engineers.
Then depending on the mission,
they'll have several more pararescuemen, also known as PJs.
It's very common to fly in a formation
of two Pave Hawk helicopters.
These helicopters have a connection with NASA
at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For many space launches,
Pave Hawk helicopters have been ready
just in case something goes wrong
and they need to rescue the astronauts.
But besides that,
missions have been flown all over the world,
including the United States.
Central America.
Africa.
Europe and the Middle East.
And Asia.
Each helicopter costs around 40 million US dollars.
The Pave Hawk is just under 20 meters long
and about five meters high.
Some of the major parts of the helicopter
are the main rotors on top,
the fuselage, which is the body of the helicopter,
the cockpit in the front,
the cabin right behind,
and then in the back, we have the tail.
The stabilator,
and the tail rotors at the very end.
The first thing let's dive deep into
is the a fueling of the helicopter.
It runs off of jet fuel.
Right here is the main fuel tank.
And then the auxiliary fuel tank right in front of it.
You can see this one from the back of the main cabin.
The regular Black Hawk helicopter
does not have this extra auxiliary fuel tank.
That means that the Pave Hawk can fly a lot further.
There are two ways to refuel the helicopter.
When it's on the ground,
they'll use the fueling connections on the left side.
But the Pave Hawk can also refuel while in flight.
There's times they can't land
or they're in a hurry to finish their mission.
In this case, they'll use the air refueling probe.
They fly behind another aircraft.
This one is called an HC-130J
and it carries extra fuel for the Pave Hawk.
At the end of the wing is the refueling pod.
The fuel and connections come out of the back of this pod.
Then the Pave Hawk flies up behind,
extends the fuel probe,
and carefully connects it up to the fuel drogue.
Fuel can then transfer into the Pave Hawk.
They can even at two helicopters refueling at the same time.
Once hooked up,
it usually doesn't take more than 10 or 20 minutes
to fill their fuel tanks.
This whole process is called aerial refueling or AR.
On rare occasions,
the Pave Hawk needs to get rid of some extra weight
by using the fuel dumping tube.
This doesn't happen too often,
but it's there if they need it.
Let's look at some more details up front here.
These are the missile warning sensors,
so that you know right away if missiles are being launched
at your helicopter.
It's probably a good thing to know.
Then there's the radar warning receiver,
so you know if you're being picked up by the enemy's radar.
Inside the nose of the helicopter,
you'll find the radio compartment
with communications gear inside of it.
This is the color weather radar,
used to detect storms so that you can hopefully avoid flying
into any bad weather.
Down towards the bottom
is the forward looking infrared camera,
which is another way to help them see at night.
On the bottom is the LARS antenna,
which stands for "lightweight airborne recovery system."
This is used to help locate survivors down below.
The cockpit is inside of here.
The pilot is on the right and the co-pilot is on the left.
There's windows directly above, but also below as well.
This allows for increased visibility
while they are in flight.
There are plenty of knobs, switches, and gauges
for the pilot and co-pilot to monitor.
What we're gonna look at are the three flight controls.
The collective, the cyclic, and the tail rotor pedals.
Later in the video,
we'll see how these controls
can help maneuver the helicopter.
Cool thing about these seats
is that they can compress down in the event of a crash.
This will help cushion the landing
and hopefully prevent any injuries.
On each side of the Pave Hawk there's usually mounted guns.
In most cases, the guns will be the same.
On this Pave Hawk, we have the GAU-2 Minigun.
These are operated by the two special missions aviators
in the back.
Let's take a closer look at the gun.
It has a rotating barrel assembly on the front.
The ammo is stored in the ammunitions box right here,
and then moves up through the ammo belt,
up then to the main gun.
The ammo loops around several times
while it's on its way to being fired.
This gun can fire up to 4,000 rounds per minute.
(gunshots firing, explosion)
The cabin can be accessed
by opening up the sliding doors on the side.
Inside the cabin on the ceiling is the FRIES bar,
and that stands for fast rope insertion extraction system.
The bars can extend out to either side of the helicopter.
And then a thick rope called the fast rope
is tied at the very end.
The PJs can then quickly slide down to the ground.
This is ideal for situations
when the Pave Hawk can't land on the ground.
Sometimes we need to bring up survivors
back up to the helicopter.
In that case, they use the hoist.
This is a hydraulically powered cable system
to bring up survivors from the ground.
It has a cable length of 61 meters
and a weight limit of 272 kilograms.
These are chaff and flare buckets,
and these are on both sides of the helicopter.
The flare buckets are the ones facing forward,
and there's two more of them up front as well.
When these fire off it looks like fireworks,
but the real purpose is to confuse any heat seeking missiles
and hopefully save the helicopter.
The chaff buckets are pointed up and towards the back.
It shoots off tiny bits of metal into the tail rotor
to create chaff cloud.
It looks like faint smoke.
The intent here is to confuse enemy radar.
This area here is called the aft transition bay,
which is basically a place to store
more electronic equipment.
On the side of the Pave Hawk, there are a few steps.
These are good foot holes
to make it a lot easier to climb up on top
to perform maintenance and pre-flight checks
on the helicopter.
The Pave Hawk has two engines.
These are General Electric T-701c engines.
They're referred to as turboshaft engines.
It brings in air through the front, heats it up,
and then compresses it,
which then turns the shaft down the middle.
That's why it's called a turboshaft engine.
Now compare that to a turbojet engine on an airplane.
It brings in air through the front, compresses it, heats it,
and then instead of turning a shaft down the middle,
it takes that hot air and shoots it out the back.
This provides the thrust, which pushes the airplane forward.
Now that's the turbojet engine,
but on a helicopter it doesn't need that thrust
to push it forward,
that's why it uses two turboshaft engines
to spin the shafts,
which then work together to spin the main rotor blades.
Now don't forget about the tail rotors on the very back,
they're powered by the same engines.
The two engines also turn a shaft
that goes all the way back through the tail
and up to the tail rotors.
In the middle is the auxiliary power unit or APU for short.
This is the small engine that provides electrical power
for the helicopter.
The APU is also responsible
for starting up the main turboshaft engines.
In the center, we have our four main rotors.
These are like the wings for a helicopter.
When the air is flowing fast enough they will generate lift.
Now you could generate more lift
by spinning the blades faster.
Some toy helicopters or drones work this way.
However, this is not how full size helicopters work.
The rotors on the top spin at a constant speed.
It doesn't change very much
once the engines are running at full speed.
For the Pave Hawk,
they spin at 258 RPM or rotations per minute.
The way we generate lift
is by changing the pitch of these blades.
This affects the angle of attack.
When you increase it, it generates more lift.
Do it on all four of the rotor blades
and this will cause the helicopter to go up.
Decrease the pitch to generate less lift,
which will cause the helicopter to descend
or accelerate downwards.
The turbo shot engines
are spinning these four massive pieces of metal one way.
This causes the main body of the helicopter
to want to spin the other way.
If we did nothing to stop this
the helicopter would spin out of control.
This is the reason we have the tail rotors in the back.
It provides a counter torque,
or in other words, a spinning force in the other direction.
This stabilizes the helicopter
so it's not spinning uncontrollably.
If you come back here and look at these tail rotors,
they are not perfectly aligned.
They are tilted by 20 degrees.
This makes it so that it also provides a small amount
of lift in the very back of the helicopter.
This helps counteract the extra weight of the tail.
Another thing about the tail rotors
is that each of the four blades can also change their pitch.
This changes how much airflow there is.
Increase the pitch if you want to turn to the left.
And then decrease the pitch
if you want to turn to the right.
How about moving the helicopter?
So if we wanna go forward or backward, or left or right,
how does that work?
First, let me show you the mechanism in the center here.
This is called the swashplate assembly.
Here's the main swashplate,
the rotor mast,
and the four pitch control rods,
which are then connected to each of the four rotor blades.
The swashplate can move up or down.
This directly affects the pitch on each of the four blades,
but the swashplate can also will tilt from side to side.
This means it will change the pitch more on some blades
than on others.
And if you watch it spinning around,
each blade is always changing.
Let's focus in on just this blade.
When it's on the right side, it's relatively flat.
But when it's on the left side, it's more angled.
It's flat. Now it's angled.
This means unequal lift
on different sides of the helicopter.
This is used to maneuver the helicopter
in different directions.
So in short, the swashplate mechanism
is one of the main ways that you can control a helicopter.
One of the hardest things to understand here
is something called gyroscopic precession.
And this happens to anything that spins,
but it's especially important to helicopters.
So if you wanna pitch the helicopter forward,
you might think we need to apply more lift
in the back of the rotor blades.
But if we did this,
it would actually roll the helicopter to the left.
We apply force and it doesn't take effect
until 90 degrees later.
To actually pitch the helicopter forward,
more lift needs to happen on the left side.
And again,
if you've never heard of gyroscopic precession before,
this probably seems a little strange.
The good news is that helicopter pilots
don't have to be actively thinking about it,
but it's definitely good to understand.
Now that we know how the rotors work,
let's take a look at the flight controls
that you'll find in the cockpit.
There are three main ones,
and we saw these earlier in the video.
The collective, the cyclic, and the tail rotor pedals.
Let's go through what each one of them does.
First, the collective.
This moves the helicopter up or down.
Pull on the collective, and this will raise the swashplate.
This increases the lift on the helicopter
causing it to rise into the air.
Push down on the collective,
the swashplate goes down and the helicopter generates less lift
to move the helicopter down.
The center control is called the cyclic.
This is used to move the helicopter forward, backward,
or left or right.
Move the control,
this will tilt the swashplate causing an uneven amount
of lift on one side, which then moves the helicopter.
This automatically adjusts for gyroscopic precession.
All the pilot has to do
is move the cyclic in the direction
that the helicopter should go.
Down here are the tail rotor pedals,
which of course uses the tail rotors to turn the helicopter
to the left or to the right.
This is also known as controlling the yaw,
or vertical axis of rotation.
If we push the left pedal
the tail rotor blades pitch increases,
which then rotates the helicopter to the left.
Push on the right pedal, decreases the pitch,
which rotates the helicopter to the right.
So in summary, you have the collective,
which moves the helicopter up or down.
The cyclic, which moves the helicopter forward,
backward, or side to side.
And then the tail rotor pedals,
which rotates the helicopter left or right.
At this point,
I just wanna mention that these three controls,
the swashplate assembly,
and of course, gyroscopic precession,
this is all not unique to just the Pave Hawk.
This is how most helicopters work in general.
The Pave Hawk helicopter sometimes needs to be transported
to another destination.
Before this happens,
there's some preparations that need to take place.
The four main rotor blades can actually fold back
towards the tail, and then secured in place.
The tail rotors are folded and also the stabilator.
Now the Pave Hawk takes up much less space
and can be put inside of another aircraft.
This is a C-17.
And it can fit two Pave Hawk helicopters inside of it.
Now it's not used as much,
but the Pave Hawk also has the ability
to fold back the tail as well,
which would reduce the size even more
for some extreme cases.
The HH-60G Pave Hawk has been flying almost 40 years now.
At some point in the near future,
it will be replaced by the HH-60W Jolly Green II.
This will provide many improvements to the electronics,
fuel system, engines, the armor plating,
and of course, the weapons systems.
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My name's Jared. I make 3D animations on how things work.
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