10/1/2003: PA National Guard in Afghanistan
 

http://cellar.org/2003/PAguard.jpg

xoxoxoBruce has really been finding 'em recently, and he sent along
this huge image of a Pennsylvania Nat'l Guard helicopter offloading some
troops on, as he puts it, "some god forsaken hill. Doesn't look like tourism
is going to be a viable option there."

In the past, I've reduced the size of things like this for our consumption.
But as we have increasingly better connections and bigger monitors,
why not just show the whole big thing? Except for the fact that it
throws off the width of the table for text, but I can just put line
breaks in by hand... it still breaks the blog view, but what're ya gonna do.

That's both a great photograph *and* an impressive piece of helicopter piloting.

I'm surprised..with the back end in the air like that the rotors must be in motion, but the shot froze them in place from what looks to be a pretty good distance.

EZ that is the front of the helocopter in the air .

EZ, I saw two of these helicopters land on the Ellipse in D.C. a week or two ago. (Dropping off some sort of mid level VIPs outside the rose garden fence.) I was surprised at how slowly the blades rotate. With the naked eye, I could follow the rotation of the blades. I think it's because they are so big, they can rotate a little more slowly. Normally the props on helicopter are a blur to me, but these weren't. So I'm not at all surprised that the camera froze these blades in this picture.

I'm surprised..with the front end in the air like that the rotors must be in motion, but the shot froze them in place from what looks to be a pretty good distance.

Happy now?;)

I'm just glad they're keeping Pennsylvania safe!

What The!
Never seen anything like that before Bruce.:)

Chinooks are awesome. Real workhorses, and surprisingly high performance to boot. And *loud*. They rumble the ground when they fly over at low altitude. I saw one flying over my neighborhood once carrying an A4 Skyhawk slung underneath it with giant web straps. I was impressed.

They sling about 26,000 pounds of external load from the center cargo hook underneath. The rotor speed is 225 rpm and each rotor is 60 feet in diameter. The rotors spin in opposite directions and overlap so the total rotor coverage is 99 feet long.
They carry 44 troops in folding canvas seats or 24 liters.
two engines rated at 7500 shaft horsepower maximum, each.
They get a whopping 3 gallons per mile.
They are particularly well suited for Afghanistan because they will handle the altitudes under load and as the picture shows they don't need to land. To unload just open the rear ramp then squat and poop troops.
You might have seen the Army commercial where they set it down far enough in the water for a Zodiac rubber boat with half a dozen rangers to scoot right in the rear ramp. If they close it up it becomes a 27,000 pound boat.

Can you imagine what the EPA might say about MilOps?

Let's remove the spent bullets from this firefight scene, men! And clean up that blood, it's a biohazard!

Thanks for that info Bruce. 225 RPM is pretty slow but jives with what I saw recently. That works out to just 3.75 revolutions per second. I think figure skaters spin faster than that. Pretty amazing.

225 RPM sounds pretty slow but on a 60 foot rotor the tip of the blade is traveling at 482 miles per hour. That be honkin'.:D

Big Pictures
 

I like the big picture, but why not just have the old smaller pictures link to the biggest available picture? That way there'd sometimes be much bigger pics available and the current table sizes could stay the same.

My older brother once told me they got their name from the sound of the rotors. (I know, it's an Native American name, right?) I grew up in Savannah, GA, with an airfield there, we would see all kinds of aircraft tooling around over our neighborhood, including plenty of Chinooks. When one would pass overhead, my brother and I would brandish "air machineguns" and fire them at each other, with the Chinook supplying the sound effects. More often than not, we would both then die horrible, languishing, dramatic deaths. Aaah, childhood...